Cat Power's songs don't need talking up - maybe it's just as well, because she's not too keen on that sort of thing, she tells Jim Carroll
There are some musicians who just weren't made for these times, and it's safe to say that Chan "Cat Power" Marshall is one of these. Throughout her career - she has just released her seventh album - Power has displayed an admirable unwillingness to toe the music industry line. Power will admit that she only does interviews under duress, while her live performances tend to be erratic and reticent. Between-song chatter does not tend to feature. "I didn't want to do any talking about the new record at all," she says. "But I had to agree to do a small number of interviews."
Yet this new record, The Greatest, is probably Power's finest hour. Recorded in Memphis with a band drawn from the legendary soul men who filled in the gaps on Al Green and Stax releases, The Greatest is the most unlikely soul gem you will hear this year. The veterans provide the beautifully sparse, lazy, hazy country-soul. Yet it's Power's seductive, husky, smoky whisper of a voice dealing with deceptively simple arrangements and a flurry of emotional storms which will really have you reeling.
It's a record which doesn't require much talking up, but things are never that simple. The promotional palaver to sell the music can be more draining on artists than the writing and recording process. Power's albums have been greeted with usually positive reviews and, in an ideal world, that would be enough for a comfortable living. But this is not an ideal world, and there's a need to thumb a lift on the promo bandwagon to ensure people know about those albums. Power would prefer to let that bandwagon pass her by.
Anyone volunteering to help Power with media grooming would require the patience of Job. Even basic information about how she ended up in Ardent Studios in Memphis with such legendary players as brothers Teenie and Leroy Hodges is tendered with extreme caution. "My label asked me who I would like to record with, and I said I'd like to work with Al Green's band. I didn't think they'd come up trumps - I thought they were all dead or would be too expensive. I'd tried working in different studios with other musicians on this record but it didn't work out. This worked, though."
There are few additional details about Power's fondness for Al Green or the soul music he was making back in the 1970s. Ask those questions and you'll either get silence, sighs or long stories involving taxi journeys to see her grandmother in Florida. But this has been Power's way since she first began to release records. You get the bare bones about her heavyweight collaborators - including Foo Fighter Dave Grohl, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, the Dirty Three and Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley on previous albums - and that's your lot.
But The Greatest, with its southern moods and manners, is a homecoming of sorts for Power, which might explain why some cracks in the mask emerge. Born in Atlanta, Power zig-zagged around the south during her early years, her folks spending periods in Memphis ("we lived down a dirt road between tobacco fields, or they might have been corn fields") and around the south. Her dad and step-dad were in bands, one favouring gospel and church music, the other more psychedelic sounds.
Power remembers her personal musical epiphany vividly. "Something really strange happened when I heard the Rolling Stones and Buddy Holly for the first time," she says. "There was always music around me, on the radio, on MTV when it started up. But it was hearing those records which set things off for me." She moved to New York in 1992, plotting a musical career for herself as Cat Power.
"I got a real sense of energy in New York. I'd be going to weird shows in weird places and just feeling this energy, this creative stuff, in the air. It got to me." Power's own profile was on the rise, chiefly as a result of erratic live performances, collaborations with other boho souls and a deal with Matador Records. She moved from New York to Oregon and onto South Carolina before settling once again in the south, with various lodgings in Atlanta and Miami. It was probably here, she says, that the notion of The Greatest came to her. "I'd written lots of songs on a piano in Atlanta, like the title track and Lived In Bars. Everyone was saying I had to have a band, I had to do a rock'n'roll record. So I decided I wanted some of those old soul players who'd been on Let's Stay Together and records like that."
Power hopes the sense of humanity she was hankering after comes through on the record. "They're songs about friends and allies and communities. They're the only people who can help you make sense of everything because they know the difference between what's ugly and what's beautiful. I think the songs are good; I'm very comfortable with them, even if I've had to work through some things to get them finished like I want them to be. I think it's probably the first record I've done which is so heart-breaking and pure."
It may be the record which could bring Power to a wider audience. However, such a move would involve much touring and promotion, and it's clear that Power would have little appetite for such things. Shortly after this interview, Power's label announced that she was cancelling her forthcoming tour for health reasons.
When Power is talking about songwriting, it's clear that she views it as a form of catharsis. "I learned from an early age that you have to suffer and get through things to get to where you want to go," she says at one stage. Now that she's found her feet with The Greatest, let's hope that it can take her to where she wants to go.
• The Greatest is out now on Matador
