Cat Power (21 page)

If Lombardi was cautious about investing in Cat Power, other people at the label were blatantly horrified that Matador was even considering it. “I don't want to bad-mouth anyone by name,” Cosloy says, “but when we signed her, she had a number of big fans and friends in the office, but there were other people in our company who were just like, ‘You've got to be kidding. Do you really think you're gonna sell this?’
Let's just say those people are no longer with us. They're alive, but they were wrong.”

After the first two albums came out, it became clear that a small contingent of indulgent New York City hipsters weren't the only ones who heard something intriguing in Cat Power. As general interest in the band grew, the risks associated with investing in Chan diminished. “I don't want to make it sound like our thing is completely altruistic, because it isn't,” Cosloy allows. “We were aware that the Italian label Runt was putting something out. We were aware that there was a growing relationship with Steve Shelley and that records were going to come out. There was a sense that there was something else going on commercially that would make things a little bit easier for us, but we had no way of knowing how far that would go.”

Though
Myra Lee
was slated to be released on Smells Like Records in early 1996, Chan's new label wanted to release Cat Power's Matador Records debut as soon as possible, so it booked studio time for the band. In early February, a month before
Myra Lee
was in stores, Chan and Cat Power guitarist Tim Foljahn made the long drive from New York City down to Memphis to start recording Cat Power's third album at Easley Studios. They were supposed to meet up with Shelley, who was flying in from elsewhere.

At this point Shelley was serving as more than Cat Power's drummer. As the head of the label about to release the band's next album, Shelley was the singer's de facto manager, producer, and marketer. He set up the studio session that resulted in
Dear Sir
and
Myra Lee
, he played drums on both albums, toured in support of them, and kept Chan on task, whether in the studio or on the road. No one was a bigger Cat Power advocate than Steve. The March 1996 release of
Myra Lee
suggested that Cat Power had found a semihome on Steve's label, so when
Steve found out that Chan had signed with Matador, he had the right to be miffed—and he was, sort of.

“I remember being with Steve and him getting a phone call, he was talking to her,” Moore recalls. “He said, ‘Oh, congratulations,’ and then he hung up the phone and said, ‘Matador wants to sign Cat Power, and she's going to go for it.’ He was sort of like, ‘I invested a lot of energy and money into making these records and doing these tours,’ but at the same time, he also understood the opportunity. He was on the fence with how he felt about it emotionally.” As a music fan and businessman, Steve wanted to maintain his professional connection to Cat Power, but as a sane person looking to stay that way, he was better off letting Chan go. “Somebody swooped in, and that's never a good feeling,” Moore acknowledges, “but the conflict was like, ‘Well, it's a little emotionally draining to begin with, so…’”

Chan's account of Matador's courtship is characteristically vivid but nonspecific. “When I moved to New York I heard of Railroad Jerk, a Matador band,” she said in 1998. “I didn't know anything. I had no conscience of the music business. I started seeing bands, kept seeing bands, and I saw Gerard from Matador. Nice guy. It just happened organically.” Whatever consternation Steve felt as a result of Chan's decision to split for another label, it didn't stop him from recording Cat Power's third album,
What Would the Community Think
, expressly for Matador. “She recorded it for us,” Cosloy says unequivocally. “It was one of these things that Chris and I had been talking about off and on for more than a year. I finally mentioned it to Chan one night after a show: ‘Would you be interested in doing something with us?’ It was not like a long negotiation or a series of business meetings. It was a pretty quick conversation.”

After signing with Matador, Chan bought an old green-and-white Volkswagen bus that ran well but had no heat. This was the vehicle she
and Foljahn drove down to Memphis that cold, dark February of 1996. “We were freezing,” Foljahn remembers of the pair's trip down the Eastern Seaboard. “Chan got sick, she had a cold.” The singer's voice sounds much more open and expressive on
Community
than it does on either of the first two Cat Power records, but according to Foljahn, Chan was too sick to relax and sing properly. “In a rehearsal room playing with her then, it was like playing with a sax player,” Foljahn recalls. “She was loud and clear—it was very much, Whoa! Very strong.” Chan's illness contributed to a detachment in the vocals that wasn't characteristic of her singing at the time.

The
Community
sessions marked the first time that Chan worked in a professional recording space. Easley Studios was cofounded by producers Doug Easley and Davis McCain in the early nineties, and it immediately became a respite-giving recording location for some of the most influential bands of the era. A greatest-hits list of the albums recorded there includes Pavement's
Wowee Zowee
, Sonic Youth's
Washing Machine
, Wilco's
A.M.
, the White Stripes'
White Blood Cells
, Loretta Lynn's
Van Lear Rose
, and Modest Mouse's
Good News for People Who Love Bad News
. Jeff Buckley was at Easley recording songs for what was supposed to be his second full-length album in late May of 1997 when he disappeared and was eventually found drowned in the Mississippi River. (The material he recorded was released on 1998's
Sketches
For My Sweetheart the Drunk
.)

Tragically, the studio burned down in an electrical fire in March 2005.

With Easley Studios' storied history and Chan's relative lack of recording experience on her mind, the twenty-four-year-old singer entered the
Community
sessions haunted yet again by the idea that she had no right to be there. According to Chan, she was so unprepared to make the album that she barely got it together to tell her band when and
where to show up. “I knew I had this huge journey, and I wasn't prepared for the journey,” the singer has said. “Much less was I prepared to make a record. The night before we were supposed to leave, Tim calls, and he's like, ‘Chan, we don't know what's going on, I guess we're not going?’ I just hadn't called them.” Chan dealt with her apprehension by holding herself to super-rigid standards once the recording session started. “She was tentative,” Tim recalls. “She thought that doubling her vocals was cheating. ‘Can you do that?’ she said. ‘I don't think that's cool. That's a special effect!’”

As long as she kept things minimal, Chan felt safe. She felt like a good person—as if through making brutally spare sounds, she was doing penance for not being professionally trained. “She didn't want any studio trickery,” Foljahn recalls. “She was figuring out what it was like to be in a real studio, how to play studios. She always knew how to play the mike, and she always knew how to do a lot of things that were pretty subtle, but I think she was probably daunted. She realized that there was so much more that could be done
in the studio as compared to playing live
, and she didn't have those ideas yet.”

Though Chan's experience in a professional recording studio of Easley's caliber was minimal, she did enter the
Community
sessions aware of the fact that the songs she recorded would actually become an album, a notion that escaped her when recording
Dear Sir
and
Myra Lee
. “When I recorded with Steve and Tim, I actually didn't think that any one was going to hear those recordings,” Chan has said, referring to her first two albums. “We were recording for the Italian record. I didn't know that the other songs were going to be used for Steve's record, but people have heard those records.” As wary as Chan was of the entire in-the-studio experience, her desire to achieve creative satisfaction on her third album gave her the courage she needed to battle back some of her
insecurities and fight to make sure that what she heard in her head made it onto tape. “I am,” Chan said, when asked if she was happy with the way
Community
turned out. “I got to do things, I got to direct it a little. The other times we just pressed record—this time I got to branch out and figure out where I thought it should go.”

At Easley, Chan was impressive in ways she wasn't even aware of. Foljahn remembers that the engineers and studio techs were stunned by her ability to cut her vocals and guitar in one take, with no drama or ceremony about it. He also noticed that though Chan presents herself as a neophyte, her in-the-studio decisions revealed a deep knowledge of sound and song structure. “Chan's a very musical person,” Foljahn explains. “She'd go over to the piano midsession and just figure something out. She didn't have a lot of experience, but she has a lot of skills—I don't want to say they are innate because I think that plays them down. I think she's listened very carefully to a lot of music.”

What Would the Community Think
was released on September 10, 1996. It's the only Cat Power album that really reflects Chan's life in New York. The abstract, fractured look of the cover, with its muted blue and gray tones, feels disjointed, moody, and undone but elegant, like the Lower East Side at night. The sonic tone of the album is disjointed but homogeneous, like an urban environment where anguish, joy, anger, and romance all merge in a dense collection of sound. The Chan Marshall you hear on
Community
is different from the one you met on
Myra Lee
or
Dear Sir
, more expressive, angrier, and even darker. She also emerges as a real singer.

Sonically,
Community
is an understated, cool guitar-rock record that sounds both timeless and distinctly nineties. (“I was thinking, why didn't we put a bass on that song?” Foljahn says of
Community's
lead single, “Nude as the News.” “But it was the nineties, you didn't need a bass
player!”) Lyrically, the album is an aggressive, moody testament to Chan's ability to write songs that are disturbing and soothing at the same time. It opens with “In This Hole,” a fraught meditation on meaninglessness. (“In this hole that we have fixed/We get further and further and further for what?”) With that uplifting beginning, the album takes you through “Good Clean Fun,” a rhythmic dirge in which Chan laments the disillusionment of a relationship (“It seems I have nothing to give/It seems you have nothing to give”). And the album's title track is an ethereal folk ballad that hints at an as-yet-unexplored richness within Chan's voice.