Cat Power (26 page)

On
Moon Pix
, Chan finally recorded something approximating the ideal she had in mind. Nearly everybody else who listened to the album heard a masterpiece. Before
Moon Pix
came out in September 1998, Cat Power was an enigmatic indie-rock phenomenon drawing the attention of a small collection of die-hard fans and zine-reading hipsters in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Europe. After
Moon Pix
, Cat Power was a star.
“Moon Pix
is when I started to become aware of Cat Power,”
Saturday Night Live
cast member and longtime Cat Power fan Fred Armisen remembers. Like many of the Cat Power fans who discovered the band through
Moon Pix
, Fred was first drawn to the album via the cover shot, taken by Roe Ethridge, which shows an angelic-looking Chan peering out from behind a flowering plant. “Sometimes a record cover is enough. You look at the picture and you go, ‘Oh, something interesting is happening here.’ It spoke to you.”

Moon Pix
is the first Cat Power album that shows Chan's face on the cover. Anyone who'd heard of the band and wondered who or what was responsible for the haunting, remote music it made now saw, in this untamed creature peering inquisitively from behind a flowering bush, the face behind the voice. With the release of
Moon Pix
, Chan's beauty officially became associated with her music. “The new Cat Power record
is proof positive that Marshall is the coolest
girl
on the planet,” a Pitchfork reviewer enthused before adding that Chan has it “goin' on.”

Dear Sir
and
Myra Lee
, while clear and confident in brief moments, are marred by Chan's lack of in-the-studio experience.
Community
is a moody, aggressive album in which we glimpse the painful realities beneath Chan's anger but never really see them up close. Just as we see Chan's face, unobscured for the first time, on the cover of
Moon Pix
, so is she more exposed than ever on this album. So much so that it's often difficult to listen to. In reviews of the album, the only thing more commented on than Chan's sex appeal was the cringe-inducing nature of her songs. Ben French, founder of the rock-criticism website Nude as the News (named after the Cat Power song), described
Moon Pix
as “one of the best (and worst?) albums of the decade” and wrote that the experience of listening to it was torturous but enjoyable. “Marshall rips your heart out, slowly, through the course of forty-five minutes.
Moon Pix
is a rare exploration of absolute misery, perfect music for the lonely loser in all of us, but too dark for an everyday listen.
The album is
a strange, and dark, accomplishment, but a tremendous feat nonetheless.”

When
Moon Pix
hit stores on September 22, 1998, it also propelled Cat Power to an entirely new level of fame. The album's mournful sensibility connected with a generation of idealists who were contending with the fact that the optimism and excitement they felt at the beginning of the decade had devolved into a sense of dread. River Phoenix was dead. So was Kurt Cobain. Those people still making money on lofty ideas for websites were watching themselves turn into the vacant yuppies they started playing computer games to escape. Those who were no longer making money on the Web had even bigger problems. And as if it wasn't depressing enough that your heroes were dead and the drugs
no longer worked, along came the Y2K scare, which gave a firm date for apocalypse: January 1, 2000. The world seemed to be ending, and Cat Power released the soundtrack to its destruction.

Moon Pix
is a melancholic gem, filled with spare songs that begin to take shape only to disintegrate in elegant, multilayered waves. Lyrically the album retreads Cat Power's usual themes of heartache, disappointment, and redemption through pain, but sonically it conveys a hypnotic, eerie spirituality, like goth church music. The album's general tone is so cloistered and dark, it's comical to imagine Chan and her team capturing these shadowy sounds in the middle of Australia's summer, but that's what happened. “It's a melancholy, ethereal winter album,” engineer Matt Voigt affirms, “but it was quite nice weather. It was bright outside, but we pretended it was raining.”

The literal sound of rain appears on “Say,” a breakup song that conveys the sense of resigned solitude that appears throughout the album.

From the opening line of the album, “My friend,” uttered like a siren's wail over the trembling, syncopated Beastie Boys drum beat, Chan's voice announces itself as open, present, and powerful. For the duration of the album it never wavers. On the understated, lunar-themed hymn “No Sense,” Chan's voice leads us like a spiritual tour guide through the emotions of the song. “Cross Bones Style” is the “Nude as the News” of
Moon Pix:
It's the most propulsive, overtly catchy song, and it was the album's most prominent single. In Cat Power tradition,
Moon Pix
also includes one cover song, “Moonshiner,” a traditional blues tune that Bob Dylan popularized. On “Metal Heart,” the loose, uncertain arrangement allows Chan's voice to emerge as the strongest, most constant entity in Cat Power's world, a North Star for lost souls.

“Metal Heart” gets at the central sorrow of this album, and of her
life. When she sings, “Metal heart you're not hiding/Metal heart you're not worth a thing,” it's as if she's speaking with resignation to her own unfeeling heart, which has once again failed to allow her the simple life she's always dreamed of. “It's damned if you don't and it's damned if you do/Be true 'cause they'll lock you up in a sad, sad zoo,” she further laments. On
Jukebox
, Cat Power's second album of covers, released in early 2008, the singer reinvented “Metal Heart” as a defiant send-off to the defeated person she was when she wrote it. In her review of the album,
Rolling Stone
senior editor Melissa Maerz described the new version as “a dramatic, crashing-drums-and-piano love letter to the old, fragile Marshall who wrote it.” So completely does “Metal Heart” represent the emotionally crippled but forward-looking Chan Marshall of the 1990s that the artist herself chose the song to herald the reinvention she's undertaken both professionally and personally in her midthirties.

The album drew the attention of a new breed of culturally clued-in celebrities like zeitgeist fashion designer Marc Jacobs. It also attracted a higher level of critical attention. Greil Marcus, arguably the preeminent music and pop-cultural critic of his generation, was one of the fans Chan earned after the release of
Moon Pix
. It was her take on “Moonshiner” that drew him in. In a column in
Interview
magazine, Marcus compared Cat Power's cover of the song with the Dylan version that inspired it. “Marshall's version is clean but weird,” Marcus wrote. “‘I've been a moonshiner/For seventeen long years,’ she sings, sounding at once absolutely convincing and not a day over seventeen herself.” Marcus wasn't quite as convinced by Chan's original compositions—he refers to the original songs on
Moon Pix
as “drifting” and rife with “unclear patterns”—but he was impressed both by Chan's version of “Moonshiner” and by her willingness to take it on in the first place.

“Dylan's version is one of the best things he's ever recorded,” Marcus explains from his home in Berkeley, California. “Cat Power is able to take a definitive performance of an old folk song, the kind of performance you would think, Well, no one needs to sing this anymore, and sing it as if she just discovered the song, as if she overheard it somewhere, as if she wrote it herself.” This piqued Marcus's interest. “I felt that she had an ability to get inside of someone else's song, of a song she'd learned from someone else's recording, that both captured the song but also seemed to comment on the person who'd originally sung it. There seemed to be an intelligence at work in her music, a thoughtfulness that wasn't oppressive, wasn't, ‘I'm so smart.’” After hearing
Moon Pix
, Marcus immediately put Cat Power on his radar as an artist whose career he would diligently follow. “She very quickly became someone to whom I was always going to listen, whether I liked what she did or not.”

Moon Pix
‘s lone piano track, “Colors and the Kids,” stands out alongside “American Flag” and “Metal Heart” as a true highlight. It is lyrically direct. “It must be the colors/And the kids/That keep me alive/' Cause the music is boring me to death,” Chan sings plainly. The song goes on to address everything from a wistful romanticizing of a past relationship (“… I'd wanna go right away/To a January night/I built a shack with an old friend/He was someone I could learn from”) to the exhaustion and alienation from friends that comes with the pressures of always being on the road (“It's so hard to go in the city/’Cause you wanna say hello to everybody”).

“Colors and the Kids” also showcases the ways in which Chan's breakup with Bill Callahan works as a recurrent theme throughout
Moon Pix
. Neither Chan nor Bill has enumerated the details of their split, but looking back, Chan has said that a torturous breakup in 1998 triggered her self-destructive impulses: “I lost the love of my life in 1998 to another
woman. He was the first person who loved me who I loved.” Indeed, Cat Power and Smog fans alike have pored over both artists' post-breakup albums (
Moon Pix
and Smog's
Knock Knock)
for clues to what exactly happened. While neither record draws the listener a map, each adheres to the same loose theme: two strong-willed, independent personalities coming to terms with the fact that as much as they'd like to, they aren't ready to settle down.

Knock Knock
begins with a declaration to move to the country, “Let's Move to the Country,” and ends with two successive songs about the relief of being unattached, “Hit the Ground Running” and “I Could Drive Forever.” The last song on that album, “Left Only with Love,” is a warm and seemingly heartfelt wish-you-well send-off to an ex-girlfriend in which Bill sings, “You did what was right to do/And I hope you find your husband/And a father to your children/'Cause I'm left only with love for you.”

Chan is less direct, but there are plenty of moments on
Moon Pix
in which she appears to be addressing Bill or pondering the disillusion of a relationship. On “Colors and the Kids,” Chan indulges in heartbreaking wishful thinking about what could have been, singing, “I could stay here/Become someone different/I could stay here/Become someone better.” On “He Turns Down,” Chan engages the listener (or herself) in a rhetorical dialogue about staying in a relationship longer than you should: “Holding on for someone/Feels like holding on too long/Have you ever held on.” It's also about feeling abandoned by the one you love: “It's not me, I am pretending/I'm not saved, he turned me down/He turns down.”