Cat Power (34 page)

Though Chan entered the recording process with more than an album's worth of original songs written in the previous four years, many of the most stunning tracks on
You Are Free
, like “Evolution,” “I Don't Blame You,” “Names,” and “Maybe Not,” were composed in spare moments of quiet downtime that Chan carved out for herself in between recording tracks that never made the album. “Those were written because I was just alone in a hotel room or in a studio,” Chan has said. “I'm not around instruments. I used to have a piano
at her house in Atlanta
, but I was never around to play it. I wrote a lot of songs on it, which aren't on this record. I wanted to put the fresher ones, the ones I was writing in between recording all these other songs that I had. Those songs are more special in a way to me because they are fresher. ‘Speak for Me’ was just me, literally, playing around.”

The opening track on
You Are Free
, “I Don't Blame You,” was the last song Chan wrote for the record. The plaintive, resigned track sets the entire pained but peaceful tone of the album. “I sat there while everybody was playing pool, Ping-Pong, and getting stoned while we were mixing and transferring tape,” Chan has said. “I was in there singing that song. We'd been drinking all night. I was remembering somebody, and I was just sitting there. I don't want to forget a song, so I have to play it over and over and over. I must have played it twenty times. I got so completely delirious that when Adam walked in, he was laughing at me.” Chan realized she'd accidentally written another song for the album. “I asked, ‘Can I record this song real quick?’” Chan remembered. “I'm glad that I did it, 'cause I could have just forgotten it.”

“I Don't Blame You” is about a performer trying to break out of the prison of audience expectations. It opens with Chan watching a wild-eyed rocker going through the motions onstage and ends with a declaration: “They never owned it/And you never owed it to them anyway.”
Given Chan's own issues with audience, she addresses her rock star as a kindred spirit. She's not singing to herself, necessarily, but she intimately understands her subject's plight. Many people have speculated that Kurt Cobain, or perhaps Elliott Smith—both of whom struggled to reconcile their integrity with their success and both of whom committed suicide—inspired “I Don't Blame You,” but Chan has kept her muse's identity a secret.

Cat Power fans have always read into Chan's lyrics and related directly to emotions she's expressing. It was a you-feel-this-and-I-do-too direct connection. Suddenly, in songs like “I Don't Blame You,” Chan was using the structure of observing someone else's suffering to express personal emotions. Instead of being in the spotlight, she put herself in the audience with the fans, relating to something she's hearing and seeing onstage. Maybe she is the secret subject of “I Don't Blame You,” maybe she's not. But the meaning, the intimacy, is the same regardless. “It's not about me,” Chan has said. “That person who is going insane? I empathize. It is a performer, but there are lots of performers who have come before that person. I don't want to mention who, because there is so much bullshit surrounding that person.”

One of the most striking songs on
You Are Free
is “Names,” an elegy to innocents damaged by the heartless world. The song is classic Cat Power in that its heartbreaking narrative is accentuated by the spare, unadorned arrangement and delivery, but it represents the same shift in Chan's writing style: Once again, the listener feels close to Chan not as the subject of the song but as its conduit. The song describes the basic life stories of five people—Perry, Naomi, Sheryl, Donovan, and Charles—whom Chan knew during her childhood. The stories told in the song are of lives marred by abuse, abandonment, exploitation, and sorrow. The song conveys Chan's empathy for these people, but the stories
she's telling are not her own. “They're people at different schools I would go to,” Chan explains. “I was always moving around. Sometimes when you're the new person at school, you are kind of an outsider because nobody knows who you are, and people gravitate towards you.

“I wasn't very close friends with the first one,” Chan said of “Perry,” a ten-year-old boy with learning difficulties who was apparently abused by his dad. (“His father was a very mean man/His father burned his skin/His father sent him to his death,” she sings in the song.) “I really liked him because he was slow. He was in special education, and everyone would throw spitballs and put boogers on his desk. They were very cruel to him, beat him up and pull his pants down and called him retarded. It was terrible. He rode the bus with me.” Moving from town to town as a child allied Chan for life with other outsiders. She gravitates toward people who knew what it was like to exist on the fringe, for whatever reason—mental retardation, a destructive home life, sexual abuse. Chan's own inescapable sense of foreignness, even in her adult life, allows her to relate to the lost souls of the world. “I was at the piano,” Chan remembered of her experience writing “Names.” “I don't know what made me think of one of my friends. I was in another place and felt kind of disconnected. I'm not really close with my family or anything. My friends, they're my, you know, they're my friends. I felt kind of that same feeling of being not the new kid, but like, ‘Where am I?’”

Chan recorded John Lee Hooker's “Keep on Runnin'” in honor of the singer and guitarist who passed away right after she had a dream about him. “I was on the wings, he was, like, playing onstage, sitting there with a guitar and a mike in front of thousands of people,” the singer has said. “All of a sudden I notice he's looking at me, and he motions for me to come onstage with him. I look around, certain he's not talking to me, but he looks right at me and says, ‘C’ mon, I'm gonna sing ‘Maudie,’ and I
want you to sing it with me.’ I'm really nervous, but I go onstage and sing with him. He keeps winking at me—his eyes are really sparkly and moist and he's got these incredible dimples. I sang with him but felt so uncomfortable and awkward standing there. When I woke up, I was so excited I got to hang out with him and make him laugh. Oddly, we were supposed to play on the same bill at this festival, but he canceled the day of the show and didn't even show up. So I thought that was why I had the dream about him, then he passed away a little while after.”

Eddie Vedder's most significant role comes on
You Are Free's
most personal track, “Good Woman.” The song is vintage Chan in that it's directly about her: “I want to be a good woman,” Chan sings. With aching candor, “Good Woman” describes an impossible scenario between two people in love. “I want to be a good woman/And I want for you to be a good man/And this is why I will be leaving/And this is why I can't see you no more,” Chan sings, with Vedder's trembling baritone echoing her.

It was particularly important to Chan to include a male voice on this song because it's meant to represent the trauma inflicted on both people in a doomed relationship. “That's what I wanted,” Chan has said. “That's a decision I made when I was listening to it. I didn't want to be alone in that. Men have suffered as well. The disconnection between men and women is the reason for problem marriages, abused children, neglected love, mistrust, lies, and infidelity. That missed connection is why that song was written. The person who sang on that song
Eddie Vedder
, I was thinking, It would be great if you could lend your
voice
because it would really help the flip side of what's important about men and women in relationships.”

Campbell, who did the string arrangements on the Michael Hurley song “Werewolf,” another cover, says that Chan had a very clear idea of
what she wanted to hear. “There are a lot of projects where they haven't made decisions yet,” he explains. “This was more like, ‘Here's the vision—add to it.’ The sound of her voice and guitar just seemed to want some other colors wafting around in the background.” Campbell was impressed by Chan's vision, and by how little the final version of the song differed from the rough tracks. “The way you hear her vocal and guitar on the final album, that's exactly how I remember it when they gave it to me. The whole concept sonically of the thing had that kind of ambient feel, like she's in a distant place, and that's exactly how they gave it to me.”