Chan Marshall is holed up with the current love of her life in a SoHo hotel room, and for this brief moment, she couldn't be happier. The sheets are rumpled. Room-service trays are everywhere, covered with the remnants of her last few meals — half-eaten fruit plates, drained-dry beer bottles. As late-afternoon sunshine pushes through closed shades, Marshall is rolling around on pale-green bedding with her beloved: a snuffling French bulldog named Mona.

"Do you wuv your mommy?" Marshall asks her dog in a squeaky baby voice. "Do you?" Mona offers a growl in response and leaps off the bed, toenails skittering on the wooden floor. Marshall, 36 — who, under the name Cat Power, has written and sung some of the most gorgeously sad and haunted songs of the last ten years — sits up and giggles. "I got her last Christmas — she was like a big sleepy potato," she says in her real speaking voice, which is whispery, musical, with only traces of her childhood Southern accent. "She was so scared, shaking, with these big, big eyes."

Mona isn't scared anymore. And her owner isn't either, though there's still something fragile about her. Marshall is sipping chamomile tea that she says tastes like bubble gum, and smoking the first in an endless series of Marlboro Lights. She's thin, maybe too thin, and tan, maybe too tan. There are tired circles under her brown eyes. She's wearing no makeup and a loose checked shirt that looks like it might have belonged to a boyfriend; her pale-blue jeans are rolled up like she's prepared to wade into something unpleasant, revealing a comfy pair of white slipper-socks. Marshall can't seem to break what she admits is a lifelong habit of repeatedly posing the same heartbreaking question to whoever's in her presence: "Are you mad at me?"