Chan Marshall drinks her scotch with no ice, laments for music of old, and used to frequent strip clubs. Those are the habits of a sixty-five-year-old man, but the talented twenty-nine-year-old, mike name Cat Power, is at once old and young for her age. Though childlike in her insecurity, Marshall is a seasoned champ in the arena of heartbreak and melancholy, defending the title with her February 18th release, You Are Free.

Free is a chronicle of Marshall's own liberation, and uses a wider range of instrumentation and spectrum of moods than her previous releases. Her voice is dry, conveying the intense sadness of a fractured heart. But there is also a new element -- Marshall has agency. She allows her anger to well up in taunting vocals like "Guess what? I found out about you" on "Shaking Paper" and in the insistent mantra, "I won't be ashamed to be" on "Speak for Me."

Marshall contended with time and space while making this record, using several different studios over a year and a half. "My friend [Adam Kasper], who was engineering it for me, was working as a producer on other records," she says. "I'd go wherever he was, whatever studio. The work was very sporadic. I'm never doing it like that again."

The "other records" happened to be Pearl Jam's Riot Act and the Foo Fighters' One by One, which led to contributions on Free from Eddie Vedder on backing vocals and Dave Grohl on drums. Marshall sums up the experience concisely -- "They're people, just like you and me. They're just nice people" -- but insists that their assists were not about adding star power to an indie record but creating a more even rendering of the themes Marshall dealt with in constructing the album.

"It really isn't fair that there isn't a male perspective," Marshall says. "I needed a drummer, and there was one song I really wanted a male to sing." That song, "To Be a Good Woman," is a mournful country and western-tinged tale of a relationship and its end, with Vedder's vocals thickening the sound and the emotion behind lines like, "I will miss your heart so tender/And I will love this love forever." Vedder also sings on the album's last track, "Evolution."

A transplanted Southerner, Marshall has been on the indie-rock radar since releasing her first album, 1995's Dear Sir, recorded the same day as Myra Lee, released the following year. She signed to Matador in 1996 and released her critically acclaimed What Would the Community Think? (1996) and Moon Pix (1998), both of which won many fans but her own distaste. "They sound so pretentious," Marshall says. "When I listen to it I'm remembering things that I did around the time of recording or writing, and there's a lot of things that I don't want to remember."

In 2000 Marshall released The Covers Record, a collection of songs near and dear to her heart that were originally recorded by everyone from Nina Simone to the Velvet Underground to the Rolling Stones. "You'll never hear Bob Dylan, or Billie Holiday, or Moby Grape on the radio," says Marshall. "I wanted to release The Covers Record because it's really liberating to not have to do interviews or that whole thing that everyone expects you to do. I could just put out this covers record and play my songs on tour as well. I felt really free."

But she hasn't always. Marshall on-stage meltdowns have often overshadowed her music. "People always say, 'Oh, she's so crazy, she can't keep her shit together,'" she says. "But, no, I'm a person . . . It's so cruel."

"I Don't Blame You," the leadoff track of You Are Free, seems to be an explanation, a justification even, of her onstage behavior. The opening arrhythmic piano bars lead into an eerily familiar account of a soured stage performance, with Marshall in the audience empathizing with the performer. She admits to obvious parallels, but won't reveal if the song's about her.

"I'm not going to tell anyone," she says. "My boyfriend asked me, 'Is that about you?' And I said no, and then I realized [the similarities], because of all the problems I've had as a person. People are human beings first -- the things that they do are secondary."

Download Cat Power's "He War"

LAUREN HARRIS
(February 20, 2003)