Cover Story

Cat Power

All This Light: 48 hours in Miami with the ever-mercurial Chan Marshall.

Amanda Petrusich
, August 20, 2012

Cat Power

Photos by Jenni Li

Cat Power: "Ruin"

There's a kind of guilelessness to Miami: If you're roaming around wondering if everyone is bullshitting you, they're not. South Beach has a famously hedonistic vein-- all that cocaine and wantonness-- but there's an earnestness to this place, too, a commitment to pleasure,  pleasantries, and poolside cocktails delivered on little bamboo trays. Stay up, Miami seems to say. Don't look down. Don't look back.

So what's Chan Marshall doing here? It's a reasonable thing to wonder. 

Performing as Cat Power, Marshall has spent the last two decades cultivating an indelible reputation for despondency, particularly while onstage: she will wander off mid-set or whisper to persons unseen, she will slug from splits of Jack Daniel's or turn her back on an audience, curling up like a pillbug. She apologizes an awful lot. There's something about the way her behavior is discussed that feels nearly if not entirely sexist-- it's rooted in hysteria, not genius; it's a function of fragility, not self-possession. Then again, there have been hospitalizations.

Such are the pains of art-making, all the clichés we assume about this particular trade: the same vulnerability that allows Marshall to be such a significant songwriter has also been her personal undoing. She's lived here on and off since 2003, but Miami isn't a city that typically calls to the moody, or the dark, or the purposefully self-destructive. There's all this light, to start.

Marshall's openness is remarkable, which is good,
because after we've walked up to the spa, two women
arrive and instruct us to remove all of our clothing.

Marshall has suggested we get private side- by-side massages in my hotel room. It's mid-July and, at her recommendation, I'm staying at The Standard, formerly an Atomic Age relic known as The Lido Spa Hotel-- a squat, mid- century haven for aging snowbirds angling to dine at 5 p.m. or complete a quick round of water aerobics in the shallow end. It's a hip place now, rendered in shades of pale yellow and sea-foam green: there are outdoor fire pits and copies of Nylon scattered about and some sort of macrobiotic meal called "Living Lasagna" on offer all night long. My little bungalow-style room has a patio with an outdoor bathtub for "soaking," and I've already engaged in the hotel's recommended hydrotherapy routine (it consists of standing alone in a very hot "Roman Waterfall Hot Tub" then plopping into a very cold "Cold Plunge Pool"; I added my own denouement, "Eating an Ice Cream Sandwich"). I make us an appointment for later that afternoon. The receptionist repeatedly refers to the booking as a "couples massage," which, OK.

Marshall shows up grinning, in black jeans, a black t-shirt with a little gold safety pin stuck to it, and a pair of Isabel Marant platform sneakers. Her bull terrier, Mona, waddles in and starts rolling around on the floor in a kind-of-manic, belly-baring shimmy. "She's breakdancing," Marshall announces, and snickers. A couple of months ago, Marshall chopped all her hair off-- an impetuous but not-insignificant move, spiritually speaking-- and she looks different now, unbound. From the moment we meet, she's effusive and curious: she inquires about my bag, the gold fox claw on my bracelet, the collection of essays on my nightstand, the Gene Clark record playing on my iPod. She tries on my shoes. Her openness is remarkable, which is good, because a few minutes later, after we've walked up to the spa (my room is too tiny to accommodate a pair of tables), two women arrive and instruct us to remove all of our clothing.

Sudden nudity, it turns out, is a great leveler. We chatter through the entire massage, mostly about heartache and its various iterations. "Girl," we say, and sigh. It's been a tough summer. Earlier this year, Marshall went through a wearying breakup, and less than two months after their five-year relationship dissolved, her ex-boyfriend, the actor Giovanni Ribisi, married Agyness Deyn, a 29-year-old British model. Before I left Miami, Marshall gave me a stack of his t-shirts to take with me, and I understood why: the purging of material evidence, all that stuff you can't trash but can no longer peaceably coexist with, becomes a problem. In theory, Marshall's after the same things a lot of people find themselves coveting (true love, a couple of kids), but there is also a real part of her that seems to treasure her autonomy, all the luxuries of an un-tethered life.

Listening to Marshall talk is a little like a round of Clue:
you’re half-waiting to learn who and where and with
what, exactly, but the game is really the thing.

While our masseuses make quick work of our knotted shoulders, Marshall tells me about the time she met Mary J. Blige at a taping of UK music show "Later... With Jools Holland"; the R&B great's 2005 album The Breakthrough is important to her, desert-island important, and before the show she assembled a collection of teas and sundries to present to Blige as a symbol of gratitude. Marshall started bawling as soon as they met. I tell her I might have cried then too, and I mean it, but she thinks Blige and I would have gotten along all right. Actually, what she said was: "She's a Capricorn, dog," and gave me a knowing look. We talk about Denis Johnson and Louise Bourgeois and Rodarte and Margiela and her burgeoning interest in filmmaking; She's been working on treatments for a series of videos set in a post-apocalyptic, biologically ravaged America. She teaches me a new way of high-fiving, which involves a series of regular high-fives followed by gorilla/Neanderthal noises. Marshall is a circuitous storyteller but a gifted one, and listening to her talk is a little like a round of Clue: you're half- waiting to learn who and where and with what, exactly, but the game is really the thing.

Afterward, we drink a few paper cones of spring water, get dressed, and hail a taxi to The Raleigh, another hotel, where we sit at the bar for a while. There's tequila, a bit of whiskey, some Camels. We're talking about underpants, and children, and she shows me pictures on her iPhone until we're both sorta teary eyed, and then we eat some fish, and then we're at a karaoke bar, and her friends are there, and she's singing "Heart of Gold" and "Endless Love", and then we're all cramming into someone's tiny hatchback ("Clown car! Clown car!" Marshall shouts, holding the door open and pointing at the backseat), and then we're at her house, and we're swimming in her pool, and Mona's chasing terrified geckos into the shadows, and we're lying on our backs on blankets in her backyard, smoking and eating salt and vinegar potato chips and listening to Blood on the Tracks until it starts pouring down rain, until the sun is almost rising.

"Should we also get a burger? Is that gross?" Marshall's leaning against her kitchen counter the following afternoon, fiddling with a pack of cigarettes, midway through placing a delivery order that, in retrospect, seems like a pretty weedy binge: popcorn shrimp with extra cocktail sauce, a bucket of sweet potato fries, Chinese chicken salad, apple crumble, banana cream pie. Weirdly, we are entirely sober. She's wearing white pajamas with little pink sailboats all over them; I'm wearing her t-shirt and a flannel she pulled from a precarious stack of clothes on her dresser. Our bathing suits are slung over the railing. We'd spent the last couple of hours at the beach, bobbing in the ocean, playing with her best friend's kids (they worship her thoroughly, unconditionally), and watching Mona attempt to permanently coat her face in sand. By the time we'd biked back and showered off a couple of layers of salt, we were the type of hungry where every kind of food seems like a good idea.

Marshall is disarmingly bright, well-versed in a cornucopia of divergent topics, from astrology to South Africa, and her apartment is littered with the detritus of a vigorously lived life: photographs, artifacts from her travels, piles of records (Lenny Bruce, Kurt Vile, Joy Division, New Morning, a 45 of "Lay Lady Lay"), books (The Collected Poems of Allen Ginsberg, The Egyptian Book of the Dead), guitars, a couple of issues of The New Yorker. She will occasionally do something wacky-- the first night we met, she wandered up to the bar, ordered a Diet Coke, paused, ordered me a Diet Coke, took my half-finished Manhattan, stuck her finger in it, walked away, and deposited it at a table on the other side of the room; in her defense, this was not our first round, and the bartender found it deeply hilarious. But mostly she's sweet and hospitable, overtly concerned with other people's comfort. She curses a lot when she's nervous, is prone to repeating "Are you mad at me?" apropos of nothing, and requires you to hold her gaze for an extra beat when you clink glasses. If you ask her something stupid, she'll squeal "Are you crazy?" She doesn't love sitting still.

For an artist who so often gets portrayed as emotionally precarious, Marshall is a tough custodian of her own work.

She also doesn't love talking about herself with a tape recorder running, and when we finally uncork a bottle of wine and settle in to chat about the new album, Sun, I feel strangely guilty, like I'm betraying her kindness; it's possible that this response was purposefully engineered, though I worry that's too cynical to consider. Marshall is forthcoming in some ways and wildly evasive in others; She's prone to saying "off the record" immediately before or after certain confessions, and she has a way of talking, sometimes extensively, around certain basic questions (as with most public figures, there is a baseline awareness of her mythology and how it's been written, both by herself and by others). Either way, I see a light go out, immediately. She yawns, stiffens. I get the sense that for Marshall, nothing shatters the catharsis of art- making faster than answering a whole lot of questions about it.

Cat Power: "Cherokee"

Marshall wrote, performed, recorded, and produced Sun entirely on her own; some in Silver Lake, some in Miami, some in Paris, and some in a Malibu studio she built herself. Those kinds of choices are rarely incidental. For an artist who so often gets portrayed as emotionally precarious, Marshall is a tough custodian of her own work. She tells me that there's a downside to strength-- that when you're strong, people assume you can take it, they keep punching-- but there is a contained internal logic to Sun that couldn't exist under any other circumstances.

That independence was hard fought. Early on, someone told Marshall the new songs were too sad-- that they sounded too much like the old songs-- and she got discouraged: "So I went and felt bad about myself," she says. Things got worse. "Then this same person said, 'What band are you going to get? What band are you going to get? What band are you going to get? What producer? What producer? What producer? You need a manager. You need a manager. You need a manager. You need a producer. You need a band.' I was like, you're not listening to me: I want to play it myself."

Right now you're probably thinking, "Hey, that guy sounds great." But ponder, for a moment, the fallibility of the creative impulse-- how easy it is to get spooked and retreat. Marshall reconfigured, soldiered on. Her favorite track on Sun is "Peace and Love", a grooving, petulant cut that belies her fondness for punk rock; it cites Black Flag, and includes a "na na na na na" chorus that functions exactly how you want it to, as a victory refrain. I like the part where she half-chants, "I'm a lover but I'm in it to win," mostly because it feels like a real good fuck you-- a reminder, at least, that we're more than just one shitty feeling. "Peace and Love" is a robust, all-American anthem, a song that could just as easily have been written and sung by, say, Tom Petty, and a minute and forty seconds in, after the vocals have temporarily faded, and after the snare and the guitar and the cymbals have crashed back in perfect tandem, there is a moment that feels something like rapture. It's a perfect punch-- Marshall tugging on those tiny golden gloves from the cover of The Greatest, knocking everybody out.


Photo by Stefano Giovannini

Sun is Marshall's ninth record, and her first album of original material since 2006's The Greatest. During our time together, I'll figure out that she's irritated by that particular distinction-- the presumption that 2008's Jukebox, her second collection of cover songs, is somehow a less significant entry in her discography. Marshall, now 40, has always liked other people's songs. She often incorporates them into her live shows, and there have been brief periods where the ratio of original to borrowed material skewed significantly toward the latter.

It feels corny and reductive to declare her "of another era," yet my understanding of how she believes songs work-- that they are channeled into existence by a handful of conduits, but in fact they belong to everyone, like a mountain or a river or an old forest-- makes her seem innately better suited to a place like Nashville circa 1952, or maybe the Mississippi Delta in 1927, when almost all art was considered public domain, verses floated gently, and creativity was about interpretation rather than invention. On 1998's Moon Pix, notice the way she sings a tiny bit of "Amazing Grace" in the middle of "Metal Heart", or the nicked/ decelerated/ reversed "Paul Revere" sample that opens "American Flag". She is not interested in ownership, not in the broadest sense.

There's also her voice, which is effortless in a way that recalls a period before aggressively mustered melisma, when people sang because it felt good and necessary, like a long stretch. It's conventionally pretty-- honeyed and subtly textured-- and so instinctive it makes me feel actual envy, like I will never do anything with as much intrinsic ease as Chan Marshall exhibits when she sings. That's how she's able to take a track as proverbial as "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", which opens 2000's The Covers Record, and turn it into something unrecognizable; She eschews the song's chorus (that dumb, galloping declaration: the ur- chorus), purposefully forgoing the obvious for the odd. Or is it obvious, not singing the chorus of a song like that? It's hard to know what Marshall's move is, when nothing feels like a move at all.

But there are moves. I can no longer physically endure her version of the Velvet Underground's "I Found A Reason", in which she nips a handful of lines from the end of the song, modifies the lyrics, and sings her new verses plaintively, for 121 seconds, over a handful of bleak piano notes. It is-- and I say this without hesitation-- the single saddest thing I have ever heard. Marshall's technical skills are often eclipsed by other factors (including her own aggressive self- admonishment), but consider what she does here, how good it is: All the explicitly narrative bits are excised, and the song's proactive punch-line ("I do believe/ You are what you perceive") is refashioned into a declaration of passivity ("I do believe/ In all the things you see"). Then there's the piano, that first, stabbing C sharp, a melody so distilled it feels obscene. When Lou Reed finally sings, "What comes is better/ Than what came before," everyone knows he's talking about love and redemption and the myth of the future; when Marshall sings the same words, you get the feeling she could only ever be talking about dying.

Marshall's work has gotten progressively less dissonant over the last 17 years, a shift that culminated with The Greatest, a winsome, ambling soul record, her Dusty in Memphis. Right now, Sun is the outlier; there's no easy analogue in her present oeuvre, although You Are Free probably comes closest. There is blues here, just as there is blues in everything Marshall has ever recorded, but there are also jokes, beats, songs you could toss your arms up and dance to, and a ghastly cameo from Iggy Pop bellowing, "You wanna live!" in an over-excited baritone, like a dog leaping at your knees. It's an optimistic record, which makes its periodic twinges of melancholy that much more affecting. As the electro-addled "3, 6, 9" fades out, there's a little Auto-Tuned whine that picks up, but it's nearly impossible to discern what Marshall is saying-- are they even words at all? Is it "from here?" Is it "fuck me?" I don't ask.

The album was mixed by Philippe Zdar, one-half of the French house duo Cassius who's probably best known for his board work on Phoenix's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and the Beastie Boys' Hot Sauce Committee Part Two; the latter is what inspired Marshall to Google him and inquire about his services. "I emailed him and said, 'Hey, you want to meet up?'" she recalls. "I played him seven or eight songs. He said 'I'll do it but I don't want to do much because you need to keep your sound.'" 

"I thought the production was so great-- so genuine, so ambitious and full of candor-- that my creative input should be nearly zero," Zdar told me in an all-caps email the week I got back from Miami. "I just wanted to keep her company, to help her when she needed." Zdar also declared Marshall one of the most talented musicians, producers, and artists he had ever met. "A REAL ONE," is how he put it. 

Chan Marshall was born in Georgia in the winter of 1972, and spent her childhood bouncing around Atlanta, North Carolina, and Tennessee, "going back and forth to Grandmother, Mom, sometimes Aunt, sometimes Great Aunt." Her father was a blues musician of negligible repute (he left before she was born), and her mother and grandmother inadvertently taught her how to sing. "[My grandmother] got me singing 'Salty Dog' and different country songs-- she was always cooking fried chicken and singing. My mom [was] singing and acting like Mick Jagger, with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth or whatever," Marshall says. She sounds both child-like and weary.

There's something so deeply, inarguably Southern about Marshall-- which is to say, she emanates the myth of Southerness, of Faulkner's South, that little bit of brokenness, that vague drawl-- and it's hard to conceive of someone from a different sort of place, someone who didn't smoke their first cigarette in second grade or slurp their first beer from a baby bottle, convincingly deliver a line like, "Sometimes you don't wanna live/ Sometimes you gotta do what you don't want to do."

"I love the South," she says now. "The mud and the creeks and the moss and the lightning bugs and the oak trees and the pecan trees. Climbing trees and looking for snakes, I really miss all that. That was the best part of my childhood."

Cat Power: "Cherokee (Nicolas Jaar Remix)"

Nature is significant to Sun, and it's important to Marshall, too, a thing to believe in. "I knew about God and church and Satan and all that shit-- demons and prophets," she says, climbing off the couch and lying on her living room floor (the hardwood boards have been painted white). "If you do this and do that, you'll go to Heaven, you just have to be good. But if you do this, you're bad, you're terrible." She pauses and gives me a look roughly equivalent to the jerk-off gesture. "Nobody ever talked about the clouds, how every cloud looks different: low clouds, high clouds, fast clouds, slow clouds, blue sky, dark blue, light blue, planets, moons. No one ever talks about that shit, or goes to church for it." She pauses again. "As a kid I knew the grass and I knew the wind. I knew that. That was very clear."

"I was just [drinking] because I wanted to. I was really sad. I was trying to cover shit up. That doesn't make me an alcoholic."

In the early 90s, at age 20, Marshall moved from Atlanta to New York with $1,500 and a few select possessions ("a suitcase, a lamp, my amp, my guitar, and a chair that I loved"), picked up a couple of part-time jobs ("nanny, cleaning apartments"), ate $1.85 breakfasts at a café on 1st Street ("You could get scrambled eggs with a bagel and coffee-- it came with butter and jam, or cream cheese"), and started playing shows around town. Per local lore, an early performance consisted of her tunelessly plucking a two-string guitar and singing the word "no" for 15 minutes while the crowd excitedly expressed displeasure. It was a prolific era, recordings-wise: she released 1995's Dear Sir and its companion piece, Myra Lee, before signing to Matador and putting out her third LP, What Would the Community Think, in 1996. Sixteen years later, she's still with the label.      

"I'd been seeing her shows since she turned up in NYC-- if not all of the early shows, probably in the 90% range," Matador co-owner Gerard Cosloy tells me later. "By the time Chan was making records, she'd become a big favorite of many folks in our office. It seemed like a natural move-- here was someone in our neighborhood, both literally and musically, who we were going to see constantly, and she was interested in making records with us. There wasn't much deliberation on our part. Or much negotiation with Chan, for that matter."

Cosloy, to his credit, is uninterested in quantifying her evolution as an artist, and when I asked him about what her developing musicianship might mean to her fans, he was even more disinclined to elaborate. I believe the quote was: "Is Blues Saraceno a better musician, technically, than Chan Marshall? The correct answer is 'Who gives a shit?'"

I had to look up Blues Saraceno (lead guitarist, Poison, 1994-1996), but Cosloy's point stands: composition and feeling, those are the real goods, and Marshall possesses both. Historically, the latter can be a noxious burden, a reason to seek out certain well-known solaces. Marshall has struggled (sometimes famously) with drinking too much. "I was never addicted though," she says. "I was just doing it because I wanted to. I was really sad. I was trying to cover shit up. That doesn't make me an alcoholic."

More troubling was her 2006 collapse. She first moved to Miami to be near a high school friend, but she was still traveling frequently for work. She hadn't been sleeping well (if at all), someone close to her in New York had gotten very sick, she'd been prescribed a new antidepressant, and she was struggling to promote The Greatest. Marshall says the voices started on a flight from Nashville, a couple of weeks before the record's release. I ask her what they sounded like. "Just terrible. Just 'Kill yourself!' and then laughing," she says. "It wasn't my voice. It was horrifying." 

A few days later, Marshall was doing an interview at a bar in Miami when she hit a psychic wall: an existential nadir, the sea floor. "I apologized and left, and what [the reporter] didn't know is that what I was going to do was take all those pills. I wanted to kill myself. I was just like, 'Yep, I'm going to do it," she recalls. "I'm gone." Instead-- and thanks to the determined intervention of several close friends-- Marshall ended up in the psychiatric ward of Miami's Mount Sinai Medical Center. The official diagnosis, Marshall says, was "psychotic break due to excessive stress." After six days of hallucinations and dissociative thinking-- she thought she was a ghost, she thought she was an 85-year-old homeless man with one leg who was "probably a rapist," she heard lions in her room-- she remembers finally forcing herself to look in a mirror. "It was like bam. I totally reconnected the line between my conscious and subconscious. And then I was like, 'Holy fuck, I'm in the cuckoo bin.'"

It's hard to reconcile all these different iterations of Marshall: the ferociously independent artist, the acclaimed singer slowly backing away from a crowd, the gracious, doting host, the panicked girl playing Uno in a Florida psych ward. "What's funny is that I did feel this sense of God," she says. "I did feel this sense of protection. It was difficult. It still is. It's because of my friends that I'm here."

I ask her if she'll tour with the new record. "Oh yeah," she says.

"You're smiling," I say.

"I'm terrified," she says.

Marshall and I are sitting barefoot on her stoop, watching cars roll by. It's late, and we're waiting for the cab she called to ferry me back to The Standard. Earlier, she told me she no longer knows where most of the masters for her early records are-- they could, she supposed, be crammed in a closet somewhere (she still keeps a room in New York), or it's equally possible that they were left behind altogether, shed cleanly, like a snakeskin. She mentions that she's gotten rid of everything she owns at least three times, and-- perhaps registering the combination of terror and awe seizing my face-- encourages me to embrace more seismic change, to create whatever kind of life I want. "No one's gonna live it for you," she shrugs, and catches my eye like, "Remember this." I don't say it then, but I admire her lack of sentimentality, her courage, the way she appears capable of untold transformations.

Instead, I say that Miami surprised me. It's optimistic and complicated. I say I think it suits her, and she seems pleased.

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