at a glance...

Hometown: Atlanta, GA
Debut: 1992

Personnel:
Chan Marshall -voice, guitar, piano, autoharp
Matt Sweeney -guitar on "Salty Dog"

Bands in the family :
Dirty Three, Sonic Youth, Two Dollar Guitar, Tren Brothers

Notes:
Although other musicians appear on every Cat Power record, Chan (pronounced "Shawn") Marshall is Cat Power. She grew up moving around the American South and hasn't stopped moving yet; her wanderings in recent years have taken her all over the USA, and she recorded one album, Moon Pix, in Australia. Marshall took up the guitar and started Cat Power in Atlanta, and moved to New York a year later. There she gained the attention of indie-rock cognoscenti like Tono-Bungay's Bob Bannister (who played on her first single), Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley (who appeared on three albums, one of which he released on his own Smells Like Records), and Gerard Cosloy of Matador Records, her current musical home.

Links:
Cat Power Interview

Also check this Cat Power site

Anyone who has ever caught a Cat Power show knows how unpredictable a performer Chan Marshall is. She's been known to worry at a single chord when the audience is too loud, to forget her lyrics or make up new ones, or to lurch into a favorite tune without warning her band. But when she's on, she is an uncommonly moving singer whose deliberate delivery extracts volumes of yearning and melancholy from her own material and the work of other writers. This album focuses on the latter.

Solo, save for "Salty Dog," where guest guitarist does the fancy picking, she transforms a dozen songs associated with (amongst others) Bob Dylan, Michael Hurley, Moby Grape, and Smog into ultra-personal statements of dissatisfaction and devotion, triumph and tragedy. Marshall strips the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" of its choruses and turns it from an anthem of adolescent aggression into a sorrowful blues. She even covers herself; "In This Hole" is an old Cat Power song, here turned into a piano ballad so desolate that it'll wilt the flowers on your table and call rain upon your firstborn's birthday party. But Marshall doesn't live under a permanent cloud -- on "I Found A Reason" she uncovers the tender love song that Lou Reed hid under a mound of sarcasm.

Whether your perceive the changes as mood swings or an unfolding journey through one heart's high and lows, The Covers Record is worth the ride.

If you like Cat Power, check out:
Cat Power Moon Pix
Smog Red Apple Falls
Michael Hurley Weatherhole

-- Bill Meyer

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