Twenty years after The Greatest, Cat Power – aka Chan Marshall – isn't interested in nostalgia: memory, much like her music, remains in motion, evolving like the people that carry her songs. It’s been seven years since I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to Marshall, and I am supremely delighted and flattered to be remembered by her after an afternoon at The Old Clare, discussing heartbreak. (Although, I confess I flagrantly ignored her advice to marry an athlete in the time that has passed between conversations, apologies.)
Dialling in from L.A., whilst Marshall is well and mixing her record, she feels for the political climate in the States. In our former conversation, she told me that music was a medicine that the world needed, and I ask her if she still feels the same way. "Definitely,” she says. “It's a necessary injection. We need it. I think everybody – children, everybody – needs subconscious information that's helpful and healing."
There's an almost maternal quality to the way she speaks about art now. Healing isn't presented as a grand revelation but as something accumulated through thousands of small encounters: records played at home, voices shared between strangers, songs that have become companions through periods of grief. "I think, especially as women, there are just so many things we overlook; things we don't speak up about, daily garbage." However, it is the daily garbage that pushes Marshall to keep writing in the face of what could be too much for some.
In order to revisit The Greatest, Marshall had to meet an earlier version of herself and one that was not so serene as they are now. "At first it was a little tricky, listening to it. Then, I realised it would actually be a nice thing to revisit, as an older woman now, and think about who I was when I recorded it." Even though she confesses she was “a mess” in her head, Marshall has the grace to meet her former self with compassion rather than judgement or shame. "Right after that record was when I started psychotherapy. I got sober. I really had to look at everything I'd been back-burning for so long. I listened to the record, and I just felt like I saw her. I saw what she was struggling through. For so many years I didn't think I could ask for help – not with certain things."
The years between then and now have not erased those experiences, but they have altered their weight. What once felt like open wounds have become scars; still visible but no longer defining. "Singing these songs now, because I'm here, because of all the work I've done (and continue to do) and trying to be honest with myself... the wounds have healed. There's acceptance. There's acknowledgement of the things I can't change. It feels good. It's still heavy, but it feels like I've come through the other side."
Listening to Marshall speak, it becomes increasingly clear that The Greatest has ceased to belong solely to the woman who recorded it in 2006. Like all enduring works of art, it has continued to gather new meanings with every passing year, absorbing experience rather than remaining fixed within it. "They weren't the same songs anymore," Marshall says. "They'd become something triumphant." This exultant testimonial to survival and growth came from a place in her life where Marshall “saw no future” for herself. "To stand on stage now and sing those songs, knowing everything I know now... I kept all of that to myself for years. It feels like a completely different message now. It actually feels really positive."
For Marshall, work became the thing that carried her through. "I think that's just how I've always lived my life. There was work to be done. I'm a workhorse. I've always been. Whether I admitted it to myself or not, it was always the work that kept me going." As for the title track itself, the song, The Greatest arrived with divine feminine creativity at soundcheck. She remembers her Mother attending one of her concerts for the first (and only) time. During soundcheck, while the engineer adjusted cables and levels, Marshall absent-mindedly began playing, surrounded by cables and a tuna sandwich on a paper plate.
"Right after that record was when I started psychotherapy. I got sober. I really had to look at everything I'd been back-burning for so long. I listened to the record, and I just felt like I saw her. I saw what she was struggling through.”
“I just wrote that song, I always kept a magic marker at the back of my amp, so I grabbed my shirt and guitar tuner – which I never use because I fucking hate tuning my guitar – but and I wrote down the lyrics of what I had just done, and then I played it that night.”
Marshall explains she may have written the song then, but that “the recorded versions of my songs in general are never done. My whole experience of recording has always been that they're unfinished. They're one moment. That's all." Recording, in Marshall's mind, is not the completion of an artwork but the documentation of where it existed on one particular day. Life continues afterwards, and the songs continue with it.
"I keep working on them. The songs keep growing. Sometimes I leave certain lyrics out. Sometimes I put them back. Sometimes I change the way something is played because life changes. The message changes. Something inside the lyrics changes. They're always evolving." The studio recording becomes less definitive than a photograph; a faithful representation of one fleeting moment that can never fully contain the life surrounding it.
Perhaps this explains why Marshall's live performances have always carried such emotional unpredictability. Audiences often arrive expecting faithful recreations of familiar recordings, only to discover songs breathing in entirely new ways. They are witnessing works still in conversation with their creator.
When I remark that it's extraordinary for a song to remain so responsive to both personal experience and the wider world, Marshall gently expands the thought beyond music. “We're mirrors of the world,” she tells me. “What we create in this life, karmically, through how we treat people and how we treat ourselves, that's the mirror." She begins listing professions almost as though dismantling the hierarchy that often surrounds artistic practice. "Whatever we're making; whether we're a chef, a writer, a housekeeper, an engineer, a scientist. We're reflecting the world around us, whether we know it or not." For Marshall, it is as though her songs are translations of her life and her beliefs and whilst they may be personal, “whatever we create inhabits our spirit, whether we like it or not, whether we realise it or not."
It is a worldview that extends naturally into motherhood when asked whether she sees herself reflected in her Son, Marshall absolutely does. She observes that she learned that the hard way. Children teach us things nobody warns us about. Nobody says, 'you're going to learn this about yourself.' Or 'you're going to learn this about your own behaviour.' They're little scholars. They're constantly reflecting back what we teach them. What they observe.” With a smile full of love, she states he is most definitely hers; she wouldn’t take her eyes off him the second after he was born.
When our conversation turns to the kind of songs that endure, we begin talking about love; how the greatest love songs eventually escape the lives that inspired them, suggesting that an individual's experience can become something universal, which Marshall builds on explaining they are not merely “one-dimensional." She recently holidayed with a friend and was plagued with empty pop and dance music. "[My friend] asked me why I'd never liked that kind of music. I said, 'Because there's no soul in it.'" It's a blunt assessment, but if songs are mirrors, then music that reflects nothing deeper than its own construction inevitably feels hollow.
We get a little side-tracked and tangentially fantasise about what we would DJ at skating rinks (think Sister Sledge, James Brown and Donna Summer) before landing on meditation via Lana Del Ray, who Marshall tells me meditates for three hours a day. Whilst she doesn’t regularly do her own reiki meditations anymore, the experience permanently altered something inside her. "I think because I built that little chamber inside myself back then... I kind of meditate differently now. I do a lot of breathing." Whenever she embraces people she loves, she insists on doing so heart to heart. "I always hug them heart-to-heart. Then we inhale. Exhale. Drop our shoulders. Three times. I love greeting people that way. I love saying goodbye that way. Because our hearts are positively charged. We carry so much desensitised pain. It just sits there. The heart is always overrun with grief. Shame. Everything that's happening in the world. It takes about six seconds for our hearts to regulate the nervous system. The heart becomes uncharged." How wonderful it would be to fix a heart in only six seconds, “when I learned that... that's why I started doing it."
There is something quietly radical about the sincerity with which Marshall speaks. In an era often characterised by detachment, she remains almost unfashionably earnest. She still believes music heals. She still believes people can comfort one another through touch. She still believes songs carry emotional responsibility.
For an artist who has spent much of her career writing about loneliness, the most striking revelation is perhaps that she no longer seems interested in isolation. Even her recent performances of Bob Dylan's catalogue (perhaps one of the most daunting acts of artistic interpretation imaginable) eventually became another lesson in transformation. What began as an act of reverence gradually evolved into something far more personal with everyone wanting to connect with Marshall. “Everybody and their grandmother wanted to come backstage," she laughs. "It became bigger than before. Everybody wanted to go and see Bob Dylan. Instead, they were coming because I was there doing it." For an artist who has spent much of her career resisting celebrity, the experience carried an unexpected emotional weight. "That was one of the hardest things, because afterwards, it was just me again." Every evening became its own emotional expedition "But every night felt like a journey. A really long journey. Very similar to The Greatest now." Speaking on the tour, she alludes to what those who attend the shows will get to bear witness too, “at the end I always do this one thing. It's probably one of the heaviest things I've ever done. As far as a song goes."
“What we create in this life, karmically, through how we treat people and how we treat ourselves, that's the mirror.”
We consider that perhaps heaviness is not something to escape but something worth returning to. To explain it, she turns not to musicians, but to poets, "I have this poet friend that I love, Aja Monet, she's crushing it." Watching Monet tour her poetry reminded Marshall of the comparison she'd made earlier between musicians and painters.
"Painters have exhibitions. Retrospectives. Poets tour with books. They do readings. Then they talk about the work. The art stands on its own. The painting stays the same. The words in the book stay the same. The vinyl pressing stays the same." Marshall seems to gather every strand of our conversation and distill it into an artistic philosophy. "But the living person, the living moment… that's where everything changes." It could be one of Marshall’s creative manifestos, that the object or format can remain fixed, whilst the artist is forever in flux. Every time an audience gathers around a song, the work shifts ever so slightly because everyone listening has changed since they last heard it. "The human being. The living entity. That's what's always changing. The artwork itself, she says, may survive for decades. "Maybe it'll last 80 years? I don't know. Our conversation right now, the audience, the poet reading aloud – that transcends the object itself. It becomes something else. It becomes what we take home with us afterwards."
Marshall brings into conversation another artist she admires and mentioning Emin's work prompts another story, delivered with the same sense of wonder that colours so many of Marshall's memories. "The first time I met Tracey was around the Royal Albert Hall recording. Later, I visited her studio." She laughs, "I accidentally went through the wrong door." Instead of entering the house, she found herself standing unexpectedly inside the studio, surrounded by paintings she had only ever seen reproduced in books. "I'd seen photographs of her work before, but I'd never experienced it in person." The difference between reproduction and presence overwhelmed her, "walking in unexpectedly and seeing those enormous new works... I was moved to tears [...] It's like reading something extraordinary. It stays inside you - it becomes part of your own living data."
It is an unexpectedly perfect phrase from someone who has spent an afternoon insisting that art is never truly finished. Those paintings, songs, poems, they continue existing inside us long after we leave the gallery or the concert hall as we carry them forward, altering them as they alter us. As our conversation begins drawing towards its conclusion, Marshall is sitting in a Los Angeles studio mixing a new record; another body of work is preparing to leave her hands and be altered by the living artists that receive it. For many artists, mixing is a bittersweet conclusion to a project that has been nurtured by them for months or even years; the endless listening, the microscopic adjustments and the quiet awareness that soon the songs will no longer belong solely to the person who made them. "It's like saying goodbye,” she explains and I can imagine her holding the record to her heart with her six second embrace.
My conversation with Marshall reverberates in my psyche as I listen back to the transcript and try and capture some of her magic and wisdom on the page. I’m drawn back to the idea that though her songs, and this record, are finite, the recorded versions have “never really been finished.” What initially seemed to be a throw away comment about artists always wanting to add more in the studio seems to become her philosophy of making and living. It is not just about new arrangements or playing the songs in new styles. The painting stays the same, the vinyl stays the same, the majority of the chords remain the same, but the artist and their audience in front of them are forever changing. Twenty years after The Greatest, Marshall isn't celebrating an album; she's celebrating the possibility that we are allowed to become someone else without abandoning who we once were, triumphantly.
