A Short History of Cat Power

Cat Power spent her early years in Georgia and it shows in her music. Her early song structures are bluesy, sparse and her songs have a stillness and emotional clarity which cannot be taught. She debuted with 'Myra Lee' in 1995. It was recorded in a day and features Sonic Youth's Steve Shelly on the drums. All the songs have an empty sound, yet they are all emotionally charged and build to odd and difficult conclusions. The standout song is 'Enough'. It follows an inevitable path towards nervous breakdown and typifies the sort of emotional territory Cat Power treads throughout her early and finest recordings.

Her next album was 'What Would The Community Think?' which was recorded in the same year as her debut. Although still very much a lo-fi indie album, it hints at a more catchy and accessible future which Cat Power harnessed on her breakthrough album 'The Greatest'. 'What Would The Community Think?' succeeds on Chan Marshall's vocal. It's all in the vocal, and the desolate and delicately heavy settings of the songs.

1998 saw the release of 'Moon Pix'. It could be compared to Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks', an album which was released thirty years before and has never been matched by it's writer. On 'Moon Pix' Chan Marshall is joined by Jim White and Mick Turner from The Dirty Three, an Australian string-driven trio. The backing music is more free-form on 'Cross Bones Style', and sort of traditional on 'Moonshiner'. She also features on her own with her guitar on some tracks and comes across as bored and disillusioned. Her next album, 'Covers Record', may add weight to this assertion. The songs she chooses are not what you'd expect from a singer who's made her name on the back of a quiet emotionally charged vibe with sparse backing. There's the Rolling Stones' 'Satisfaction' for one. The Cat Power version turns the song into something completely new and original, a difficult trick to pull off. The album is, in the main, a success.

For her next venture, Cat Power released 'You Are Free' in 2003 and it's a return to the deep and heavy feel of her earlier records. Her stories are sung in a whisper and cry out under a weight of fragility which is rarely laid to tape. It's a difficult listen, but beautiful too. On the first track on the album, 'I Don't Blame You', she sings 'they wanted to hear that sound that you didn't wanna play', which may put into context the fragile whisper of the singer's delivery and the tricky distinction between the private life of a performer and the public persona they are expected to deliver. After all, they are entertainers aren't they?

Her biggest commercial success had come from 'The Greatest'. It's an album which is still obviously Cat Power, yet the songs are given a radio-friendly production and a blog-friendly angle. It's not a patch on her earlier work, but maybe a necessary step in Cat Power's musical evolution. Maybe she has finally discovered the right public persona to hide behind, or maybe she just wants commercial success. Either way it's a shame when such an obviously unique artist has to compromise her own individuality and voice in order to get an extended run on the music industry's treadmill.