Chan Marshall’s concert at the Satellite Ballroom in 2005 was everything I’d been led to expect it would be: a few sparse, harrowing blues originals from the nervous chanteuse with the dark bangs in her eyes, interrupted halfway through as she voiced her anxieties, saying she “felt like she was being watched by the KKK,” then grabbed her glass of wine and split the stage. Marshall finished four or five songs in her 90 minutes or so on stage, and only two or three were hers; the others were covers of “House of the Rising Sun” and the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to do is Dream.”
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Nearly a year later, Marshall spilled it all to the New York Times: whiskey and scotch by day, Xanax by night, meltdowns aplenty. But by that point, it didn’t matter: Cat Power’s 2005 record, The Greatest, was reissued with new art, and her live gigs had grown by leaps and bounds, her backing band of soul veterans amplifying tunes from her catalogue as well as providing Marshall herself with an array of talent that she could envelop herself in. “Cat Power” became a group name that Marshall could disappear into rather than a globe she was required to support on her slender, bowed shoulders. She began dotting her live shows with new covers, ranging from The Highwaymen’s “Silver Stallion” to Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears,” huskily murmuring, “People say I’m the life of the party ’cause I tell a joke or two./ Although I might be laughing loud and hearty, deep inside I’m blue.”
Cat Power’s latest record, Jukebox, is her second album of cover songs, following 2000’s The Covers Record (which featured one of the greatest lyrical reinterpretations in modern rock, Marshall’s cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” without using the chorus, a purely sexual tease). Jukebox features many of the covers that Marshall unveiled during tours that followed her recovery from addiction: “Silver Stallion” perfectly pairs Marshall’s ash-tipped voice with a dusty slide guitar, while “Aretha, Sing One for Me” drowns her voice in gospel organ and electric guitar gnarls, not altogether pleasantly.
Rather than the soul ensemble of Al Green vets that made up her band for The Greatest, Marshall’s crew features drummer Jim White of Australian instrumental whizzes Dirty Three and guitarist Judah Bauer, once a member of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. White’s drumming almost succeeds in making Jukebox’s lead track, “New York” (made famous by Frank Sinatra), a repeat of Marshall’s take on “Satisfaction,” and the song’s cymbal-tapped transition to Hank Williams’ “Rambling (Wo)man” (Marshall makes the subject feminine) makes for a dynamite pairing of murky keys and Zeppelin drums, but Chan the Cat has to work a bit too hard to turn the schmaltzy opening cut into something darker.
Jukebox makes a few more missteps in song choices: Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” should’ve been canned, and a few tracks from a bonus disc (namely Nick Cave’s “Breathless” and Hank Cochran’s “She’s Got You,” made famous by Patsy Cline) should’ve made the cut. But Marshall’s re-imagining of “Metal Heart,” an eight minute track of tinny Danelectro guitar and a vocal double from 1998’s Moon Pix, speaks volumes about the record. The song is sliced in half, but Marshall’s voice, without studio support, soars as something new as her band rocks behind her like her past catastrophes. Marshall isn’t quite the life of the party anymore, but she seems a little less blue.