Love letters from fans to their idols, covers allow artists to record their ideal playlist. Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, continues with Covers (1), third cover album after The Covers Record (2000) and Jukebox (2008), the construction of this personal pantheon in which Billie Holiday occupies a prominent place. The first, to listen to his haunted and masterful interpretation of I’ll Be Seeing Youwhich rises to the level of that of Lady Day while regenerating this heartbreaking song of farewell.
With a deep voice of thoughtful intensity, with caressing or biting inflections, Cat Power sings without concessions, inhabiting the pieces, giving everyone the impression that she is interpreting them for them. The orchestrations, stripped down, guitars and piano at work, offer a sound that breathes to titles reinvented with conviction. At best, A Pair of Brown Eyes recalls the dazzling talent of British-Irish pop group The Pogues and It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels resurrects country singer Kitty Wells.
“The Greatest”, an album with mystical melancholy
The songwriter honors rock stars: Nick Cave, Iggy Pop, Bob Seger… Not to mention the new pop generation, including her friend Lana Del Rey with White Mustangor, more unexpectedly, actor Ryan Gosling and his group Dead Man’s Bones, which she illuminates Pa Pa Power.
Propelled to the firmament of independent rock by three major discs, What Would the Community Think (1996), The Greatest (2006) to mystical melancholy (heard in the soundtrack of the film My Blueberry Nigths by Wong Kar-wai), and the authentic and sober Wanderer, his last original album in 2018, Cat Power draws its radiance and spiritual vibration from the four sources of rock: blues, folk, country and soul. These founding American musics still irrigate it.