At 17, Chan Marshall—known by her pseudonym, Cat Power—was a bona fide tomboy. It was a time marked by the struggle to find her identity. Coming from a home where alcohol and drugs were often around, by high school she was also drinking, smoking, and experimenting with LSD. At the time, Bob Dylan’s “To Ramona” somehow made everything feel a little better.
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But it grieves my heart, love / To see you tryin’ to be a part of / A world that just don’t exist / It’s all just a dream, babe / A vacuum, a scheme, babe, Dylan sings on his folk waltz from 1964.
“I was so aware of being a female growing up because I was a tomboy, and I was always made to feel like a female,” Marshall says. “When I heard ‘To Ramona’ the first time … I still have the same feeling when I play it. I feel grateful and thankful that a man wrote a song so protective and respectful of a woman, and caring for a woman.”
A year after releasing “To Ramona” on the album Another Side of Bob Dylan, the Bard took on a musical transformation that would cause controversy then, and would greatly impact a young Marshall many years later. To the dismay of folk purists, Dylan “plugged in,” playing an electric guitar for the first time live—with The Paul Butterfield Blues Band backing him up—at the Newport Folk Festival. He was met with boos, and only made it through five songs, three of which were plugged in.
Marshall has long been in awe of Dylan’s artistic arc, so she knows all about his musical journey from the acoustic to the electric. She was already aware of him by the age of five, in fact, when she first started getting glimpses into his music from her parents playing classic rock radio. Marshall later discovered his legendary “Royal Albert Hall” performance, which was featured in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 film Don’t Look Back. The film documented Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, along with his extended “electric” world tour in ’66 that included a concert supposedly held at the Royal Albert Hall. Marshall says the film “transported” her to a place of “poetry and the absurd.”
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Furthering the absurdity surrounding this concert was the fact that it actually took place at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, on May 17, 1966. Bootlegs of the concert were erroneously labeled as having taken place at Royal Albert Hall.
In November of 2022, Cat Power recreated the momentous event—this time at the actual Royal Albert Hall—for the album Cat Power Sings Dylan. She performed Dylan’s 15-song set just as he did nearly 60 years earlier.
Through the first half of the set, Marshall was faithful to Dylan’s original treatment by keeping it acoustic through “Mr. Tambourine Man”; then she settled into the electric second half that opened with “Tell Me, Momma.” During the original concert, before Dylan went into his penultimate “Ballad of a Thin Man,” an audience member infamously yelled out “Judas!” (he who betrayed Jesus), to which Dylan responded, “I don’t believe you … You’re a liar.”
Marshall never expected anyone to mimic that exact moment at her show, but a crowd member indeed yelled “Judas!” prior to Marshall’s hypnotic take on the Highway 61 Revisited song. Her simple retort was to counter with, “Jesus!” As she was quoted in a press release for the album, Marshall’s impulse at that moment was to set the record straight. “In a way, Dylan is a deity to all of us who write songs.”
During her Royal Albert Hall recreation, Marshall was flooded by memories of how each song had impacted and educated her throughout her life, right from the opening “She Belongs to Me,” which always felt more like a first-person narrative. But as she played it at her Royal Albert Hall performance, the track transitioned into something more reverent of Dylan’s original composition.
“I wanted this performance to be honorable and elegant and graceful—not ego, not rock and roll,” says Marshall. “I wanted it to be measured and respectful.”
“Mr. Tambourine Man” also felt different to Marshall this time around. “Standing there last year [in 2022] singing it, it sounded different coming from me, because as a child, it had this sort of Christmas fable feel of hope and inspiration,” she shares. “It sounds like a picture of a dream, a sound like hope, a sound like promise. Looking to the future, there’s promise, but when I sing it, I can’t help but get incredibly sad, because I still have the hope, but there’s sadness.”
She adds, “It feels like singing against the world that’s going on at this very moment, like, ‘Didn’t you guys hear that song? We let the world down. We didn’t do a very good job of standing up for what we should have all these years.’ It takes on a very scarred feeling.”
Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm,” a missive of gratefulness in unfortunate times from Blood on the Tracks,is another song Marshall says takes her “out of her head.” It’s a song she connected to even more in 2012 after being diagnosed with hereditary angioedema, an immune disorder that causes swelling of the throat and face.
“When I had a health scare, the autoimmune situation I didn’t realize that I was born with, I started playing that song,” shares Marshall. “I think it’s about Jesus being hunted like a crocodile, and it’s about Mary Magdalene in my projection of the song. I don’t have to worry. I’m safe in my lifestyle. As an adult, I can do better, so I get out of myself, and I listen to that song before I play.”
[RELATED: Cat Power Revives Bob Dylan’s Pivotal 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert]
Starting with her earliest introductions to music—listening to her parents’ vinyl and singing old-timey songs with her grandmother—artists like Dylan became integrated into her life.
“Because I was so young, as strange as it sounds, all the records that I was listening to as a kid, they almost felt like family members,” says Marshall. “When you grow up with them so young, they become well-formed identities. Before I started getting into punk rock and college radio, growing up, it was always the greats—Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, Hank Williams, The Rolling Stones, and all of that. My peer group had a similar relationship to the piles of records that their parents had, and [they had] a similar relationship to Bob.”
Through his lyrics, Dylan became a pseudo-life coach to Marshall. “Bob may have also had something to do with teaching us critical thinking through his lyrics,” she says. “It’s an interesting idea, and he might not have been aware that he was doing it, but who would have thought that a whole second generation of human beings would know all of his songs just like the first generation?”
Marshall’s own catalog stretches nearly three decades, and is informed by everything that has colored her life. Her lower-fi 1995 debut, Dear Sir, and its follow-up, Myra Lee, (named after her mother) were both recorded in 1994 shortly after she relocated from her home state of Georgia to New York City. Her more recent collections of original songs, including Sun from 2012 and Wanderer from 2018—have provided a steady stream of stories. Many of the songs are set in ambiguity and rely on her own brew of black humor that penetrates a multitude of human conditions. This has led some to dub her the “queen of sadcore,” a moniker that barely scratches the surface of her storytelling prowess.
“It’s a stream of consciousness,” says Marshall of writing. “It feels like an itch you can’t scratch. I have to leave the party, leave the restaurant. I have to go to an instrument—whether it’s backstage, at my hotel room, in my house, or a hotel lobby—and I have to either play the guitar or the piano and just get a continuation of the vibe that’s running through me, whatever it is, subconsciously. My subconscious is breaking through to my conscious.”
Literature is also something Marshall would like to try her hand at more, but it’s difficult to find the time as a single mother. Marshall gave birth to her son in 2015 when she was 43. She has also revealed that she is newly sober, having given up alcohol nearly seven months prior; she reported that she was 205 days sober at the time of our interview. Marshall says it’s hard to capture stories as they come to her without a laptop or other typing device in tow, but she’s still determined to write a book one of these days.
“I used to [write] when I was younger because I loved it,” shares Marshall. ‘There’s just so much that I need to take care of in the house or while on tour, all the different pieces. As a single mom, there’s always that drawer of socks. There’s always that laundry. There’s basketball, karate, and so many elements flying around all the time.”
Along with her recent homage to Dylan, Marshall has inserted cover songs throughout her catalog since the early 2000s. In between collections of her own original material, she’s released three covers albums, beginning with The Covers Record in 2000, which features Dylan’s “Paths of Victory.” Then came Jukebox in 2008, which includes the Bard’s “I Believe in You” from his Slow Train Coming record. She also released Covers in 2022, on which she takes a breather from including any Dylan.
Following her recent live homage to Dylan, Marshall has recorded five songs for a new album. “Get your tissues,” she jokes, hinting at more somber and contemplative subject matter to come.
And Marshall has recorded another song as well that links to two more legends. Her rendition of John Lennon’s brooding 1970 acoustic ballad “Working Class Hero” is a duet with Iggy Pop that’s featured on The Faithful: A Tribute to Marianne Faithfull. The song is one Faithfull first covered on her 1979 album Broken English.
“I don’t know if it’s because I’m Aquarius or the way I grew up or where I grew up, but I’ve always had this thread of speaking for those who don’t have a voice on Earth, the underserved,” shares Marshall. “So my songs always have a sort of identity with some sort of struggle inside myself or being a witness of the world and [having] an awareness of the world around me.”
Speaking of the melancholy within some of her new songs, Marshall says, “Clearly it’s coming from the feelings of being left, feeling powerless, and watching similar archetypes continue to flourish and thrive in the face of real horror, and heartbreak. There’s this [sad] theme that’s always in my songs, but [then there’s] another thing that pops up that’s triumphant and makes the picture nicer to look at by offering grace in present time to these horrible moments in time, these reflections, sort of like mantras.”
Marshall’s 2024 tour schedule includes a performance of the “Royal Albert Hall” Dylan concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City. She is still in awe of the musical seeds Dylan continues to plant in her life.
“I love him. He’s the greatest in my lifetime. He’s amazing. It’s all about him. It’s always been about his work.”
PHOTO BY INEZ & VINOODH
