By way of introduction, the Atlanta-born singer-songwriter Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, tells me that she’s sober. I tell her that I should think so, too, at 10 o’clock on a Tuesday morning, but Marshall is announcing her sobriety as a new way of life, not a temporary condition. “Ever since I started playing live aged 18 I would never not drink,” she goes on.
“It became so habitual because everybody around me was doing it, but they went back to their normal lives at some point and I would be carrying on because I was always on the road. It’s been a wake-up call.”
In February of this year, Marshall’s record company, Matador, cancelled her forthcoming world tour. “My life had become a scattered mess,” she says. “I didn’t realise what all these years of living out of a suitcase had done to me physically, emotionally and psychologically, and I was too ill to do the tour. But I would have continued until I blew my brains out, jumped out of a window or became a drug addict because I was trying to hang on to what I had been doing for the last ten years.”
We’re at the Mercer, a fashionable hotel in downtown Manhattan. With her large sunglasses, skinny jeans and newly skinny body Marshall fits in well — Karl Lagerfeld saw her arriving the day before and has been enquiring after her — but her appearance hides a wayward, troubled soul.
Since 1995 Marshall has made albums of beautiful songs filled with tender melancholy and performed concerts that have been frustratingly chaotic: chronic stage fright and alcoholic confusion have resulted in her stopping songs halfway, forgetting her own lyrics, and, in one notorious New York show, lying face down on the stage and refusing to get up.
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Something had to change, particularly as Cat Power’s new album The Greatest, recorded in Memphis last year with the city’s top session musicians, including Al Green’s guitarist and songwriter Teenie Hodges, is the best of her career.
If Marshall was going to do justice to The Greatest and the musicians that played on it, she needed to get her act together. The following day I would be travelling to Boston to see Cat Power in concert with the Memphis Rhythm Band to find out for myself if she has or not.
The Greatest began in April 2005 in London, when Marshall was having lunch with the boss of her record company. “He says to me, ‘We’ve been waiting on your new record for years and we need to get on with it. Give me an ideal situation.’ So to shut him up I say, ‘Al Green’s band,’ and went back to eating my dim sum. I didn’t think for a moment it would really happen — those guys are old enough to be my dad. Before the meal is over he says, ‘We can do the record at Ardent Studios in Memphis with Al Green’s band’.” We step outside the Mercer for a cigarette, where Marshall lets out a screeching wolf-whistle as the Hollywood actor Josh Hartnett walks by. (He ignores it.) “It was intimidating,” says Marshall about going to Memphis. “I get nervous playing in front of my grandmother because I don’t know chords, I don’t know notes, I don’t know anything apart from the way my songs sound. But Teenie sat me down in front of the others and told me to play the songs, and they worked it out from there.”
Somehow it worked remarkably well. The album was completed in three days, with most of the tracks recorded live in a single take. The songs on The Greatest are quietly intimate, but with a groove and slickness that Cat Power has never had before. The subjects of the songs are culled from episodes in Marshall’s wayward life: Lived in Bars is about spending afternoons after school in bars at the behest of her hippy mother. “Me and my sister would sit in men’s laps and get quarters and give it to my mum and that’s how we lived.”
Willie is about a love affair between an elderly black man and a white woman in Florida whom Marshall met by chance.
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“All the people in my songs are real,” she says. “I have a feeling and a memory and the song comes from that. It’s like a closed bud, or an embryo of a wish, and hope and forgiveness enter into it too. Whatever all those words make up, that’s what it is.”
There has been no shortage of drama and tragedy to fuel her inspiration. A chaotic childhood led to a rebellious adolescence in Atlanta’s drug-drenched music scene. “I would have been dead a long time ago if I hadn’t got out and done something, whether it was playing guitar or painting a picture,” she says. “I always thought I would not make it to 21, and I suffered a lot of my close friends dying from Aids, drug overdoses and accidental deaths.”
I meet Teenie Hodges in Boston the following day, and as you might expect from a man who has worked with everyone from Ike Turner to Little Richard, he is not fazed by her eccentricities. “I like her, she’s a beautiful woman,” says the cadaverous Hodges, who seems to be creaking under the weight of a mass of gold chains. “She don’t even know what an A chord is but there’s a lot of people like that and it don’t mean that they’re not good. She’s a great singer and her lyrics remind me of something Bob Dylan would write.”
That night Cat Power’s shift into a new gear is confirmed. Despite a raging storm that made two members of the 12-piece band miss their flights and hence the sound check, the concert bears no relation to the chaos of the Cat Power of old. The band give an ultra-tight Southern soul backing, while Marshall never misses a cue and even manages to throw some angular dance moves when she’s not singing.
The contradictions in her character that make her songs so special — an extremely shy woman who also happens to be in desperate need of attention — are finally making her performances work, too, and it’s a wonderful thing to witness. I’m reminded of something she said the day before, when I asked her what the reward was for what she did: “Self-respect. The key to life is doing something that gives you a bearing, whether that’s going jogging every morning or buying expensive sherry. For me, music is the bearing.”
Cat Power and the Memphis Rhythm Band is at the Barbican, EC2 (020-7638 8891), on June 21. The Greatest is out now on Matador.