Definitive Albums: Cat Power 'Moon Pix' (1998)

Chan Marshall thought she'd retired from music. In June of 1997, performing as Cat Power —as whom she'd already released three albums and toured Europe— in New York, the 25-year-old had a near nervous breakdown. Born in Atlanta and raised in various parts of the South, Marshall was untrained as a musician, pushed into performing by her friends (who were all in awe of her astonishing singing voices), and a sufferer of crippling stage-fright. That night in New York was one of her worst; Marshall could barely finish a song.

So, she packed her bags, and headed off, on somewhat of a whim, to Prosperity, South Carolina, with then-boyfriend Bill 'Smog' Callahan. Marshall had seen the name of the tiny, tiny town on a highway sign, and thought it fated, a sign, a beacon of Hope in a life that had started to seem bleak.

In reality: it was hard. Living in complete isolation, Marshall felt immediately restless. Seeing Callahan calmly write songs brought back painful memories. The relationship, which one felt freeing, was growing cloistered. The ghosts she was trying to run from —an itinerant childhood, a bad relationship with an egotistical actor, a harrowing trip to South Africa, a family history of schizophrenia— closed in around her.

One stormy night, with lightning flashing on the horizon and thunder rolling across the plains, Marshall awoke with a start. She picked up a guitar, and songs started coming to her —through her— in a stream, as if she was hearing auditory hallucinations. There were five of them; eerie, raw, and tortured. With new material to her name, Marshall was, in spirit, unretired. But she didn't really climb back on that horse until Callahan started to book his first-ever Australian tour.

The revelation hit Marshall in a flash, like a this-time-figurative lightning bolt: she'd make her record label, Matador, fly her to Australia, so she could escape the isolation. She was, she knew, running from South Carolina, but she was devoted enough to the idea that she accepted the pay-off from Matador: she'd have to make a new album whilst she was in Melbourne.

Marshall didn't have a whole album's worth of songs; she had, after all those months in the musical wilderness, only those that'd come to her that night. And, though she hoped her friends Mick Turner and Jim White from Australian instrumental maestros Dirty Three would be on hand to inspire her, after a few days recording, they had to leave on tour. So, Marshall would head into the studio with an only an assistant engineer on hand, and fumble out whatever came to her.

After it was finished, the album felt dislocated and incomplete to Marshall. She was sure Matador would hate it. Maybe, after trying retirement on her own, this record would be bad enough, Marshall thought, to force her into retirement. She couldn't have been more wrong.

The record turned out to be Moon Pix, the work that served as Cat Power's breakout, that still, to this day, is hailed as Marshall's greatest. As album, it's anchored by those five songs that came to her that one night: "You May Know Him," "He Turns Down", "Say", and two of Cat Power's best-known and must loved tunes: "Cross Bones Style" and "Metal Heart."

Each of these tunes has, fittingly, a haunted quality; a sense of a spectral other pressing in on them. Listening to them is to hear Marshall spooked by specters, reeling from painful memories, and torn apart by conflicts.

She may be indignant at meeting African children orphaned by the cut-throat diamond trade ("Cross Bones Style"), but she knows that the evil spirits that haunted her time in South Africa ultimately rendered her completely powerless ("Metal Heart," with is aching self-reprobation "how selfish of you to believe in the meaning of all the bad dreaming"). She may still feel the warmth of a childhood singing in choirs and believing in Christ ("You May Know Him"), but, now, Marshall knows the brutal truth of the matter ("He Turns Down," whose title unfolds to: "I'm not saved/He turned me down").

Around them, Marshall threw together assorted tracks: "Colors and the Kids" improvised on piano after a day at the beach, "Back of Your Head" taken from a Dutch Radio Session back in 1996, a take on the ramblin' traditional "Moonshiner" knocked out quickly with White and Turner. But, magically, everything hangs together perfectly; is bound by a sense of spirit, if not a state of mind.

The state of mind is, really, Marshall wondering if she's going out of hers. The conflicts therein are, when added up, symbolic of the split mind; of the fact that, as she'd previously confessed in a B-side that drew inspiration from both Michael Hurley and Sonic Youth, Schizophrenia had weighted her down.

Musically, things're anything if schizophrenic. Though there were elements here that marked a defiant step away from the spartan twang of prior Cat Power LPs —a looped Beastie Boys sample(!) on "American Flag," a fluttering flute on "He Turns Down," a cracking backbeat on "Cross Bones Style"— Moon Pix is the album that found Marshall refining her musical mode.

Throughout, Marshall plucks a skeletal, sorrowful take on the blues; the ache of her heart evoking the yoke of Southern burden, her spindly guitar-picking like a hollowed-out, wan, ghosted take on Americana. Before this, Marshall had been lumped with misplaced, burdensome comparisons to PJ Harvey and Liz Phair, but after Moon Pix, those fell away.

Never again would she be compared to anyone (songwriters would, in turn, soon be compared to her). This was Chan Marshall, this was how she sounded, this was who she was. Moon Pix was an album —still is an album— that lays a soul out for all to see. It's an album made by a songwriter exorcising a whole host of personal demons; a brave work authored by a young woman, for so long dogged by dreams and ghosts and anxiety, who no longer wanted to be held prisoner by fear.

Record Label: Matador
Release Date: September 22, 1998