Chan Marshall on discovering new music, motherhood and getting ‘jacked up on free jazz’

By Brian Braiker

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You can prepare all you want for an interview with Chan Marshall, but an interview with Chan Marshall is going to more or less where Chan Marshall wants it to go. Which, to be fair, is usually better than anywhere you could have gotten it on your own. Marshall is a natural born storyteller, a fact that shines through in her music and in her tangents—which are sometimes even one in the same.

Marshall, of course, performs as Cat Power, sometimes a solo act and sometimes a band, but always filtered through her own personal and unique prism. When asked where Chan Marshall ends and Cat Power begins, she tells me: “I guess that’s my restaurant. I’m serving you some vegan options, some fresh fish options.”

The restaurant metaphor isn’t too far-fetched, actually. Marshall loves to cook (she prepares lunch for her son, who makes a brief cameo on the podcast, during the interview). She also paints, writes poetry and dabbles in photography. So I ask her: What does she consider herself?

“It took me so many years to say this, but I just say I’m an artist,” she says. “It took me many many years to understand that hey, man, that’s what I am.”

Marshall’s newest album—her 11th and third collection of cover songs called, simply, “Covers”—takes a similarly polymathic approach to covering an almost audaciously eclectic group of songs. It’s something that we have come to expect from her by now but still retains an element of surprise. The songs she reimagines come from a list of musicians that ranges from Billie Holiday to Frank Ocean to Rihanna to Bob Seger to Iggy Pop.

Marshall, who performs April 18 at Brooklyn Steel, is this week’s guest on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.”

I asked her how deliberate she is about the songs she chooses to cover and whether there is some design behind releasing an entire album of cover tunes every few years. “It’s almost like blowing off steam of all the other stuff that’s rumbling around in my head as far as how much music I love,” she says.

And yet, for as omnivorous her tastes seem to be, she professes not to seek out new music. “I have to get shown modern music a lot of times,” she says on the podcast. “I just don’t gravitate to it. Hearing Frank Ocean, that record, there are some things I hear I just get floored.”

In a wide-ranging conversation, we touch on her chaotic childhood in Atlanta, growing up around music and her relationship to it now. “When I started discovering punk rock and hardcore and jazz right around the same age, 12, that’s when I started not searching but really quickly being able to identify if this spoke to me or not,” she says.

It was after moving to New York in the early 1990s that her friend and collaborator (and frequent peer-pressurer) Glen Thrasher introduced her to free jazz. It clicked. “I was jacked up on free jazz,” she says. ”It was beautiful. It taught me that there are no rules, it taught me that a woman can do the same thing. It’s not about how you look, it’s not about your body it’s not about rock and roll.”

Not that Marhsall is a free jazz artist. She is a singer-songwriter who deftly combines rock, folk, punk and soul to create gems that sparkle through toughness.

We also talk about motherhood, stalkers, how she’s spent the pandemic, and loss: Her grandmother, who raised her through the earliest years of her life, passed away just before Covid hit. And her haunting rendition of Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” is a tribute to her late friend and collaborator Philippe Zdar.

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.