Marshall was struck by the performance, and she acknowledges the band’s influence on her on her new album, Covers, which includes a rendition of the Replacements’ tune “Here Comes a Regular.”
“He just threw his guitar off his body and ran away after playing it,” she recalls in a recent phone interview. Cat Power performs at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 27, at House of Blues. “It impacted me so much. When I moved to New York, I had three favorite songs on the jukeboxes at the two bars I would go to — Sophie’s and Mona’s. I would play ‘You Don’t Know Me’ by Ray Charles and ‘Try Me’ by James Brown at Sophie’s. And then, I would walk to Mona’s and play ‘Here Comes a Regular’ as many times as I could if I had any change left. That song is so beautiful. It’s almost a ballad for the heartbroken and weary who have found alcohol to help them. It’s just crushing.”
Covers represents Marshall’s third album of cover songs and completes a trilogy (though Marshall says she’s not opposed to recording another album of cover tunes). The tracks started to come together during an organic jam session at Rob Schnapf’s Mant Sound Studio in L.A.
“I like to warm up before the session starts,” Marshall says. “While the band was warming up and I was setting up the mics with Rob to make sure everything sounded good and that we could do everything in week, I started composing. The band is really talented and open-minded and willing to let me guide them.”
At that first session, Marshall and Co. proceeded to play what would become the album’s first set of covers. They started out with a deconstructed rendition of Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” that features hushed vocals and fragments of piano and guitar.
“I had never played it before,” she says of the Seger tune. “I got the lyrics and said, ‘Fuck it.’ I got the lyrics and sang it, and we recorded the first take. It sounded great. I jumped back in and had nothing to sing and was reminded of Nick Cave’s ‘I Had a Dream Joe.’ Never in a thousand lifetimes would I have thought to cover that song, but we did. I again jumped in the vocal booth and didn’t know what to play and played ‘Endless Sea’ by Iggy Pop.”
Marshall also covers one of her own songs, “Unhate.” She says she regularly revisits an older song of hers when she’s assembling tracks for a covers album.
“I always do a new cover of one my songs because things change in my life,” she says. “I remember I was in Africa and was singing that song on tour. I thought I was sick. When I came back to America to continue my tour, I found out I was pregnant. When I started to sing that song again, I changed it right away. That song is specifically about suicide. When I got sober, that’s when I made a pact with myself to not hide anything and not be afraid to ask for help and do the therapy and all of that stuff. It helped me be a stronger human. That’s why I didn’t play that song for many years. Then, I started playing it again because I changed the words. Everyone gets the blues in a real bad way. It’s just to say, ‘Don’t ever try it.’”
The rendition of Nico’s ballad “These Days,” a song penned by Jackson Browne, is incredibly beautiful as Marshall’s echoing voice possesses a mercurial, Nico-like quality.
“I think the Velvet Underground in general was a huge influence on me,” she says. “They broke the mold with their sound. Nico broke the mold by becoming a female icon. She was so broken. That European classical way to singing that I wanna say is very Catholic is very influential. It’s that church-ingrained mentality. It’s like don’t speak and don’t have an identity — just conform. She brought such strength and grace and elegance and such sadness and darkness. We started playing it on the Wanderer tour. One night, Jackson [Browne] came to the show, and I played it for him, and he liked it and now plays it again when he’s on tour. I got to meet him, and he’s super cool.”
With a career that now stretches back 31 years, Marshall has somehow managed to survive in a world that doesn’t make it easy for independent artists. So what has been the key?
“Basically, it’s been my community,” says Marshall. “It was playing shows with these people and meeting them over and over through the years. Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney and Quasi. It’s a long list of different bands. That’s what kept me going. Lana del Rey asked me to go on tour with her when I was dropped from my record label. Being a part of the music community has kept me going. It’s that community, and the community that would come to these shows and offer places to sleep on their floors. I developed those friendships all around the world. In all these different places, I have friends who are not part of a clique. They’re not part of the scene. We fortified each other as a peer group. Maybe we weren’t so happening. These are painters and writers and different people I’ve met along the way. I think that’s what helped me survive.”
This article appears in Mar 9-22, 2022.
