Outside

Cat Power: I associate Chan Marshall with a gift, a giving. She takes songs, very familiar songs by The Rolling Stones, Procol Harum and then strips them of their familiarity. No longer, then, is ‘Satisfaction’ part of the unfolding of the Rolling Stones’ career; no longer is it part of that endlessly rehearsed story about the ‘glimmer twins’, about heroin and Marianne Faithful. Chan Marshall has disclosed what, in that song, join itself to an impersonal force.

Is it appropriate to observe an asceticism in her work? It becomes simpler, but not monotonous – do not think she reduces songs to the same mood. Nor is it a matter of imposing a style – her style – upon the songs she covers. Chan Marshall holds these songs, these too familiar songs, into the draft of the outside. They become no-one’s songs. And, in that moment, they are able to be touched, in the great fragility of her performance, as a spider’s web is touched by the wind. They bear what they could only bear if they were allowed to become as thin and as delicate as the strands of a web.

I hardly dare write of her own songs. No, I must stop here, out of discretion.