Early in 2003, I was chatting with a grad student I’d
gotten to know who happened to mention recently buying a bunch of new CDs. I asked her what she bought and she reeled
off a list of artists—none of whom I’d ever heard of before. It surprised me a bit, and depressed me a
bit, for some reason. I guess it had to
do with the feeling of being more out of touch than I liked to consider myself,
at the time. One of the artists she
mentioned was called Cat Power, and the album was You Are Free. A little later
I got the CD. I won’t say I fell in love
with it, but it certainly left a lasting impression; in fact, I would list it
as one of the key albums of that year.
Today’s song, “The Greatest,” is the title track from Cat
Power’s follow-up, released in 2006. I’ve
still never seen Chan Marshall, the singer/songwriter who “is” Cat Power,
perform live, and I’ve heard she’s rather unpredictable at best. But the tour in support of this record was a great
success, with her loose and lively, as seen in the video (from the Jools Holland show), and the musicianship on
the record and the tour, featuring veterans of “southern soul” billed as the
Memphis Rhythm Band, is high caliber, giving the record a glowing sound that’s
very easy to listen to, unlike the much starker and riveting arrangements of You Are Free.
Today Chan Marshall is 42, which comes as a shock to me as I
tend to think of artists I discovered around then as living in a perpetual
state of “under 40.” Well, someone’s got to be under 40, but it won’t be people
born in the Seventies for much longer. Which is a way of saying that this album, released days before Marshall
turned 34, is mature work. I would say the song from the album that was the song back in 2006 was the funkier “Living
Proof,” but for today I want the chastened, rain-washed sound of “The Greatest.” It’s opening solo piano would be at home on You Are Free, but then strings come in,
and those slipping drums, to say nothing of the background vocals piping “greatest,
greatest” like a bright echo.
The lyrics are rather elliptical but they do convey, in that
great opening line “once I wanted to be the greatest,” a sense, if not of
crushed hopes than at least of rueful awakening. “Then came the rush of the
flood / The stars at night turned deep to dust.” I get the sense that aiming to
be “the greatest” is one of those “beware, doll, you’re bound to fall”
moments. Then there’s lots of
imperatives—“melt me down, pin me in, leave no trace of grace just in your
honor.” The latter phrase suggests a bit
of score-settling, but it’s not at all clear what the emotional weight of the
lines are. I take it as a kind of challenge: Ok, I’m down, so take me lower,
really fuck me over, but “big black armor” and “culprit south” suggest a
struggle still ongoing.
The main idea I get is that, if not “the greatest,” the
singer will still rise above all this eventually. I say that because of the
lovely little musical phrase that backs the line “for the later parade” which leads
each time back to the opening strings. It’s a song that comes from a new sense
of, perhaps, a lost chance and what that means—not so much a shattering of
illusions as a coming to grips with what is—and finding the imperative to “secure
the grounds / for the later parade.”
For some reason that phrase has been sounding sotto voce in
the back of my mind, ever since I realized that I would post this month in
honor of Marshall’s birthday. It was the tag line that announced the mood of
the moment. That moment of the song and those firmly supportive strings
throughout. There’s nothing weepy about
the arrangement, for all that Marshall tends to swallow her words while the
expressive feel of the “lower me down” passage does indeed dip. Still, “with
brains to explain any feeling”—is that what it means to be “the greatest”? Maybe. Able to put something wordless into words.
I’m finding I’m not able to and that’s why I feel a bit
haunted by this very elusive song which becomes more slippery the more I hear
it. Finally, I realize, the interplay between the very expressive piano and the
way Marshall sounds vocal notes creates the tone, almost as if singing were
just a way of breathing. A rhythmic
cascade “for the lead and the dregs of my bed / I’ve been sleeping” is paused and
cleansed by “for the later parade,” with a sense of much riding on the latter for someone coming fully into her own.
No comments:
Post a Comment