I left Cat Power’s “‘The Greatest’ 20th Anniversary” show feeling like a glitter laden tween after “The Eras Tour.” The two shows did not overlap in gemstone body suits, but rather in the grand vocal and genre breadth of a renowned musician rejuvenating the work that made her famous.
“ That song,” said Cat Power’s Chan Marshall about the track “The Greatest” to the magazine Exclaim!, “is about hopelessness and death, a spiritual fuse that got put out.” Standing on the other end of her sorrow, in the rosy vacancy of the First Avenue stage in Minneapolis, the 54-year-old indie rock, soul and pop mastermind rewrote her youthful record. “I get to have that free will, because it’s my f—ing song. I can change … and [I can feel] the power and the hopefulness that’s in the song now,” said Marshall. “That’s the good thing about doing this tour, [it’s] narrating it from who I am today.”
At a half hour past eight, the silhouette of a cool aunt with a crisp bob climbed onto stage, followed by her band that comprised your Einstein-haired German professor on bass, every punk frontman with a black spikey updo on keys, a slightly out of place guitarist in proper band attire and someone’s dad on drums. The crowd, made up of everybody else’s dads, broke into applause as Marshall introduced her show with a classic formality unfamiliar to the disco-speckled space. According to Marshall, we can and should be late.
“It’s your life, take your f—ing time,” she said, before cracking open the egg of her record, “The Greatest,” with mournful keys. In keeping with her motives for the tour, Marshall stretched and folded her southern drawl over her band like golden taffy, such that it was impossible for even an expert fan to sing along. Instead, our bodies swayed silently over the chessboard floor. The conductor of the room was Marshall. When it was time to switch genres to the soulful yet buoyant “Living Proof,” or to the crunchy rock of “Love and Communication,” we followed her lead. If she wanted us to clap along to her elastic cover of Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” we clapped our hands.
Not that we knew what to expect — the rather sleepy rhythm of “The Moon” was glossed over in synths and autotune. Where the recorded track fades out in its repetitious riff, Marshall’s band erupted into an affirmational outro as large as the dime in the sky itself. Her improvisation strung into a series of compliments, the brightest being “you are the moon.” Bending the autotune to fit her silver song, even the robotic tone could not control Marshall’s musical autonomy.
It was this morphing of Marshall’s 2006 record that taught us her methodology: the sonic remolding of the familiar is necessary and natural in a world content with locking us in routine.
“They hate us anyway,” Marshall said at the end of the night. “Stand up to the man.”
And if pop music represented “the man,” she did just that. Her reconstruction of “Manhattan” broke out of its frame by dipping into the tradition of jazz poetry, a subgenre created by Langston Hughes and most present in performances of his 1961 anthology “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz.”
“Manhattan” is, in its recorded form, a subtle Friday night getting ready tune. It is a protest anthem wearing the pants of a pop song. Though the 2012 track could not be farther from jazz, Marshall’s technique of lyrical improvisation hinted undeniably at Hughes’ subgenre; she threw in lines such as “big strong man,” and the clarification “white man.” Flexing her biceps, backlit in blue, she shifted from singing to speaking in a deep, authoritarian tone. Perhaps the pinnacle of the night was Marshall’s rendition of “Manhattan,” layered with political complexity. By the time she reached the track’s signature line, “free speech, lipstick and the moonlight,” I felt like a fool for several years of taking the song at surface level.
At the start of the night, Marshall sincerely thanked Minneapolis for standing up at the heart of the nation’s immigration conflicts. In a final act of gratitude and mourning, she coupled her sweeping cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” sung for the first time since recording, with a silky performance of Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Over 30 years into her career, Marshall knows how to bend her crowd’s expectations. What was promoted as a record anniversary tour was in fact a multi-genre salute to the musicians and writers who guided her and spoke for a nation in need.
