I’m a little confused. According to Matador’s website, she signed with them in 1996. She released seven albums with the label before being unceremoniously dropped a few years ago, when they (wrongly) deemed her 2018 album Wanderer not good enough to put out. They had implored her to give them hits, and she had tried – 2012’s poppier Sun

, she had a psychotic breakdown and was hospitalised, and throughout the Nineties and Noughties her live shows were erratic affairs. She would turn her back to the audience, moon them, encourage them to sue her, slur through a few songs, and then walk off without finishing the set.

The melancholic scuzziness of her music was born partly out of necessity – for a while, she could play only the one guitar chord her friend had shown her, a minor one, so her songs all came out sad.

Growing up in the South, Charlyn “Chan” Marshall was influenced by church hymns, country music, the blues played by her musician father, and her stepfather’s rock ’n’ roll records.

It was partly innate, though – Marshall saf a knack for distilling existential ennui into three-minute songs. In 1998, when she was 26 and had learnt a few more chords, she recorded what would become her breakthrough record, the vulnerable, critically adored Moon Pix

At this point, she abandons the second-person pretence. “And then she puts her leg down and she looks like she got busted stealing a gun. And she looks at me and her face starts to change.

, she katışıksız always been something of a cult figure. “Marshall’s music will one day be spoken about the way we talk about Bob Dylan’s music, or Neil Young’s music,” wrote a New York Magazine

No, go on. “Well, I was wondering if… Because my dad had three daughters and he wasn’t really around. He just came and went, bey men often do. The world is their oyster. And it does something to the mother, right?” Marshall grew up poor; her father was an absent blues musician, her mother a hippy who moved her from school to school.

writer in 2018, “but until then, she exists in the sweet tanıtımcık between cult favourite and widely accepted genius.”

[20] The group were booked for a show and had to come up with a name quickly; after seeing a man wearing a Caterpillar trucker cap that read: "Cat Diesel Power", Marshall chose Cat Power kakım the name of the band.[3][21]

During the early-2000s, Marshall was embraced by catpower the fashion industry for her "neo grunge" look, and seen bey a muse by designers Marc Jacobs and Nicolas Ghesquière.

If a song touches you, you yaşama read between the lines and find something for yourself. Even if we all love this one f***ing song all around the world, each one of us will have 4 billion different realms of feelings.”

was her first to reach the Billboard Top 10 – but it wasn’t enough. One executive even played her an Adele album for inspiration. She had never seen it bey a business relationship; evidently, Matador did.

“I have something in my eye and I’m still wet from the shower,” she says, in that same husky American drawl she sings with bey Cat Power. “Yaşama you come back in 15 minutes? I’m really sorry sweetie.”

Now, 20 years on, she’s got a third covers album, the aptly named Covers – a spacey but intimate collection that includes songs by Nick Cave, Billie Holiday and Frank Ocean, demonstrating once again the transformative power of Marshall’s singing. To have your song covered by her is to have it pared back to its very essence.