Review | Rechanneling an Old Cat Power, Recharged

It was 20 years ago today-ish that the artist known as Cat Power (born Chan Marshall in Atlanta in 1972) released-unleashed the masterful album The Greatest. It is a ripe moment to bring it back to life, in a live way, and Marshall’s current such tour swung by one of the area’s most desirable mid-size venues, the Libbey Bowl in Ojai, last week.

To say that this Cat Power show was the best of the five of hers I’ve witnessed over many years might seem like faint praise or a backward compliment. The bulk of her current tour, after all, consists of 20-year-old music. But in that special outdoor space, not only did she ignite and bring back to life the intrinsic heat, mystique, and strange oblique soulfulness of that music, but she also effectively reminded us just how timeless and unique her vision and voice as a “pop” musician really is.

In a 2003 New Yorker profile, Hilton Als described her persona as “…a Southern belle in bluejeans, a trashed Faulkner heroine whose arias of disillusionment, hope, fantasy, bitterness, and understanding are played out in 4/4 time and in a distinctly American syntax.” In the subsequent stretch of years, her paradoxical charms remain, although the plot has thickened in various ways.

Contrasting the mercurial, dramatically dim-lit ambience of her last two shows at the Lobero Theatre — her juicy Bob Dylan tribute in 2024 and a tour covering Covers in 2022 — she was fairly true to showbiz standards as we know them. But her mystique was intact: Although she sported her new short, windswept blonde coif and spent time in an actual center spotlight onstage, she also drifted on either of the spotlight, as if more comfortable in her chosen domain, in the shadows. At one point, while busy fanning herself, she sidled into semi-jokester mode, explaining, “Somebody stole my air conditioner. I got this amazing little fan in Japan.”

The Greatest may or may not be the greatest album in Marshall’s discography — a lofty spot usually reserved for either that one or 1998’s leaner-meaner Moonpix. Stylistically, The Greatest squirms around in American-rooted genres of soul, country, and blues, and it enjoys the benefit of having been recorded in Memphis by a musician team including HI Records players who worked in Al Green’s band. Live last week, her gifted gathered crew joined the leader in the respectful art of faithfully recreating what’s heard on the classic source.

As she told the Ojai crowd, well-stocked with true-blue Cat Power fans, the album “is not about being the greatest, but just getting better.” The title track opens the album and opened the Libbey Bowl show, with her wending around the languid groove, suggesting her modest ambitions on the chorus: “Once I wanted to be the greatest / Two fists of solid rock / With brains that could explain any feeling.”

Twenty years later, it can be said that through her strange and winding career, Marshall has created music which explains a forest of feelings, in ambiguous but detectable terms. Cliches and big statements are not her thing: surfing poetic fringes are.

On the song set, Marshall also digs into, and floats around, a ballad vibe in her own special way, on the lazy and loping world weary “Lived in Bars,” and “Where Is My Love” — with its piano student-y arpeggios playing alongside her pared-down lyric asking the musical question: “Where is my love? Horses running free / Carrying you and me.” 

Toward set’s end, the spare lament “Hate Me” kicked into a finale, “Love and Communication,” a climax with touches of the old Cat Power “sadcore” atmosphere, but with rockier voltage attached. On the song, one of her signature wandering, traipsing lyrical walkabouts drifts over an obsessive four-chord pattern.

Clearly, The Greatest — revitalized before our eyes, ears, and souls — was the main attraction of the evening, but wait, there was more. A psychedelic instrumental jam served as a palette cleanser and chance to give the singer a break, followed by a mini-set climaxing with a personalized spin on James Brown’s “Try Me” and the eeriest take on “I’ll Be Seeing You” you’ve ever heard, as a finale. 

Over a minimal instrumental backdrop, allowing us to check out Ojai’s famous cricket chorus (made famous during the Ojai Music Festival concerts), Marshall slowly shifted from the man-like bottom of her range to higher, fragile tonal quarters. It was paradoxical to hear her sing “I’ll be seeing you / In all the old familiar places / That this heart of mine embraces / All day through.” She visits covers and revisits her own vintage material — the “old familiar places” — in a renewably unfamiliar, Cat Power–ed way.