Wonder Woman.(Chan Marshall's 'Jukebox')(Sound recording review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 10-DEC-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The singer and songwriter Chan Marshall performs under an alias--Cat Power--with superhero connotations, but she sometimes struggles simply to get through a concert. She was born Charlyn Marie Marshall, in Georgia, and began appearing in clubs in Atlanta, in the late eighties, while she was still in her teens. I first saw her play in 1995, at a now defunct club called the Cooler, in New York's meatpacking district. She performed alone, seated, with a black-and-white Danelectro guitar. Light-brown bangs covered much of her face, and she slouched, wearily, as if she were entering the fourth hour of an interrogation. When she spoke, she sounded drunk and disoriented. Occasionally, her bangs would swing away from her face, revealing freckles, a heart-shaped mouth, and clear brown eyes. Her voice kept me from leaving; when she was audible, there was a palpable ache in her singing, as well as flashes of sharp, high tones. There were also uncomfortably generous silences.

Whatever else was going wrong, though, Marshall knew how to dramatize a song, alternating bursts of passion with unintelligible whispers. It's hard to know what to call the music that she was playing. She strummed her guitar tentatively, repeating a...

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