She is Cat Power, otherwise known as Chan Marshall (pronounced Shaun). Honestly, I don’t know too much about her, except that she’s got an amazing voice and makes very cool music. She came into the Indie & Lo-Fi scene in 1996, releasing both Myra Lee and What Would the Community Think that year. She’s worked with members of Sonic Youth and Two Dollar Guitar, and Eddie Vedder of Peal Jam contributes to this record, You Are Free. She dropped out of high school and still managed to have a successful career and create beautiful music. No, it’s not ironic, just an interesting fact (ahem, parents!).
 
The noise she makes varies intensely. It’s a bit Indie, it’s a bit folk, it’s a bit alternative. This album thrives in the simplicity of itself. Sparse guitars, violins and piano pieces seem to float through the songs as her voice layers on top of the music. Songs like “Speak For Me” and “Fool” use several vocal tracks, displaying her deep and wholesome voice underneath a layer of lighter vocals. It almost sounds like two different singers – she definitely knows how to harmonize. It's one thing to write a set of vocals, but another to write a second set of vocals that works beautifully with the first layer and also independently.
 
I first heard her after I’d checked out Liz Phair on RealRhapsody. Next to Liz was a list of her contemporaries and Cat Power was one of them, not to say that she's anything like Liz Phair. I’m not sure what song I heard first, but once I heard that incredible voice and those cool guitar tracks I was instantly hooked. She’s obviously on the opposite end from Auf der Maur, the artist I featured earlier, but that’s why I like her. Sometimes loud music is just too noisy. But because Cat Power is quieter, it doesn’t mean that she’s easier to listen to. It’s a different kind of soft. Someone like my younger sister would say that Cat Power is “boring”, but take the time to listen and you’ll see there’s a lot of beauty, creativity and lyrical density there. She doesn't need power chords to make her point.
 
She’s captured me in the way she moves from a deep ballad-type song like “Good Woman” to “He War”, a song you’ll be tapping both hands on the steering wheel to. It's rock at it’s purest. Take Bob Dylan or Cat Stevens or Joni Mitchell and put them in the mid-nineties in the body of an indie rocker. No restrictions here. She just goes with the music. She has no need to change the music with every verse or chorus. There is no emphasis on forcing a particular chorus line on you. The whole song is important and that’s what you should listen to. You don’t want her to change the chorus music in a song like “Shaking Paper” because the music is just cool to begin with.
 
What makes her so important is her delivery. I sometimes feel that musicians who make loud and very heavy rock all the time are just too insecure to strip down and let the real emotions flow through the music. There are no reservations here. Like Dylan, her vocals are sometimes so mumbled that you can’t understand them, but the lyrics that you do hear stand out. You know she’s saying something important. She wouldn’t be singing against one sparse acoustic guitar like she does in “Babydoll”, or an electric guitar in “Keep On Runnin”, or a piano in “Names” if she didn’t hold her lyrics to a higher importance. There is a great sense of a 1960’s songwriter in her.
 
She’s worth your ears because you’ve probably never heard of her before. But she’s crucial to the Indie rock scene. You’ve got your PJ and you’ve got your Liz (before her pop make-over), but Cat Power is Indie that doesn’t need dirty guitars to make it Indie. She just makes beautiful music. Period.
 
She gets bonus points for the title of the album. I get the feeling that she’s not so convinced that you are completely free. The lyrics to “Maybe Not” read like a poetic version of an inspirational self-help book. And yet the song is titled “Maybe Not”. Hum. Think she’s trying to tell us something?

Of course she is, it’s why she makes music.