- Gretchen Robinette
I’ve begun earnestly considering myself addicted to Chan Marshall’s voice: I’ve listened (without exaggeration) every day (without fail) since the first time I heard it in 2005. On November 14, 2013, at her solo show as Cat Power at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, I got a heavy dose of it; the next morning felt worse than a hangover after a cocaine binge: sullen, listless, lackluster, depleted. For another fix, I wanted to drive to New Haven, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Englewood, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to see every remaining show of the first part of this tour. Three weeks later, I still feel withdrawal symptoms.
Her voice is addicting for its tranquilizing effect—like numb calm in the nervous system after taking a stimulant—and its simultaneously visceral impact: resonance so powerful that it feels like a blow to the body.
November 14: Nico Turner’s haunting opening set (ghostly vocals crooning under moody electric guitar; the synesthesia between chord and color so vivid it brought to my mind psychedelic shades of blue, green, red, yellow, as delirious and spontaneous as Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes paintings)—her demeanor of cool confidence and shy modesty—was a seamlessly fitting counterpart to Cat Power’s mystique. She played until the stick of incense stuck in her guitar-strings extinguished, settling the space, cleansing the atmosphere.
- Gretchen Robinette
- Nico Turner
Chan back-stepped onstage for the first of two sets. Even after adjusting to the lights and sound system, she didn’t overcome her nervous edge: she shook her head back and forth, cringed, and apologized for some error that only she could hear. Yet whenever her voice did actually falter, she’d follow the false note to its most melodic conclusion, reversing each flaw into an idiosyncratic victory. Like in a Basquiat painting: errant brushstrokes, cross-outs, erasures, footprints, lists and manic scribbles are essential to its composition, its authenticity—its accidental and intentional perfection and imperfection.
Maybe Chan doesn’t realize that her fallibility is endearing. It suggests a mutual fragility, and tendency toward expressivity over complete accuracy, “the feeling,” as Jorie Graham calls it, “of being capable because an error.” The error evokes the ultimate pathos; she always seems to sing on the verge of weeping.
Roland Barthes—attempting “the impossible account of an individual thrill” he derived from listening to certain singers—wrote, “It is this displacement I want to outline… the encounter between a language and a voice,” which produced a quality he called “the grain of the voice”: “The grain is the body in the voice as it sings.”
The grain—displacement of corporeality to incorporeality—is autobiography communicated not in words but (more intangibly) in timbre. Its complexity and contradiction deepens simplicity into sublimity, and elevates sentimentality above melodrama. The grain of Chan’s voice tells the story of one who’s endured great pain yet remains optimistic, who’s crossed smoldering coals to guide me through a maze. Even singing on the verge of weeping, she seems equally likely to break into laughter.