Cat Power’s Chan Marshall has taken on the task of radically reinventing other people’s songs before, with 2000’s The Covers Record. But the fact that this isn’t her first go-round doesn’t make the new Jukebox any less affecting.
As a stylist, Marshall’s calling card is to strip songs down to their skeletons and dress each one with her trademark dichotomy, butting a sense of evocative soulfulness against a nerve-wracked timidity, like a lion afraid of its own roar.
Indeed, Marshall roars on Jukebox, at least figuratively. Her interpretations of songs by greats like Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, James Brown, and Frank Sinatra come off wholly distinct from the originals and from past Cat Power releases, though they’re undoubtedly Cat Power-ed.
Jukebox works because Marshall finds the emotional center in a song and builds her own aesthetic around it. It was the honesty and lack of pretense in Hank Williams’ voice that made his delivery of any song tough to dismiss; on Jukebox’s “Ramblin’ (Wo)man,” Marshall repackages Hank’s “Ramblin’ Man” as a slinky soul confessional, her voice winding with elasticity, never with showy exaggeration.
Marshall’s dirge-y “Don’t Explain” is a different brand from Billie Holiday’s, but the caverns of emotion between the words compare. Marshall, too, manages to hold a voice that’s smoky and sultry but steeped convincingly in ache. Maybe you wouldn’t kneejerk-associate the two artists, but this track makes a particularly good argument that Holiday and Marshall are both possessed of the ability to make the difficult emotions in someone else’s words gut-grippingly real.
But Marshall finds a new core on Jukebox at turns too, and it lands just as squarely. Where Sinatra bellowed with a cocksure croon, Marshall’s voice shivers and breaks on Jukebox’s “New York,” feeling more like she’s trying to convince herself that she can conjure the strength to conquer the big city. Meanwhile, her delivery of Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” billows with a pulsing organ drone and tumbling piano notes. “I love you,” Marshall sings, her voice rising, falling, and rising again.
The album is most poignant, though, when Marshall reinvents herself. On “Metal Heart,” originally on her 1998 Moon Pix album, the singer takes her own folky tenderness and reworks it for Jukebox, building the song into a fierce and tense tangle of bluesy, soulful energy. It’s starkly different and similarly gorgeous, but more key, it shows that she’s even able to reinterpret and inhabit something as close as her own ideas.