After Cat Power (Christian name Charlyn “Chan” Marshall) released her ninth album in 2012, Sun, it seemed as though she was content to disappear for a while after achieving her most successful album chart position at number ten, her first to secure a slot in the coveted top ten on the Billboard 200. Favoring a more electronic tinge, Cat Power had proven once more that while able to evolve her sound with each new decade (at this point experiencing three different ones since the time Dear Sir was released in 1995), she could also maintain the integrity of her work’s skeleton, if you will. And that skeleton is very much present on Wanderer, her first record in five years.
Aware that her genius is at its best when the music and vocals are both sparse in such a way as to coalesce into a weighty entity as you listen, Cat Power keeps her sound as minimally produced as possible. Which is just as it should be as she reingratiates herself firmly back into our consciousness.
The Florence + the Machine-esque opener, “Wanderer,” manages to make the hairs on one’s arms (come on, you know you have them) bristle in the brief span of one minute, fourteen seconds, with Cat Power singing, “Oh, wanderer, I’ve been here wondering: if your brown eyes still have color, could I see?” Thus, she makes the thesis of the album pertain more to being the fixed point to someone else’s journey (yes, the logical assumption is a bloke). Like some sort of neo-Penelope to an even greater fuckboy Odysseus, Cat Power recognizes a like-minded wandering spirit in whoever this man is, the one that clearly got away. The baby she speaks of in the song in the poetic line, “Twist of fate would have me sing at your wedding/With a baby on my mind and your soul in between” seems to appear on the album cover–her own son, of course, who she gave birth to in 2015 (still unclear on who the father is on that one). The cover art, indeed, somehow feels like a loose homage to Nirvana’s Nevermind, released just as Cat Power was about to enter “the scene.”
Straying away from the subject of the self, as Americans can tend to get fixated on, Cat Power, like her recent comrade Lana Del Rey, can’t help but get political despite generally avoiding the prospect of a polemic in her work on “In Your Face.” Though, of course, it could be about “anyone, anyone” (as Lily Allen puts it in “Knock ‘Em Out”), the lyric, “You forbade yourself to think/See where you are as you begin to sink/In your mirror, in your mirror/In your mirror, in your face,” is all too tailor-made for a certain Orange One–who doesn’t even deserve such lovely Dorian Gray-inspired overtures. Sounding like it could have been plucked from the 60s, both sonically and in terms of class warfare content, Cat Power is at her most pained as she rues for the politician who “feel[s] so above the hunger on the streets/With your safe and your document in its place/Your money, your gun/Your conscience, sweet like honey.”
One of the most unusual songs on the album (in terms of cohesion) is “You Get,” which sustains a certain political motif with, “And on the street, they’re all talking ’bout the things you should listen to/And on the news, they’re always excusing.” But it isn’t about government affairs so much as time–its value and its ability to imbue much needed perspective, which is, of course, a subject Cat Power, as a forty-six-year-old woman in the music industry who has struggled with depression and alcohol abuse, knows something all too well about. So it is that she sagely assures, “And, no, there’s nothing like time to teach you where you have been/And there is nothing like time to give you things you can need.” Like, say, for example, the love and devotion of Lana Del Rey, who reached out to Marshall after having put her in the thank you section of the liner notes of Lust for Life to ask if she might go on tour with her. Though the two had only met once before at, naturally, the Chateau Marmont, Cat Power couldn’t resist when, “She told me I was part of the landscape of artists she admired. She reminded me there was camaraderie in music and that she felt community with me. These business people had decided I wasn’t an artist anymore, but she reminded me that I was.”
So it is that we have “Woman,” a song that clearly delineates Del Rey’s Cat Power influence and musical styling origins. Opening in that sort of “old-timey” way one would expect a musician to execute solely on a stage in the 90s by singing a question to their audience (the same sort of effect created on Violent Femmes’ “American Music”), Cat Power says, “If I had a dime for every time you tell I’m not what you need/If I had a quarter I would pull it together/And I would take it to the bank and then leave.” Which is, in effect, just what she did in order for Wanderer to be released after her longtime record label, Matador, planted the seeds of doubt in her mind about her talent by telling her that the songs she had presented them with had to be “fixed” in order to ensure if not higher at least the same amount of sales that Sun finagled. As a result, Cat Power, like so many women devalued by men in the entertainment industries, had to step back for a moment to reconsider what she wanted to do.
The call to music too strong after being given the support from her fellow musician that she needed, Cat Power says it best on “Horizon” with, “Let’s get up to something.” Another perfect ramblin’ man sort of track in keeping with the theme of a title like Wanderer, the meandering auditory tone maintains a bittersweet sadness to it as Cat Power describes the life of a vagabond born to never to stay in one place. As such, alas, “Your face on horizon I cannot see/Your face on horizon I cannot say.” So it goes when you’ve got to be on your way.
Ironically, then, next to follow is Cat Power’s incredible rendering of Rihanna’s “Stay,” a command that the vagabond hears often in their travels, prone to breaking hearts as they are solely as a result of the cachet of not being able to be “had.” Reworking Rihanna’s iteration to her own unique stylings, Cat power bemoans the endless search for a sense of “place” in this life as she says, “Round and around and around and around we go…/The reason I hold on, oooh ’cause I need this hole gone.” And, to be sure, constant traveling is one way to attempt to fill it–of course to no avail.
And this is when one’s mood can go “Black”–as is the title of the seventh track on the record, exploring a surreal experience Cat Power had while on the brink of death (“la grande faucheuse,” as she calls it), rescued by a friend (now dead herself) who brought Cat Power back from the other side with an “ice bath and a slap.”
Waxing philosophical about class disparity once more as she does on “In Your Face,” “Robbin Hood” finds Cat Power again accusing the proverbial “man” of being a “big fat cat, [with the] biggest piece of the pie/High top hat, there’s no disguise.” No, there certainly isn’t–especially when you’re radioactive orange (an off-brand color of agent orange, at best).
Reiterating Madonna’s sentiment on “Nothing Really Matters,” Cat Power’s song of the same name mourns this idea that what might be important to you is not necessarily important to another–least of all the right wing extremists intent on making the iconic scene from the Book of Revelation happen sooner. So she must reconcile, “How can other people’s ways be an estimate of your way of life?” To each his own, in essence, even if there is an objective way to live or believe–subjectivity must reign supreme in terms of what people deem as important.
To firmly establish the lifelong mantra of the true wanderer, Cat Power closes things with “Me Voy,” which translates to “I’m Going” (the true final track is the two minute, nineteen second “Wanderer/Exit,” an even more morose bookend than the opener, “Wanderer,” in which Cat Power ruminates in a different intonation with the same lyrics, proving that the passage of time really does make you look at something with an entirely new headspace). Speaking from the vantage point of both the one who stays and the one who goes, Cat Power croons, “Wish you could stay tomorrow/Wish you would stay/Don’t go tomorrow/Don’t go anywhere,” in between insisting that “good is gone.” That to make oneself scarce at just the right moment is the best way to avoid the plague of what Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert) in I Heart Huckabees calls the inevitability of wanting “to be drawn back into human drama.”
So whether you are coming or going–or can barely decide–Wanderer offers the perfect rumination on both states of (impure) being, which we all find ourselves in at various stages of our lives.
