Cat Power's Jukebox

Chan Marshall is one of only a few recording artists these days who seems to understand that the art of interpreting someone else's songs can be an act of creation on par with the act of songwriting itself. Each song on Jukebox, Marshall's fifth full-length release as Cat Power and her second album of covers, participates in an act of transformation. The original song is lost, submerged in a new wash of sound, and comes out something different.

The experience of listening to Jukebox is, at first, a little disorienting. Listening to "New York" and "Ramblin' (Wo)man" the first couple of times around, you might try to match the melody that Marshall sings to that of the familiar originals. Eventually, though, you would have to give up on this, because the melodies as Marshall reworks them are not the same. She could have written new words to the arrangements on this album and never been accused of theft. But that, it seems, is not the point Marshall is trying to make.

The iconic "New York" (the title pared down from the more familiar "New York, New York") takes on new meanings with Marshall's breathy reading of it. Some of the Sinatra swagger is there, but there is a quality to Marshall's voice that makes her version less about the braggadocio of taking the big town by storm than about the vulnerability of wishing for some experience that is beyond the limits of your own life as you have known it so far. She takes Sinatra's swing and replaces it with soul. The song will always be about taking a chance on the big city. Marshall makes taking the chance seem like a more risky enterprise than Sinatra did, but the risk here pays off. "Ramblin' (Wo)man," aside from taking liberty with gender role reversal, takes one of Hank Williams' only minor-key songs and spooks it out almost beyond recognition. On the original recording, Williams' voice is plaintive and apologetic--the voice of a soul in turmoil. Marshall issues no apology and makes no excuses for her rambling ways; she offers an explanation instead, stripped down as it is: "When the Lord made me, he made a ramblin' woman." There's no other accounting for the mystery of her character. The echoing sound of electric piano is perfect for the mood Marshall evokes on these two songs: soul in the deepest sense, haunted, from the vaults.

As she did on The Covers Record, Marshall covers herself here, reworking "Metal Heart" from Moon Pix, filling out the song and giving her vocals a bigger sound, somewhere between the breathier hush of her earlier work and the classic soul-inflected tones she has pursued of late. Marshall will never be a belter like some of the singers from eras past that she seems to be drawing inspiration from, but her voice now is far from fragile.

Nowhere is Cat Power's new vocal confidence more evident than on her version of "Aretha, Sing One for Me," a somewhat obscure number by blues-soul songwriter George Jackson. The band is loose here in a good way, and the production is playful--listen for the whistling at the beginning of the track and Marshall's pronouncement to the studio engineers: "keep rolling." On other tracks, Marshall takes old songs and makes them new; here, the mood is retrospective, but it's an utterly winning track in all ways--impossible to dislike.

Really, there isn't a song on this album that doesn't profit somehow from its presence here, even if the result is not to overtake but to draw out new meanings from the originals. The Highwaymen's "Silver Stallion" (something of a Townes Van Zandt knock-off) takes on the opposite effect at work on "Ramblin' (Wo)man": these outlaw blues inherit a new sensitivity, and the cover, like "New York," exposes a kind of longing heretofore latent in the lyrics. James Brown's "Lost Someone" also holds up admirably. The sparse arrangement--unaccompanied electric guitar--on the traditional "Lord, Help the Poor and Needy" is pitched right for the song, which effectively gives the album grounding right at its center. (It also serves as a nice complement to "Moonshiner," another traditional song that Marshall covered on Moon Pix.) Dylan's "I Believe in You," from the odd and somewhat baffling Slow Train Coming (a fifty-cent bin favorite across the country), fits nicely with a chunky guitar riff powering it from start to finish. The tempos start to sag a little toward the end, but Joni Mitchell's "Blue," while doing nothing to inject energy into the album, is lovely nonetheless: thin and ghostly but aching with a soulful quality that again brings new dimension to a song that is now approaching a certain age.

There's one more gem here worth drawing attention to: the album's only new original track, "Song for Bobby." This is a quiet, understated song that brings to mind Cat Power albums of the past but also shows how much her music has refused to stay still. It also gives us reason to look forward to more original songs from Marshall in the future.