1
I’ve posted a pdf-book of drawings I made in 2014 here.
2
A new episode of Subject Object Verb is out now, featuring Hunter Ravena Hunt-Hendrix on mysticism, total art, opera, metal, and her transcendental philosophical system. Listen here.
3
About a decade ago, I spoke with Chan Marshall, who performs under the name Cat Power. When I initially called at noon, she didn’t answer. In a few minutes, she responded with a text: “Sorry JUST WOKE UP gimme 2 minutes to get off the crapper, get my dog outside, press the coffee button & we’re on!! Or can we do that all together on the phone?” I told her she could call me when she was ready, and she did, five minutes later.
During our interview over the next hour, she held an 8-minute conversation with her godson, ate a bowl of Honey Puffs cereal, and belted a soulful verse from Nina Simone’s version of “Funkier than a Mosquito’s Tweeter,” which she describes as “one of the greatest pieces of audio I’ve ever heard in my life,” and from which she referenced a lyric to title her new song “Peace and Love.” Every few minutes, she'd get distracted and then urgently ask, “Are you mad at me?” Sometimes she'd answer questions with a long passionate rant then dismiss the whole thing by saying, “Don’t even listen to me right now.”
The whole interaction felt intimate and unburdened by the usual social niceties that can slow conversations to a mumbling drag. Marshall talked while she chewed, spoke in several character voices, and freely discussed her mental breakdown.
CHAN MARSHALL: I had a dream about my ex boyfriend, Giovanni Ribisi last night. We were with our old dog and he had an alligator farm in the backyard.
Do you analyze your dreams?
That’s what they’re there for!
So you think your dreams have meaning?
Are you kidding me? Yeah. Dreams are very, very important.
What do you think an alligator farm means?
I think I picked the alligator farm because my godson lives with me now. I live near the Everglades and he caught a gecko five days ago, and we put little holes in Saran Wrap and wrapped it with a rubber band around a glass. We put a bottle cap full of water in there and we watched him for a couple of days. When my godson got home from summer camp one day, I told him, Remember when we were talking about how his family lives in the jungle behind the house? I think we have to let him go back to his family today. He got really, really concerned. He’s just 6 years old. But that was a good step for him to know and appreciate life. I think that’s why I had the dream. It's an exaggerated form of life.
I’ve heard you say that you feel like something is always wrong when you are on stage. Do you still feel that way?
I can’t believe I said that. When I was young, I would always say the wrong thing. But yeah, something is usually distracting me when I’m doing my job, especially since my job is to be faithful and dedicated to the song. It’s hard to present the song in its natural state if someone is taking a picture with a flash, like, seven times, in the front row, or if there are two chicks who are like [valley girl voice], “Oh my god, I know! So last weekend, that was so much fun!” I’m like, Can you go to the bar where everyone else is talking? Its hard to be a professional robot when things are fucking distracting your mind, when what you are trying to do is to get away from your mind. What if the lighting guy thinks strobe is perfect for a slow song? What if the sound guy turns the vocals so loud it hurts your ears to whisper?
The problems, then, are largely logistical or situational?
It’s also been a really great challenge for me, I think, physically, to let myself be accepted by the public. Like dancers, they’re trained from a very young age to be completely comfortable with their bodies.
Do you feel less self-aware in your body as you’ve grown older?
I think as I got older—it’s not that you stop caring about your body—it’s that your equilibrium and your metabolism are much stronger when you’re younger. You’ve lost all these brain cells and muscle memory. It just disintegrates. The matter, the composition of myself, isn’t like it was at 20. Everything’s just a different temperament. Whenever I play, there’s always a part of me that’s like [in little girl voice], Oh, I’m the new kid again? And the older me is like, Fuck it, come on! This is what I’m here for!
Did you feel comfortable acting in the films [Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers and Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights] and music videos you’ve been in?
The thing about videos is that nowhere else in the world do you find yourself looking into a camera, acting like yourself, and saying your lyrics like you’re singing them. It’s such a mind-fuck.
So not really?
But I am directing my first video soon, a movie.
A feature-length film?
Well, actually, if I could pull it off in a really beautiful way, visually, story-wise, I would love to use it as a trailer to show some studio hotshot and get a movie made.
For a narrative film or more of a music-based film?
Totally narrative, like a tribal, apocalyptic kind of thing.
Have you written the screenplay?
No, but I started writing a book a long time ago.
Do you write regularly?
I used to write stories when I was in middle school. I wrote stories, and then I started painting, and then I wanted to be a war photographer, and then I started to play music. But I started to write a book when I was about 24, a true story, and then I started writing another book when I was in Malibu, when an ex broke up with me and I lost my marbles.
When you say you lost your marbles…
I’ve been misdiagnosed due to, like, stuff from the past that I was keeping a secret. Well, not keeping a secret but—it’s amazing when you open up to your friends, what you learn about them and yourself. A lot of people have doctors and shrinks who they can really open up to on a regular basis, which I’m not into, because I don’t want to dwell on shit, you know? I think good things come when you’re actually communicating with someone back and forth, and you share interests and ideas. But I’m not into analysis. I think it fits a certain personality type who needs that kind of attention, or who struggles with self-awareness, or who needs to feel like someone gives a shit.
Why were you misdiagnosed?
Due to the stress from, like, death and insufferable loss. A gargantuan loss, just like a big, extreme, can’t-make-it-through monumental loss that gives you pain that’s so hardcore that you feel like you can’t count, can’t spell—that kind of shit. So I’ve been misdiagnosed several times by several doctors, and I just lost faith in them, just like I have with religion.
With all of psychiatry?
Because of analysis and Freud and Jung, and the psychiatric society they created as the identity of psychiatry. It’s just inappropriate to make all these students go to university and push all of this shit—all these control tactics—onto people. It feels like governmental control or something, like racial profiling. They’re similar ballgames to me, and I don’t appreciate the criminality of psychology. Anyway, I had another meltdown or whatever, and after six days, on the seventh day, it was great because my friend explained to me that I wasn’t bipolar. My subconscious had to start working, you know, the frontal lobe. I wasn’t sleeping. I was too stressed out. That’s what happens—your subconscious basically takes over — just like dreaming.
