Not always your responsibility, but the Cat Power passes through the Portuguese stages have been accompanied by a huge unknown and tangent often epic and tragic. From the already mythical lunar landing (it’s hardly credible that his head was in any earthly whereabouts) of the singer in Blah Blah in Matosinhos in 2003, when 20 minutes came to a concert-disaster when the songs they walked to struggle with alcohol and both fell by KO, the latest failed presentation of the album Sun in SBSR 2014 festival, where it was forced to act late and with a reduced alignment drastically due to the effects of torrential rain which launched chaos in programming Meco.
With Cat Power never knows what to expect. But the unexpected is part of an involuntary charm. Chan Marshall is a kind of magnet that attracts extreme situations or who – is also a hypothesis – has the ability to turn any event into a story as dramatic as delusional. Take Sun for example. His latest album, released in 2012, was born of a bewildered reaction to the response that had its publisher to the first models that presented. “They said very negative things about all the songs that had written to the disk and then lay them off and started again from scratch,” recalls the Ípsilon by phone two weeks before performing this Saturday at Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Sunday at the Hard Club, Porto. “That day I felt a thousand arrows sticking in the heart because that guy [the publisher] that was until my friend. I closed the notebook where I showed him the songs and never talked to him. “
Sun was therefore created in the middle of” pain of doubt about everything felt as person, as a woman and as an artist. ” It’s an album built on doubt and that it sinks avoiding the easy and obvious solutions. Cat Power wanted to get rid of the guitars and keyboards that were familiar to him and was looking for a sound that neither the singer knew how to recognize. I knew, instead, that violently rejected the publisher’s pressure to deliver a hit record and to deliver into the hands of “a famous producer”. “We still want to make the decision to do the shit I feel like doing,” he says past three years, with an irritation that say’s Eve. “I do not really want to go back to that charged pain of doubt and personal scrutiny or the sale of my editor when I needed their acceptance and support.”
The lesson Cat Power took the making of Sun was therefore to that is not to call into question their intuition. Especially because after this long, tortuous and difficult process for which was even dragged his love affair with actor Giovanni Ribisi, completed before the album is completed, Sun was released and entered the top 10 Sales in the United States, unprecedented feat in Marshall’s career. By that time, however, I was already lying in a hospital bed, the hospital due to an angioedema. Although the causes could be several, it is sure that, in your case, the immune disorder that put her in intensive care was due to a peak of stress a result of trying to protect yourself from the world. When handed the disk, he lowered the guards and the body collapsed. “I was very sick because they do not believe me,” he insists.
At the same time he was hospitalized, barely able to breathe and she says, as she listened to the doctors discuss measures to save her lungs, I knew that Sun climbed to the top 10 through a friend. But even after high was quick to cancel the subsequent European tour due to “fight against angioedema” and its “bankruptcy”. Money was also sucked in the long months of composition and recording Sun . And Cat Power then had to devote to one of his talents that will equal one who puts the music service:. Survive
Little integrated
Product an erratic and a troubled adolescence and constantly shifting childhood – “I went through 13 schools in ten years, I moved a lot growing up in different cities,” says Marshall to Ípsilon – Cat Power has always felt the sidelines, someone whose integration capacity It was reduced and quickly overtaken by the relative comfort of solitude. After “stay at home of strangers, grow with strangers and be ridiculously dangerous situations as a child and having to survive in the midst of so much shit”, always bouncing around between cities in the southern United States, decided to go to New York alone, already clinging to music as insufficient means of survival. “Also there did not get me to integrate, was extremely poor, I had to steal food at grocery stores in order to survive, all because I refused to remain Southerner from a certain point of my life.”
No wonder, therefore, feline attitude and wounded animal that Cat Power responds to any hint of lack of confidence or interference attempt in his artistic life. Who uses music to stay alive, physically and mentally, is not really available to listen to that which creates is evil, that its truth does not serve, which can be improved to achieve this greater goal of having a hit record – the Whatever that may mean these days. Did not surprise too, so that despite the onslaught in New York have compensated when Steve Shelley, drummer of Sonic Youth, found Cat Power and assured her recording of the first two albums in 1994 – Dear Sir and Myra Lee , launched in the following years – Marshall has refused to surrender themselves to the enormous potential game-songwriter singer in the indie circuit in the 90 Instead, declined to obey the commandments a manager. Who sent in his career was just her. And it would be clear when, after the issue of What Would the Community Think , decided to eclipse and go to work as babysitter somewhere in Oregon, moving-after for a fifth in South Carolina.
Of course, it was short lived. Cat Power thought he could hide and give the world the same way he believed that the world gave up himself. “I reached the point of no longer caring if I could I integrate because it was anonymous and through the anonymity can be observed the world hear conversations and be in any situation that allows us to learn everything because nobody expects us to be interested, awake observers” he says. Then came Moon Pix (1998), recorded with the Dirty Three, a revival in their music abandoned the acid rawness of the early days. It was a first founding moment, which is why it has referred the Sun as an investigation into the hidden side of this album.
The discovery of a voice
Only later, however, with the second onslaught on tour The Greatest (2005) by failing to meet the financial conditions to follow for road with the original Memphis Rhythm Band, Cat Power says he found his voice. He spent that time in Portugal, microphone in hand and delivering the tools at Dirty Delta Blues Band, formed by people coming from the ranks of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Dirty Three, The Delta 72 and Lizard Music. Ie replaced this a light approach to music soul participation of extraordinary musicians who had shared the stage with Al Green by a group of people (also her extraordinary, or did not include Judah Bauer and Jim White) who started from the same misfit stance that has always been the essence of Cat Power.
“With the Memphis Rhythm was sober recently, was facing the world. Never before had seen the public because he lived behind my hair and my songs were not on my face, my body, how sexy could be if they were me taking a picture, “he recalls today. They were therefore potentially pop field; They were always a confessional unbridled report. And in this environment, it finally destrinçava guys in the audience, in which not guitar or piano created a distance with those who followed him, he felt able to sing, surrender and return to childhood, “when loved to sing small with four, six, eight years old and not more than that. ” “It was the best time of the stage of my life, there was no sorrow, pain of singing in public was not there and it was an entire happiness. It was this band of friends, who gave me a happiness that he felt when singing since I was eight. “
Now that returns to Lisbon to Porto the ground, something that regularly makes from 20 years now a mother of a six-month boy, now that is keen to talk about the candidacy for nomination by the Democratic Party of socialist self-styled Bernie Sanders, now that tells us worried monitoring that has made hunger strike musician and Luso-Angolan activist Luaty Beirão, now appears to us at the point where you can share with national stage half a dozen new songs, Cat Power accepts his place off-center and realized that possibly this is what unites its audience. “I see people in my concerts integrate with me,” he says. “I do not feel that is integrated in society, but I see that there are everywhere people aware that there is something very wrong with how everything works and how to tell us to feel, be, walk, think, dress, learn, speak , love. “
” This means that all won, “he concludes. This means that, at every concert, Cat Power believes that, in addition to the songs, there is a greater story to be told: a. A community of survivors
r sounds in ‘Gamelan’ to which it is connected and which is a traditional instrument from Indonesia.” 
