Looking out into the blue-bathed audience at College Street Music Hall, looking back to her amps, and then looking out again, Chan Marshall — a.ka. Cat Power — adjusted the mic in front of her, eyeing it warily before lighting a twig of incense beside it. Tendrils of white, sweet smoke snaked into the air. A few people in the front row leaned all the way forward, setting their beers on the floor. She closed her eyes.
Anxieties stilled. Any ruffling clothes or papers fell to a hush. A stream of bottomless, just-rugged-enough notes poured from her throat, conjuring a scene: the coziest coffeehouse she’d performed at in weeks. Or, perhaps, a best-loved bar in Brooklyn that hipsters still hadn’t discovered, or had discovered after they were over being hipsters. Or a backyard patio strung with lights, winking on and off as she played.
Except Marshall surpassed those sorts of venues years ago, with her quirky, warm performances on late night television, virally inventive videos and candid, sometimes gravel-voiced interviews. This past Friday night she brought her singular style to College Street, wowing a crowd of over 500 listeners as she played a solo set to a seated audience. In a testament to the variety of acts that Manic Productions’ indefatigable Mark Nussbaum puts together, it yielded a kind of concert the Hall hasn’t yet seen: slow-smoldering and intimate, despite the many feet of space between the musician and the audience.
Lucy Gellman Photo
That can be a double-edged sword. Despite her incredible talent, Marshall remains wholly the product of a society that has taught women to apologize on cue for perceived errors. She brought with her an unwarranted platter of woe, stopping mid-song several times to deliver all-too self-deprecatory, self-conscious banter with the audience. Listeners treated this as an integral part of the experience, yelling “you got this!” and “no Cat, I love you more.” But it undermined the proceedings, lending a not-quite-varnished quality to a show that people had paid $40 to see. Kind of like this:
It’s hard to say, though, if it would have been a Cat Power show without it. Marshall is immersed in what she does, and expects perfection from herself — especially when there isn’t a band behind her. And she gets damn near close. When she sang out “Old Detroit,” the city sprouted and bloomed right around her, the old River Rouge plant and Central Depot rising sharply out of the green-lit backstage in all their forlorn grace. Every hush she bestowed on the audience was met with chapel-like reverence. Everything circa 2006 was performed with exuberance and panache, and had the audience swaying to the lyrics, eyes closed to savor the sound.
That’s the thing. Cat Power can mess up. She can admit to messing up when no one else has noticed it too, and did so Friday. By the time she got to “The Greatest,” the audience had already forgiven and embraced all of it,. Surely, they believed — and were probably on the right track — that she was genuinely one of them.
