COVERS is Cat Power’s third cover record, and she has long been both: great songwriter and unique interpreter. Which is because of how idiosyncratic she approaches these templates. Instead of emphasizing obvious characteristics, she plays the songs the way she wants to hear them. The Pogues’ “A Pair Of Brown Eyes,” for example, is originally a song that juxtaposes a young man’s love heartache with a veteran’s wartime experiences. Chan Marshall develops an intimate monologue from the dialogue, only at the very end do their two voices separate: poetry in the pub! That’s also true of “Here Comes A Regular,” their take on a drunkard’s ballad, written by the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg.
What Marshall also dares to do: change and shorten lyrics. “I Had A Dream Joe” by Nick Cave lacks the blatant metaphors, in Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion” she turns the taxi driver’s “Allahu akbar” into a “Praise the Lord”, she took the guitar motif from her own song of pain “In Your Face” taken over. There are many such bridges to their own work to be discovered, which makes COVERS a detective game and a double album – because of course you have to hear both the templates and what Cat Power makes of them.
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