Seventeen years after Chan Marshall's debut as Cat Power and six years after her most recent album of original material, comes Sun, her ninth album. But let's drop the math right there. Because Sun is a record with its own peculiar temporal logic, one that's circular rather than linear. Take that picture on the cover, for example. It's Marshall 20 years ago, but toward the end of Sun's almost six-year gestation period, she chopped off her hair and looks, once again, like the image in the photo. At the risk of engaging in cheap analysis, this fact feels not entirely trivial. "When we were teenagers, we wanted to be the sky," she sang on her enduringly haunting 1998 record Moon Pix, her voice warbling at that moment as if she were delivering an elegy, like it's a shame we all at some point give up on those lofty and poetically illogical dreams. But Sun is a testament to what happens when that sensibility and logic somehow survive a turbulent adulthood: This, these weather-beaten and irrepressibly hopeful songs all seem to say, is what it sounds like when you still want to be the sky at 40.
In just about every way, Sun is a declaration of independence. There are, of course, the biographical facts, the things the record's defiant tone feels like a direct break with-- stage fright, substance abuse, break-ups, creative demons (it's been reported that Marshall scrapped some early demos because a friend told her they sounded too much like her older stuff). It is also the first Cat Power record to feature prominent synthesizers and (occasionally) Auto-Tune, though that doesn't exactly mean it sounds like anything on the radio right now. But you'd get these ideas about autonomy and independence just from perusing the lyric sheet, too. "I want to live my way of living," she chants on the meditative "Always on My Own". The next song, "Real Life", is about the universality of grass-is-always-greener yearning ("I met a doctor/ He want to be a dancer/ I met a mother/ She want to be alone"). Spinning her years of tour-induced wanderlust into wisdom, Marshall offers them all some sage advice: "Sometimes you gotta do what you don't wanna do/ To get away with an unordinary life."
In the way it simultaneously embraces darkness and light and exists completely and defiantly outside of any larger musical trends (and clearly operates with no particular fear or hang-ups about kitsch-- check out that eagle sound effect on "Cherokee"), the closest thing to Sun we've heard this year is probably Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel. But whereas Apple focuses on the highly idiosyncratic clockwork of her own brain, Marshall is more interested in the ways in which she is, in some fundamental human way, no different from anybody else. In some cases, this means grappling with her own privileges ("Ruin"'s deceivingly upbeat chorus actually goes: "Bitchin'/ Complainin'/ When some people ain't got shit to eat"). And in others, it means those sorts of bald-faced cosmic statements about mortality that few other artists can pull off (see: a song called "Human Being" that goes, "You got a right to breathe/ You got a right/ You're a human being.") In her recent profile of Marshall, Amanda Petrusich linked Cat Power's songwriting philosophy back to an earlier time when ownership was a much looser concept and all songs were considered public domain. She sees people like this, too, including herself. So in the moments when Sun feels kitschy, it's because it's got a generousness of spirit that's fallen sharply out of fashion at some point, that something about our experience is public and shared, that we're all pretty alike just by virtue of being human.
Sun's middle stretch from "Always on My Own" to "Human Being" suffers from being a little muddy and unmelodic, but stick around for the finale. It starts with the late-night, long-walk-home soundtrack "Manhattan"-- gorgeous, hypnotic, and quietly, unsentimentally lonely ("All the friends we used to know ain't coming back"). And then there's Sun's late-sequenced, 11-minute centerpiece, "Nothin But Time". Which brings us back to that "public domain" idea: With its parade-float pace and self-consciously anthemic lyrics ("You got nothing but time/ And it ain't got nothing on you... It's up to you/ To be a superhero"), it is, yes, a clear homage to Bowie's "Heroes". But it's "Hey Jude", too: Marshall wrote it to cheer up her ex's teenage daughter, and the longer it goes on, the truer its optimistic truisms ring, the stronger the urge to holler them along with the rest of of voices ("You wanna live!"). It's an odd but fitting peak. By the sixth minute, when Iggy Pop's voice comes in god-sized and benevolent, it's like some sort of peyote daydream where one of the faces on Mount Rushmore stoops to talk to you and has only the kindest things to say.
Then again, maybe she's just talking to herself. "Time, nothing but time," was another lyric she sang on Moon Pix, except there she moaned it a little bit like it was a prison sentence. Here it's a mantra. Sun doesn't reach the heights (or more accurately, wallow in the depths) of Moon Pix, but more than anything else she's made, it feels like a companion piece to that record, a conversation with an older and wiser voice. But what she seems to have learned out there is that wisdom means knowing less than you once thought you did, whether that means embracing some new instruments even if you have no idea how they work, or seeing sense where others see paradox. Sun is a double-exposed photo. You know those afternoons when the sun's high but somehow the moon's just unexpectedly hanging out, too? That's the kind of sky Marshall got to be.
