These days, covers albums largely get dismissed as cash grabs, vanity projects and stop-gaps between more meaningful efforts. But, it wasn’t always this way. Some of the most beloved and acclaimed albums of the last century consist largely—even entirely—of songs written by people other than the artist on the album cover—be it Nina Simone’s I Put a Spell on You or Joan Baez’s Diamonds & Rust. If the art of the cover album has been largely lost, or at least obscured, in the 21st century, one of the few artists who continues to understand it is Cat Power—singer/songwriter Chan Marshall—a rare contemporary act who has gained similar praise and popularity for her original material as she has for her inventive covers of numbers by Lana Del Rey, Phil Phillips, the Velvet Underground, Frank Ocean and more.
Her newest collection of covers is surely her most ambitious—a song-by-song recreation of Bob Dylan’s historic “Royal Albert Hall” concert. In interviews leading up to the live album’s release, Marshall has spoken of her deep admiration for Dylan’s music and how honored she felt to cover his songs. Her take on some of Dylan’s most critically and commercially successful material is appropriately reverential—even down to recreating the acoustic-to-electric switch midway through the set.
In less capable hands, such a painstaking interpretation would be rendered redundant, but the wounded innocence of Marshall’s voice ensures that her versions remain piercingly evocative—vital, even. On opener “She Belongs To Me,” she establishes a clear likeness between herself and the song’s protagonist. “She’s an artist, she don’t look back / She can take the dark out of the nightime / And paint the daytime black,” croons Marshall, evoking in the process her own singular creative path and her ability as a musician to excavate and find meaning in both the bleakest and brightest moments of our pasts.
As demonstrated on “She Belongs To Me” and again and again on Cat Power Sings Dylan, Marshall’s success in covering these American folk rock classics lies in her ability to crawl inside the characters that populate the songs and their stories—adding new depth, vulnerability and feminine perspective to them. Marshall’s take on “Like A Rolling Stone,” arguably Dylan’s most recognizable hit, demonstrates a quiet resilience. As opposed to the bombastic start of Dylan’s 1966 version—he began by confronting a heckler with “You’re a liar. Play it fucking louder”—Marshall’s begins relatively softly and gradually builds steam to create something visceral in it’s own way. Her approach necessitates a greater focus on the song’s lyrics—a requirement to confront the isolation and directionless aesthetic that forms the thematic core without looking away.
There’s a deliberate elusiveness and ambiguity that runs through so much of Dylan’s “Royal Albert Hall” set (which, unlike Marshall’s recreation, was actually recorded at Manchester Free Trade Hall). It’s a mood that Marshall is singularly qualified to channel—her magnum opus Moon Pix, which celebrated its 25th anniversary earlier this year, exists in a surreal, desolate world all its own. Unsurprisingly then, Marshall proves adept at conjuring up the dreamstate of “Mr Tambourine Man”—charting a journey into the surreal, she scratches at deeper meaning while lingering on certain lines (“Take me through the smoke rings of my mind”).
The highlight of Cat Power’s set is her cover of “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Before she begins, an audience member cries “Judas!”—a recreation of the cry thrown at Dylan when he performed the number nearly 60 years ago. “Jesus!” retorts Marshall to a crowd that has received her far more warmly than that which greeted Dylan in Manchester. Backdropped by hypnotic Wurlitzer swirls, Marshall’s voice sounds as rich and as vivid as ever. It’s easily one of the best Dylan covers of all time, and it’s an appropriate penultimate act for Marshall’s set too, as one generational talent at the top of her game pays tribute to another.
