Cat Power is Chan Marshall. Chan Marshall is Cat Power. Tonight’s selections are from Cat Power’s 1998 album, Moon Pix. Moon Pix was recently named one of the 40 Saddest Albums of All Time by Discogs.
Darkness has always been a theme in Marshall's work, but Moon Pix shines because it focuses on the darkness in and surrounding Marshall herself. Her previous album, What Would the Community Think, explores the feeling that someone (or more than one someone) caused her incredible pain. Moon Pix, by contrast, is a note-perfect album that turns inward, filled with songs that express what it means to be deeply, inexplicably melancholy. And even more incredible is that Marshall wrote most of this masterpiece in one night. — NPR
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Cross Bones Style [1998]
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The story of Moon Pix, the one that Marshall always tells, is that she was living in a South Carolina farmhouse with Bill Callahan, getting ready to leave music behind entirely. But one night, she had a vivid and overwhelming nightmare, a vision of evil spirits trying to get into her house to take her away. She woke up in a blind panic and immediately wrote much of Moon Pix that night. Then she got Matador, her label, to fly her to Australia. She bummed around for a few months and then got together with Mick Turner and Jim White, two members of the tangled-up instrumental rock trio Dirty Three, and recorded the album in a few days.
It’s hard to assign concrete meaning to most of Moon Pix, since it’s not a concrete album. It’s Marshall, languid and expansive but also raw-nerve vulnerable, venting spacily about formless, nameless anxiety. Marshall was young and familiar with what heroin had done to her peer group, so she knew about mortality. And she’d grown up in the church, with all the intense confusions about morality and the afterlife that that brings. And so all of that comes out, in twisted and personal ways, on Moon Pix.
She sings about going to hell over and over. Sometimes, it’s almost playful. Sometimes, it’s desolate and urgent. She sings about trying to find comfort in God and getting just nothing in return: “Have you ever seen the face? / You know the one I’m talking about / Have you ever been to that place? / You know, the one I’m not supposed to say.” She sings “Moonshiner,” the old folk traditional, putting herself back into the skin of someone living on the other side of the law, in the earlier days of the dying century: “You’re already in hell, you’re already in hell / I wish we could go to hell.” — Stereogum
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American Flag [1998]
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Moonshiner [1998]
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This is the kind of myth that music fans cling to make their treasured albums seem more magical, and sometimes we can use these tales to terrorize their teller. When Moon Pix came out in 1998, the fevered hush of possessive adoration surrounding Chan Marshall was at its peak: This was the era of shows stopping and starting, of her faltering voice and mid-song apologies, of breathless reports of said interruptions showing up in the music press, as if Marshall were a consumptive 19th-century heroine. For her most avid listeners, this was the moment when Chan Marshall’s life and Cat Power’s music swirled together most hypnotically, most dangerously, when one threatened to consume the other.
The problem with extricating these complicated ideas—who is making my music? Is this person feeling the feelings I feel?—is that sometimes an artist makes something dangerously potent, a piece of work with a mood so thick that it demands an explanation. Moon Pix is undoubtedly that album for Cat Power. We play it for some of the same reasons we play Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks or Slint’s Spiderland—to bask in the suspended time it creates every time it fills a room. She made albums with more indelible songs on them, but she never again made an album so darkly spellbinding. — Pitchfork
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He Turns Down [1998]
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Josh Gad, Anna Chlumsky, the Weather Station
Jimmy Fallon: Pre-empted
Stephen Colbert: Dua Lipa, 2 Chainz
Seth Meyers: Pre-empted
James Corden: Kenneth Branagh, Lily James, Nicki Minaj
Trevor Noah: Johnny Knoxville
SPOILER WARNING
A late night gathering for non serious palaver that does not speak of that night’s show. Posting a spoiler will get you brollywhacked. You don’t want that to happen to you. It's a fate worse than a fate worse than death.
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David Bowie :: Heroes [1977]
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