Moon Pix has a wonderful origin tale, one simply too good to miss an opportunity to retell: Chan Marshall was living in a barn with singer-songwriter Bill Callahan in a South Carolina town called Prosperity, on the brink of saying goodbye to music forever—or so she told scores of eager interviewers—when she woke up from a horrible nightmare. “Hell came to get me again,” she told The Fader, attempting to describe the mortal panic in which she awoke. She wrote the songs that night, with visions of spirits pressing the glass. Voilà: Her very own crossroads.
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.
All of the production choices that go into an album like this wind up feeling a little haunted, because the atmosphere they generate feels so unlikely and so unreal: Yes, that is the backwards drum loop lifted wholesale from Beastie Boys’ “Paul Revere” on the album-opening “American Flag,” and yes, there is almost nothing happening around it—the drone of feedback around the electric guitar blurs into the whine of the sample, so they sound like one hybrid sound. But there is no real accounting for the heavy sense of doom this imparts, why it makes us feel like a low ceiling is suddenly moving lower.