Moon Pix

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.

And yes, Chan Marshall sings “my new friend plays the drums” before a startled little crash of snares answers the line—as if she has reminded the guy at the kit to wake up, and he has fired off a panicked fill to assure her he’s working—and this gives the music a certain unmade feeling, as if unfolding in real-time. But that doesn’t explain, exactly, its incantatory effect. Nothing can really explain it besides intangibles like conviction, intensity, shared intention. Whatever nameless thing Marshall and her hired band were pursuing on Moon Pix, they were united in their pursuit, and this sustained fever of artistic purpose is another element in the mix, just as palpable as the instruments or the lyrics. It doesn’t take many elements to generate a trance, but it requires a Herculean level of concentration and empathy.

All of this witchiness seeps into every fiber of the songs. Marshall reached out to the Australian trio Dirty Three, with whom she had toured. She asked her record label, Matador, to cover her airfare to Melbourne, and they complied. Nearly three months went by, during which not a note was recorded. Then, days before guitarist Mick Turner had to leave the studio, they crashed Sing Sing Studio and recorded everything, uninterrupted, for four or five days.

As a result, the band plays as if sleepwalking across a five-lane highway—everything sounds high-stakes and somehow perfectly in place. The drummer was Jim White, a highly skilled player capable of navigating hairpin turns, but here he only played in eruptive splashes. He mastered a sort of controlled aimlessness, a series of managed stumbles that lent an air of hunger to the music. Questlove, another technician with a metronomic heartbeat, perfected a similar blindfold-tightrope style to play D’Angelo’s Voodoo, dragging just a millisecond behind the beat. In both cases, the tension their restraint generates is palpable, nearly visible on the surface of the music, like a neck bulge.

If the arrangements were a canvas, then Marshall’s guitar would be the unruliest blot, hogging the most white space. She plays rhythm guitar the way people talk at a cafe—excitably, with varying levels of purpose and speed, prone to slumping off into peculiarly timed silences. Listen to her instrument at the center of “Moonshiner”—she speeds up, slows down, flubs a note here and there, places some notes a little more loudly than others without seemingly meaning to; some of her chords are choked off by her fingers. Her guitar nudges every other instrument into the corner of the mix, moving the entire baggy-shaped composition forward, pulsing blood through its veins with the irregularity of a heart murmur. Everything—everything—in the music seems to be responding directly to her, and to her innermost thoughts. When flute wanders up and down modal scales behind her on “He Turns Down,” it sounds loosed directly from Marshall’s singing mouth.

All of the shapes Marshall’s music would later take were vaguely discernible here: the careful way she arpeggiates that root chord on “No Sense,” over and over, and how closely the figure evokes the luxurious stretch of Al Green’s Hi Records band, how the hesitation on the downbeat heightens the tension to near-erotic levels. You can hear her future as a soul balladeer on The Greatest whispering at you. On the rudimentary finger-picked minor chord of “Back of Your Head,” you can hear the shadows of future Cat Power dirges like “Babydoll” lurking.

And on “Metal Heart,” the album’s moral center, you can feel her clasping her fingers around a message, a mantra that would follow and sustain through the next decade. “You’re losing the calling that you’ve been faking and I’m not kidding/It’s damned if you don’t and damned if you do/Be true ‘cause they’ll lock you up in a sad, sad zoo,” she sings. The “you” in the song, addressed with such affection, feels like Marshall herself—an unverifiable, if inescapable, impression.

She would go on to sing other songs to other “you’s,” also with unclear subjects: on You Are Free’s “I Don’t Blame You,” she offered another benediction to a reluctant and tortured performer. “They never owned you/And you never owed it to them anyway,” she sang. She was coy for years about the song’s source, telling one interviewer it was simply about “that feeling of not being understood, but supposedly being understood by everyone” Years later, she would tell a Guardian reporter it was definitely about Kurt Cobain “blowing his head off.” But whoever it was, her solidarity with them was unmistakable: That person onstage who “didn’t want to play,” was always Marshall, using someone’s story to tell us a version of her own.

By the time of 2012’s Sun, she was comfortable and confident enough to start speaking directly to other people, to her idea of “kids” that were not her own obvious narrative surrogates—“You ain’t got nothing but time, and it ain’t got nothing on you,” she asserted, bravely. But here, in the haunted circle that was Moon Pix, she realizes something about herself, her art, and transmits it to us for the first time. “Metal heart/You’re not hiding/Metal heart, you’re not worth a thing,” she sang on the chorus. An “Amazing Grace” quote escapes her like a hiccup—she sounds startled to find herself singing it, mimicking the nature of revelation itself. Grace—itself accidental, capricious, not to be owned—seems to guide Marshall through Moon Pix like a waking dream. If we still yearn to embrace her tale about that single fevered night of songwriting, about keeping devils at bay with just her voice, well, we have Moon Pix to thank for prodding us into believing it.