Do I need another miserabilist in my life? I’m not a fan of the word, the tortured type, damaged to the core, is a cliché in music and art but some cannot escape to this cliché. Those who belong to this category have always been very present in my music world for the best and the worst and I cannot imagine not listening to them.
Chan Marshall a.k.a. Cat Power, born in Atlanta, GA, daughter of a blues musician, is one of them. I have always like her 2006 album ‘The Greatest’ which was recorded in Memphis, a come back to her roots and to a truer herself after harsh times.
On the album, there are two kinds of songs, the deeply depressing ones and the emancipating, triumphant ones. After all ‘The Greatest’ could have been named after Mohammed Ali since the album cover features a pair of boxing gloves, so no wonder there are victorious songs which champion life. Songs like ‘Living proof’ which, with its powerful drum beats and its bouncing piano, seems a dance around life and its true answers, songs like ‘Lived in Bars’ which starts with distress and nostalgia and ends up as a liberation. At the end of the song, she is flying, overcoming all her problems, free and fearless.
But there are also the poignantly devastating songs, like ‘Where is my love’ or ‘The Moon,’ with its imagery of death and lost love that can never been reached but are here to stay anyway. And especially song like ‘Hate,’ which contrary to the first impression is less about suicide than about life unavoidable deceptions and the courage to face this acknowledgement.
Her voice has always produced this unique deep sound so rich, smoky but vulnerable and broken at the same time and, on this album, it is surrounded by powerful horns and joyous sha-ba-loo backup vocals.
But there are very few songs that give me the chills, the same thrill than the opening track, ‘The Greatest,’ even after listening to it numerous times. You get generally used to a song, and even if you want to recover that very first feeling, it is not the same after a while. But there are some songs that cannot be worn out, the feeling is intact and it can even make you cry after 10,000 times. ‘The Greatest’ from Cat Power is one of these. It is full of melancholic pain and lost potentials but expressed in a contemplative and serene way, a calm acceptance of life failures.
This is what is the most touching about the lyrics, they describe so well a place you arrive to at a certain point of life, the recognition you will never get there but you are ok with that. It is not a renunciation, it is not a failure, because nobody achieves his or her full potential in life, but the acceptance of this is the hardest thing to accomplish in life.
The piano and chords in between the words are the special moments in the song where the emotion transpires the most, and suddenly you want them to be the soundtrack of the most poignant, if not the most miserable, moments of your life.