Cat Power debuted a new song on BBC’s 'Later With Jools Holland', and it is a truly devastating naked piano ballad. The song, called 'Bully’, doesn’t really sound like any tune off her more recent album ‘Sun’, but instead it showcases her famous smoky vocals over a chorus-free sparse melody.
She looks deeply affected as she sings, and the lyrics suggest a story close to her heart, someone in her past, as she remembers some good times with him, ‘27 was a good year, the best/The back of the bar watching me dance in a dress/Remember that night in Paris, all those candles you lit/You and all the alcohol’, but also someone who got lost in the street and couldn’t be saved, ‘Nothing could be done/For this young, wild son/Standing on the street in a hospital sheet/All on the run from the police/Dumb girl on your arm/That look on your face/And all those crazy things you said to me/I can never forget’.
There’re no metaphors there, it’s all raw and bleeding all over the lines, with some mystery left in the last lines ‘Everything we now know, with a smile on our face/I, I can never forget’. It’s so personal and intimate you may feel uncomfortable.
She actually performed the song live numerous times before, but now iTunes is proposing ‘Bully’ as a bonus track for ‘Sun’.