Notebook: CAT POWER SINGS BOB DYLAN: THE 1966 ROYAL ALBERT HALL CONCERT by Cat Power

Sure, but... how does it feel?

Chan Marshall aka Cat Power

Even though music is a deeply meaningful and important to me, I have my own problems when it comes to musical appreciation. I’ve written about it before, but I do not process lyrics and words— their meaning, their feeling— when I listen to songs. Words exist almost syllabically for me in the context of songs; they are a mechanism for delivering melody or rhythm or both, but they do not register for me in the same way they do for many people, as an integral part of a song’s quality and meaning. I recognize them as words, as language, on a surface level, but as stories or narratives or meaningful statements? No.

At the same time, I deeply feel and process melody and rhythm and pitch and harmony in ways that, it seems, many other people do not. Unexpected lyrical shifts do not make the hairs on my arms stand on end, but unexpected harmonic shifts absolutely do. This is, I think, why singing is so fascinating to me as it seems so many great singers are able to transform lyrical meaning into musical emotion, a skill that I not only do not possess, but which I find to be a sort of transcendent power, and really, a defining feature of my longing to fully connect with songs.

It may come as no surprise then that, as a kid growing up in the 1980’s, two of my favorite singers were, essentially, indecipherable to me. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. took words and disregarded the need to have them understood. Instead, he created a private world of meaning for himself¹, an approach that absolutely shaped my understanding of musical feeling. Liz Fraser of the band Cocteau Twins, even more so— her Scottish accent and incomprehensible delivery became a shimmering tower of feeling and mood. I was absolutely not aware of it then, but over time, I have grown to see that I was finding refuge in their voices precisely because they reinforced my own way of hearing and experiencing melody.

Take Liz Fraser as an example.  It’s 1983, you’re twelve years old, you’re in your bedroom, you put on a record, and Liz just, well, listen:

Standing out in front of reel to reel drum machines, bright, shimmering guitars, and that heavy, relentless bass, Liz’s dark, etherial howl of a voice cuts straight through you.

Cocteau Twins were post-punk and postmodern, creators of a goosebump-inducing sound that felt like the future and some hidden, dangerous past, all at once². One thing they were not were “storytellers.” To this day, I have not one idea what Liz is singing about, hardly a single word across any of their albums. If I do catch a word, I question it, I go back and listen again, and then, maybe, one, a single jewel, but I couldn’t tell you what it means. When I listen to them, I am not looking for story because I’ll never find it anyway— the feeling and melody and that voice, intertwined, is the meaning. And Cocteau Twins continue to mean the world to me.

If punk rock was a reaction to the stadium excesses of the post-singer/songwriter era, Cocteau Twins were a response to punk itself— fronted by a woman, stripping away the nasty boy lyrics and retro rock-and-roll influences of Ramones and Sex Pistols and The Damned (for example) and replacing them with something emotionally overwhelming— dark, gorgeous, and unknowable.

Which brings me, of course, to Bob Dylan.

As much as his work has meant to so many people, I have never connected with Dylan’s music in the way that others have, primarily because his generation-defining lyrics are, for the most part, lost on me³. My inability to process the meaning of his lyrics is a disconnect I cannot seem to repair— whereas Dylan’s work springs from a stripped down, folk storytelling tradition that is deeply connected to the concept of populist authenticity, so much of his power as a songwriter and performer comes from his command of language, the simplicity of the guitar coupling with the intimacy of his vocal delivery as he tells a story in song.

I need to clarify: It is not that I don’t understand the lyrics to songs. Obviously, when I read “Once upon a time you dressed so fine/threw the bums a dime in your prime/ Didn’t you?” I understand it, what it means, and I absolutely see the poetic value of the words. It is more that, when Dylan sings them and they go flowing by with music behind them, I am not processing them at all. I can even sing along with the words, but I don’t really experience them as words with any meaning. They are just part of the sonic landscape of the song. Dylan’s songs in particular, with their long, structured verses, are impossible for me to follow as they’re being sung— by the time a song like DESOLATION ROW wraps up, I have no idea where it started, where it ended, what happened, what it means. For me, its power as a song is in its feeling, its mood, in the emotional experience it delivers as music.⁴

But I also absolutely get it. Dylan took his songwriting beyond the influences of the past and forged a modernist approach that plugged directly into a rapidly fracturing social and political moment, one that planted the seeds of our current time, which makes his music and personae enduringly contemporary. By connecting the past to the splintered present in a new and powerful way, Dylan created the freedom to transform himself. And it is there that I really connect with Dylan, when he serves as a bridge between the poetry and structures of traditional music and opens up the sky to something new. Not just one time, but always, a perpetual movement of personal reinvention. He literally embodies the huge rupture of his time and is, I think, a uniquely representative ideal of a certain strain of self-created American individualism.

So, there is a ton about Dylan I do admire very much, particularly his refusal to stay in place, his trying on identities and the constant changing of his public persona and, I’ll say it, the many, many moments in his work where his voice and melodic delivery just absolutely move me. But Dylan’s work, the long, shifting arc of his unparalleled career, has always felt to me like it belonged to someone else. Like trying on your father’s best coat and feeling out of place in it⁵. In this sense, Dylan epitomizes my own deficiency at finding an emotional connection to words within music, the fullness of his meaning as an artist⁶ clashing with my brain’s inability to process his lyrics, that conflict crashing against his hyper-literate storytelling style.

Which is why I was absolutely shocked, like, lightning bolt shocked, when I heard the new Cat Power album CAT POWER SINGS DYLAN: THE 1966 ROYAL ALBERT HALL CONCERT which is, and I can’t tell you how much I love it, a live album wherein Cat Power (aka Chan Marshall) covers, song for song, Bob Dylan’s legendary 1966 concert in Manchester, UK⁷. Listening to Chan’s performances on this album brought me, for the first time ever, to a place where Dylan’s music clicked, and it’s clear Marshall’s emotional delivery as a singer— that voice!— and her understanding of the melodic feeling in the songs in this performance, are the crucial factors in making them utterly transcendent, bringing forward those elements for me in a way Dylan, as a performer, typically does not. Doing all of that in the context of a live performance only adds to its luster.

For me, Chan is the perfect artist for this project. First, she is somewhat of a shapeshifter of her own, changing her approach to her own compositions, inhabiting other people’s songs, always alive to and curious about musical possibility. Her voice continues to grow more and more resonant for me as she ages, and that voice has always pulled me right in to her music— it remains warm and wary, rich and alive in ways that only an artist with her experience⁸ could convey. With this incredible set of songs in particular, Chan is an emotional antenna, pulling down feeling from the sky and transmitting it directly through her voice, at once honoring the originals and bending them to her will. Doing all of that in the context of a live album only makes it more human and dynamic. It is her alchemical transformation of Dylan’s music, from song to experienced feeling to voice, that makes this record so special.

I don’t want to overstate things, but I think this album has unlocked Dylan’s music for me, sending me scrambling back to his albums and performances, reassessing my own detachment from his work, to think about his songs in, for me, a new way⁹.  Chan Marshall has found a profound and deeply moving level of contemporary feeling in this music, and by making it hers, she has, suddenly, made it mine. Which means that it was always there, it was always mine, I just had to find my own way in. I just needed someone to hold my hand and show me how.

1. It should come as no surprise that once Stipe grew in confidence as a singer and performer, he started making his lyrics more broadly relatable, his articulation more clear, and his voice more forward in the mix, the band’s music became much more popular.

2. While I know that later albums like HEAVEN OR LAS VEGAS have gone on to be genre defining masterpieces, I am talking early Cocteau Twins here, which, explaining in words how revelatory it was to discover their music in the 1980’s is a piece for another day…

3. …and not being a part of the generation defined by Dylan’s music doesn’t help, if I’m honest.

4. I’m trying to make it make sense!

5. I am sure to many of Dylan’s generation, he was the antithesis of this feeling. But times are always a’changin’ , non?

6. I mean, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It doesn’t get any more meaningful as a lyricist than that.

7. Released by Dylan many years later as The Bootleg Series Volume 4, the famous performance from the Manchester Free Trade Hall on May 17, 1966 came at a moment of seismic change for Dylan— this is the period when he transitioned from solo acoustic performance and went electric for the first time, inspiring an audience member at this show to infamously call him “Judas!” This show was mistakenly labeled on ensuing bootleg tapes as being recorded at The Royal Albert Hall in London, so Cat Power’s winking title for this record and her decision to record her performance at The Royal Albert Hall only make me love it more because #InsideBaseball.

8. I’ll never forget reading this interview the first time… it is incredible, painful, and vulnerable, one that has had a profound impact on me.

9. …and to write this weird piece!