Cat Power has recorded her second album of cover versions, with striking reinventions of songs by Hank Williams, Joni Mitchell and Frank Sinatra. Her secret? To sing all songs as if they've never been sung before. But there's more than one way to cover a tune, writes Jim Carroll.
MEET the godmother of the cover version. Back in 2000, Cat Power released The Covers Record, an album which saw her tackle songs as diverse as Nina Simone's Wild Is The Wind, The Rolling Stones's (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction and The Velvet Underground's I Found A Reason. Whatever about Chan Marshall's own songs and releases up to that point, those covers really got people talking. Perhaps inevitably, Power has returned to the cover version.
Seven years on from that first album of other folks' tunes, Jukebox arrives into the shops today with Power throwing her heart and soul into songs originally shaped by Hank Williams, The Highwaymen, Frank Sinatra, James Brown, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. There are two originals here, including Song to Bobby, her ode to Dylan, but it's the covers that dominate.
Much has happened to Power between the release of the two albums - including lots of turbulence in what was long a troubled personal life - but the most striking event was probably the reaction to her 2006 album, The Greatest.
Recorded in Memphis with a band drawn from the ranks of those legendary soul men who filled in the gaps on Al Green and Stax releases back in the day, The Greatest was Power's most successful release to date. Audiences and critics worldwide really responded to those beautifully sparse, lazy, hazy country-soul songs.
Yet instead of following that up with more of her own songs, Power has decided to hit the covers trail again. She doesn't see anything wrong with this. As she told Greil Marcus in a rare in-depth interview last year, she always covers songs as if they're brand new compositions anyway.
"The reason the songs don't sound the way they're supposed to, the way the original vocal lines or melodies are set, is because I don't know how to play them on an instrument and I'm too impatient to learn," she told Marcus. "I don't feel like it's so much of a necessity to be exact."
Those marvellous reinventions, which have become Power's stock-in-trade, though, are far from the norm in this game. Cover versions sadly remain the last refuge of the musical scoundrel. There's a lot of evidence for the prosecution to consider in this regard.
HOW NOT TO DO IT 1: BUTCHER A CLASSIC
Like so many of their pop peers, the members of that bland cash-cow Westlife have carved a very successful career for themselves by callously butchering the songs of Billy Joel, the Rat Pack and many others. You could accuse their manager, Louis Walsh, of many things, but you cannot fault his unerring ability to match his bands with the right covers.
HOW NOT TO DO IT 2: THE IRONIC NOVELTY VERSION
This is when a group such as Travis or Fountains of Wayne decide to have a pop at Baby One More Time with usually execrable results. This redrawing of a big mainstream pop tune can be done well - Roddy Frame and Aztec Camera's sublime version of Van Halen's Jump, for instance, makes our Top 20 list (see panel) - but, more often than not, more thought goes into the choice of cover rather than the execution of the song - the musical equivalent of style over substance.
Yet there have been - and continue to be - fantastic cover versions recorded of great and not-so-great songs. When you evaluate these, you'll find certain qualities coming up again and again.
HOW TO DO IT 1: REINVENTION
There's the complete reinvention, where a song you know like the back of your hand is flipped and leaves you trying to work out what the hell happened.
One of the best recent examples of this is Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road, as visited by Will Oldham (AKA Bonnie "Prince" Billy) and Tortoise, who streamlined the song to accentuate its powerful narrative.
You can also find it in how certain artists approach hoary, well-worn standards. For example, there's a hard-to-find version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow from Jerry Lee Lewis which turns that song into a lonesome, heartbreaking torch ballad.
HOW TO DO IT 2: CROSS-POLLINATION
This can often result in fascinating covers. Who ever thought that Kraftwerk's austere, Teutonic grooves could have been successfully reinvented as alluring cha-cha-cha and merengue grooves? Who knew that a whole swathe of stout meat-and-two-veg indie anthems from the Kaiser Chiefs, The Zutons and Coldplay were crying out for a big dollop of brass?
Who believed that the arch-miserabalism of The Smiths would have sounded so much better with added electronics? Step forward German-Chilean band-leader Señor Coconut, hip DJ/producer Mark Ronson and German electronic wizard Schneider TM. They were the ones who boldy went to places other people had never dreamed of.
HOW TO DO IT 3: CHANGE OF OWNERSHIP
Then, there are the artists who put their own stamp on a song so forcibly that you will forever associate that tune with the new singer. After Johnny Cash hooked up with producer Rick Rubin in the 1990s and began to record the American albums, he claimed ownership of one iconic song after another.
From Nine Inch Nails' Hurt and Nick Cave's This Mercy Seat to U2's One and Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down, the Man in Black occupied those songs in ways their originators never imagined.
As Cat Power shows on Jukebox, the art of the cover version is all about taking the familiar and doing something entirely else with it. It might be someone else's tune, but you can always have some fun with it.
Jukebox is released on January 25th on Matador Records.
