Cat Power…then I’m soft

Cat Power. Something about that music, something about Chan Marshall – her voice, her words, her mannerisms – just gets me. I know but a fraction of all that is Cat Power, but it catches me and it catches in my throat, being something that I can’t wholly swallow. Seeping into me, it makes my chest ache with a thrill or nostalgia or loneliness or love for things nonspecific. Maybe I ache with all those at once. I listen to her voice singing, delicately rough, and it’s as if it’s trying to exfoliate me from the inside out. It isn’t an obvious scraping or scratching, but it is rubbing away the dead cells or some unfeeling I may have. After I listen to (and/or watch) a song by Cat Power, I can’t help but to feel something. Maybe I’m over dramatizing the effect this music has on me and maybe another day I will be sick of it, but today this is where it is for me. True enough.

A view of the world through a child’s unclouded eyes. Crying fetal-ly. Looking too closely in the mirror. That’s the sense I get. That probably tells more about me than it does about Cat Power. So, while I’m on that track, let me stray further…

When I was younger, I thought I might grow up to be magical. I hoped I would. I wanted to smell like flowers without help from perfume, lotion, or shampoo. I imagined that maybe someday my eyes would actually sparkle. That my skin might shimmer at sunrise and glow in the night. That my hair would radiate light. I could be the girl of the love poems and the love songs that aren’t real, except that I would be, you know, real.

To be honest, I never really hoped for those things to be true of me. I knew it wasn’t possible, but I did like to think of it back then. What’m I saying…I still do.

Maybe I should think of having traits more honorable, more useful, but no. Even if neither this nor that has or has not to do with what I started out with, not now. I’ll save that more worthy stuff for another time.

So you see, this is what listening to Cat Power does to me. Or maybe that’s just my excuse.

The Greatest

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