Chan Marshall sits in her record company's office toying with a partially eaten apple. It is a fitting symbol. In Tokyo to promote her new album under the Cat Power moniker, "You Are Free," Marshall (first name pronounced Shawn) is dealing with her own peculiar fall from grace: the publicity tour.
"I'm talking to you like a human being," she keeps repeating, as if to wish herself into a different situation.
Her entertaining stories, told in a voice that modulates between a whisper and a whoop, would be more appropriate on a girls' night out. Lacking an ability to edit herself, thoughts flitting through her head are immediately expressed. The subject changes every few minutes, digressing to her safari in Africa ("A hippo can bite a person in half!"), her worries about teenagers ("They've been told about the condom, the p***y and the d**k, but not about the human interaction between a man and a woman"), and the redemptive power of making music ("[If I wasn't doing it] I would probably have three kids by three different fathers").