Chan Marshall: Scratching the surface

She wowed Madonna but couldn't care less about recording and claims that her latest Cat Power album isn't really an album at all. Kevin Harley asks Chan Marshall what she does care about

Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, isn't about to give her new album the old-school press plug. You don't get that from the 30-year- old Atlanta-born singer-songwriter, whose last album, The Covers Record, released in 2000, gave alt.Americana a proper set of goose pimples with its hushed, otherworldly folk-blues transformations of songs by the likes of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Lou Reed. And with that voice: eerily parched and haunting. Her new one, You Are Free, is her first collection of mostly self-penned songs since 1998's Moon Pix. Here's the pitch: "The album? The album isn't anything. To me, the album isn't even an album. It's, like, periods of time in this ant's life, just looking at... stuff."

It's not a poster quote. But then, Marshall's music has never been something to treasure for its go-Cat, power-spiel possibilities. "I have no idea what I'm talking about," she repeats, often, "and I don't know what I'm doing, but I don't have anything else to do." As for being interviewed, well, she's honest: "Photo shoots, interviews, all that shit. You! The interviewer! The analyser! Take this person and figure them out in 1,200 words! It's not garbage, but there's no way one person can be the stimulus for so much... stuff."

You could argue that she's being disingenuous. Formerly, Chan – you pronounce it "Sharn" – has put in an abashed appearance in a Gap advert, and in magazines alongside Catherine Deneuve and Fiona Apple. She has been courted by Madonna for her record label, and mingled at one of Puff Daddy's parties not so long ago. Pretty showbiz.

But she clearly fell into all this "stuff" by accident. She might not be a reluctant singer or songwriter; she makes those talents sound innate. She might, though, make America's most reluctant star, or even "recording artist". Initially, Cat Power was just a band she played in while living between her divorced father and her nomadic, bohemian mother in Atlanta in the 1980s – named not to evoke anything tippy-toed and feline, as you might imagine from her music, but after the "Cat Diesel Power" logo on a friend's cap.

Thrown out of her father's place for flunking school in the early 1990s, she ended up in New York's arty East Village. There, it took the Sonic Youth associate Wharton Tiers to talk her into recording some songs. These made up her first two albums, Dear Sir and Myra Lee, but she wasn't happy about putting them down and getting them out. That uncertainty has stuck: "I couldn't care less about recording," she says now.

Perhaps it is this ambivalence that makes her gigs almost legendarily touch-and-go. Played solo or with a small band, they either induce reverence or rile non-converts something rotten. Perhaps she'll sing at a whisper, barely visible behind her fringe, or stumble into the mic stand and on to the next song before finishing the previous one. Or simply play on and on, trying to put the set to rights in extra time, she says. Oddly, you hear less about the gigs that do go right – a sublime show at Bush Hall, London, last November, say, jokes included. (It was about Virgos and virgins, it was funny, and yes, you had to be there.) Maybe that's why she seems tired of the subject. Asked about performing, she says: "It's psychological."

It was while touring for her third album, What Would the Community Think, that Moon Pix came about. Things clearly came to a head: she suffered a breakdown and decamped to Australia to record the album. Two-thirds of the masterful mood instrumentalists, and sometime Nick Cave cohorts, the Dirty Three, provided evocative backing. That time, she did push to make it. Had to, even: "I was like, 'Excuse me, I'm doing this, get out of my way.'" She's described the tracks as "salvation songs", and there's been plenty written about the demons in them.

Her new album came together on the road, too, albeit not with the same urgency. "I never wanted to put out another record after The Covers Record," Marshall says. "But I kept playing shows, living life, meeting people – younger people, mostly, now I'm getting older, when before it was peers at my concerts. And they'd say, 'When's your next record coming out?' So I felt guilty. I felt bad. And y'know, it's for free – the record company's like, 'Oh, we'll put your record out.'"

Anyone with a yen for the darker corners of Will Oldham and Smog, or the kind of lo-fi, post-grunge sounds she must have soaked up in the early 1990s East Village, will be happy it did. You Are Free is a distinct record, though. Anything with her voice would be. It's as pleasingly out of step with most current music as, say, Beth Gibbons and Rustin' Man's Out of Season, and as all-enveloping. You have to get up close to it, and it keeps you there, pulls you in. Singing sweetly on two tracks, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder is transformed. Foo Fighter and Cat fan Dave Grohl pads along softly on drums. Warren Ellis is very much himself, mind: the sometime Bad Seed and Dirty Three man's violin weeps majestically on "Good Woman".

She's not too willing to talk about it, though, from the title ("It's almost, like, a colour"), down to reference points ("Oh, man. Are you high on crack? There's more to life than trying to file some data"), or the timeless appeal of the inimitable Michael Hurley. Marshall crooned the legendary Greenwich Village singer-songwriter's dreamy "Sweedeedee" on The Covers Record, and he's called on again for You Are Free's "Werewolf", a reworking of his lusty lament to magnificently atmospheric effect.

"It's just a song a guy wrote," Marshall sighs. "A guy nobody... I don't want to say nobody likes, but no one's heard of, because he's not hopping around on one foot shaking his tail feathers and bending over backwards with a rose in his teeth trying not to spit while he swallows an enchilada, or doing brain surgery for no reason." Sorry? "I mean, he's not a market- able object.

And Marshall is raging against the marketing machine today. "I've never known what it's like to be doing what I'm doing right now," she says. "But I don't like it and I don't understand it." She was working on a video for the single "He War" before we spoke, so maybe she's promo'd out. She flits from utterly earnest to infectious giggling fits, but sticks like Sellotape to the anti-sell. Energetically, entertainingly, warmly, she talks about anything but the album. Martin Luther King. Jim Jarmusch. Rose Kennedy's lobotomy. Her much-loved shearling boots. ("Everyone thinks they're ugly and uncool, but God, you have no idea how comfortable they are.")

As to what drives her, the answer is as refreshingly atypical as her music. "It starts to matter when someone says, 'I feel something.' You can't articulate it, you can't reach it. You know how it is, sometimes, with songs, with music – it can just slice right through you." Listening to Cat Power, you know how it is.

'You Are Free' is out on Matador on 17 February