Be My Shrink For The Hour

Cat Power “Bad Religion”

Chan Marshall does a lot of things in her covers that I typically hate – she slows songs waaaay down, significantly alters melodies and chord progressions, emphasizes the lyrics over the music. But this all works for her because her approach isn’t a matter of just playing a song, it’s more about showing us how she’s heard a piece of music and connected with it. It’s as though she’s heard something that has moved her, scribbled down a lot of notes and lyrics that resonated with her, and then she made another piece of music based on that. Her version of Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion” barely resembles his original, trading out his muted gospel for a cautious rhythm and guitar and piano tones that will sound familiar to anyone whose heard her ‘90s recordings. But you can really feel how she internalized his song, particularly the parts in which he’s spilling his guts to an anonymous cab driver because he feels like he’s under siege and he’s desperate to finally just say some things he can’t stop thinking about. Marshall zeroes in on the exhaustion at the core of the song and moves from there, connecting to her own terrible memories by way of Ocean’s exasperated vulnerability in the original recording.

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