PHOENIX — Cat Power (née Charlyn Marie “Chan” Marshall) took the stage at The Van Buren to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her landmark album The Greatest. What makes the concert a true triumph is the journey that led her here — setting it apart from the increasingly common anniversary album performances that have become routine for many artists in recent years.
You see, twenty-plus years ago, shortly before the album was released, Cat Power was last. At least, that was what the sign on the front door of the venue said when I first saw her perform in October 2005. As I understood it, she flew into St. Louis, got into a rental car, and started to drive to Springfield, Illinois and not Springfield, Missouri — where I lived and where the show was.
The estimated time of her arrival was 11:30 PM, but it ended up being nearly 1:00 AM when she pulled up and rushed in with her guitar case in hand. For an hour, she played for a crowd of diehard, devoted Cat Power fans who owned and loved her six albums and, by extension, loved her. She seemed a bit stressed by all that had transpired, and when she would pause or seem agitated, someone in the crowd would call out “We love you, Chan,” drawing a smile from her before she returned to singing.
Still though, her set that night was beautiful and brilliant. She included a few new songs, as she described them, that would appear just a few months later on her album The Greatest — an album that is the indie rock equivalent of Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis.
Cat Power in 2026
“Gracias,” said simply with a brief bow and a sip from a mug of hot tea.
Clad in a bright white ensemble of shoes, pants, belt, shirt, and jacket, she shone with the stage lights upon her, looking like I hope my guardian angel might look like, if such beings exist. As a performer, though, for all of her brilliance, she has never seemed fully comfortable on stage. She is not one for banter either, so throughout her set on Sunday, she simply said “Gracias” and bowed after each song.
Audience photo by Ryan Novak
It is difficult to put into context what The Greatest means to me and the rest of the audience. We, the Gen-X indie rockers of Phoenix, let each song wash over us. To look around was to see mouths moving while slightly singing, not necessarily along, but each to themselves. For so many of us, those songs all felt like hugs that we each needed those twenty years ago in the lost days of our youth and maybe, probably, still need now. Cat Power’s music has always been very emotionally raw, and something about that album clearly resonated in our souls.
With each song, she used two microphones to recreate the haunting reverberation of the vocals on the album (I always wondered how they achieved that effect). Even when she pulled the mics from the stand and moved about the stage, she held one in each hand and sang with the same passion that we felt with each song.
Audience photo by Ryan Novak.
With the album’s closing, she did not leave the stage. Cat Power has never been one for encores. No, she plays until she is ready to play no longer. She did a run through a short set of songs off her most recent albums, but finished with songs from across her three different albums of cover songs, culminating in a gorgeous full-band version of “Sea of Love,” originally performed on her The Covers Record in a slow, stark acoustic sung with a melancholy and longing. Now, though, it felt soaring and hopeful.
As I left that art gallery at 2:00 in the morning more than twenty years ago, I took the “Cat Power Got Lost” sign from the door and kept it. It now rests in a scrapbook of set lists and show flyers from over the years. Cat Power is no longer lost. On stage, shimmering in a heavenly white, she was most definitely found, and now she is triumphant and should take a moment to celebrate what is arguably her greatest work: The Greatest. This time, aside from her “Gracias,” she responded to each person who cried out, “We love you, Chan,” with that same smile, less nervous and more , and with a tender reply of “I love you, too, so much.“
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