It can take a keen set of ears to tell when Chan Marshall is singing someone else’s tune. Take her rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which opens 2000’s The Covers Record. Her voice dragging over spindly guitar, she sounds like a broken bird in a burned-out nest. Where the Stones’ swaggering anthem was a hot-blooded rush, Marshall’s version is hushed and dolorous, a wilted lily in an airless mausoleum. It’s not just a question of mood: She excises the song’s entire chorus, leaving only vignettes that feel like disconnected snapshots of a deep and unrelenting depression. Where the Stones’ song revels in a surfeit of emotion, Cat Power’s anhedonic dirge is a lament for the very impossibility of feeling anything at all.
To render a song so unrecognizable can appear irreverent, but Marshall has never come off as ironic or trolling. Even her most radical reinterpretations feel tender, searching, and, above all, thoughtful. And there are many: In addition to what are now three collections of cover songs, with the arrival of her latest album, Covers, most of her releases contain at least one song made famous by another singer. Her choices can be canonical or idiosyncratic: She’s tackled Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, and Billie Holiday, but also Liza Minelli, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Ca$h Money rappers Hot Boys. Long before indie rock’s cloistered scene had given way to a more diverse and dynamic landscape, Marshall reminded her listeners that life didn’t begin with the Velvet Underground (even though she covered them too). The widest ranging of any of her covers collections yet, Covers pushes beyond the habitual melancholy that has marked much of her work. In bold colors and vivid relief, it illustrates her talent for radical reinvention.
Her choices are audacious right from the opening track: “Bad Religion,” a total teardown of Frank Ocean’s 2012 single about nursing emotional wounds. In place of the original’s gospel organs and ’60s soul strings, Marshall swaps in piano backed by a subtle but muscular rock rhythm section. She not only changes the song’s key; she writes new chords and even a new melody. And while some of her lyrical edits might seem minor on the page—“Praise the Lord/Hallelujah, little girl” in place of “Allahu akbar”—her delivery brings these lines to the forefront, drawing out “Lord” into four agonized syllables that feel like a physical bloodletting. The most striking line of all is her own addition: “All just stuck in the mud/Praying to the invisible above,” an act of supplication that teases out the song’s implicit theme of faith and illuminates it like a cross up on the wall.