Cat Power

Charlyn Marie "Chan" Marshall (/ˈʃɔːn/ SHAWN; born January 21, 1972), better known by her stage name Cat Power, is an American singer-songwriter. Cat Power was originally the name of her first band, but has become her stage name as a solo artist.

Born in Atlanta, Marshall was raised throughout the southern United States and began performing in local bands in Atlanta in the early 1990s. After opening for Liz Phair in 1993, she worked with Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth and Tim Foljahn of Two Dollar Guitar, with whom she recorded her first two albums, Dear Sir (1995) and Myra Lee (1996), on the same day in 1994. In 1996, she signed with Matador Records, and released a third album of new material with Shelley and Foljahn, What Would the Community Think. Following this, she released the critically acclaimed Moon Pix (1998), recorded with members of Dirty Three, and The Covers Record (2000), a collection of sparsely arranged cover songs.

After a brief hiatus she released You Are Free (2003), featuring guest musicians Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder, followed by the soul-influenced The Greatest (2006), recorded with numerous Memphis studio musicians. A second album of cover tracks, Jukebox, was released in 2008. In 2012 she released the self-produced Sun, which debuted at number 10 on the Billboard 200, the highest-charting album of her career to date.

Critics have noted the constant evolution of Cat Power's sound, with a mix of punk, folk and blues on her earliest albums, and elements of soul and other genres more prevalent in her later material.

Charlyn Marie Marshall was born January 21, 1972, in Atlanta, Georgia, the second child of Charlie Marshall, a blues musician and pianist, and Myra Lee Marshall (née Russell). She has one older sister, Miranda ("Mandy"). Her maternal grandfather was of Native American ancestry. Her parents divorced in 1979 and remarried shortly thereafter. Her mother remarried and had a son, Lenny, and the family traveled around often because of her stepfather's profession.

Marshall attended ten different schools throughout the Southern U.S. in Greensboro; Bartlett and Memphis and throughout Georgia and South Carolina. At times she was left in the care of her grandmother. She was not allowed to buy records when she was growing up, but she listened to her stepfather's record collection, which included artists Otis Redding, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Rolling Stones, as well as her parents' records, which included Black Flag, Sister Sledge, and Barry White. In sixth grade, she adopted the nickname Chan (pronounced "Shawn"), which she would later use professionally. When she was 13, she listened to the Smiths, the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees. She had to save up to buy cassettes and the first one she got was a record by the Misfits. As a high schooler in Atlanta, she saw shows by punk bands including a Cramps show at which Flat Duo Jets opened. She has referenced multiple times the influence of Dex Romweber from Flat Duo Jets, and she bought her first guitar because it looked like his black and white Silvertone. At age 16, Marshall dropped out of high school and became estranged from her mother, having no further contact with her until she was 24.

Religion was a large part of Marshall's upbringing; her father was a Jehovah's Witness, though she attended Southern Baptist churches with her grandmother, where she began singing while learning hymns.

Marshall's first instrument was a 1950s Silvertone guitar, which she taught herself to play. While working in a pizzeria, she began playing music in Atlanta in the late-1980s with Glen Thrasher, Marc Moore, Damon Moore and Fletcher Liegerot, who would get together for jam sessions in a basement. The group were booked for a show and had to come up with a name quickly; after seeing a man wearing a Caterpillar trucker cap that read: "Cat Diesel Power", Marshall chose Cat Power as the name of the band.