1. Cat Power, Sea of Love
1. Cat Power, Sea Of Love
Louisiana musician Phil Batiste wrote and released the original version of Sea of Love under the name Phil Phillips in 1959. Like many great love songs, Sea Of Love is known just as much for a terrible schmaltzy cover (in this case, an early-eighties version by the Honeydrippers) as it is for the original. But the original is wonderful, because it’s so lyrically simple. One metaphor, and it’s in the title, and only a few words rhyme. When Cat Power recorded the song in 2000 she stripped it down even further, getting rid of the backing singers and the fifties arrangement and not replacing them with anything.
I bought The Covers Record when the InSound bus made a stop at Brown University, which was where I worked and not where I went; I didn’t know of Cat Power previously (though I remember pretending I had, once, to impress some girls in line at Store 24) but the indie-snob InSound dudes were really adamant that I get this, for some reason I don’t recall, in addition to the Lucksmiths 10” that I was purchasing.
As I’ve said in previous reviews, 2000 was kind of a downer year for me, with the whole not going to college thing at the beginning of the year and then the whole going to college and hating it and breaking up with my first boyfriend thing at the year’s end. This was also, despite my love of Pink and Britney and Christina and Hoku and Vitamin C, the beginning of my indie-snob phase, something you’ll more clearly when I move into the 2001 list. Cat Power makes sense when you’re depressed anywhere, but especially when you’re in upstate New York surrounded by people you don’t like and you’re in the middle of nowhere and it’s the fifth-snowiest winter in recorded history. I played this album a lot.
If you’re in the mood, and really you do have to be in the mood, The Covers Record has a bunch of great tracks on it. I remember at the time I made this list trying to decide whether Sea of Love or (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction or I Found A Reason or Naked If I Want To or Troubled Waters was the best; I’d still have trouble choosing, and can’t really play the album without singing along with it.
Unlike a lot of her 2000-era fans I don’t dislike later Cat Power; Jukebox, her second album of covers, is actually pretty good, once you detach the music from the personality of the woman singing it. But for those of us who listened to her for days on end when we were at our most miserable, that’s actually a pretty tough separation to make.
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