Presented by (((folkYEAH!))) at the GB Amphitheater

Cat Power

Chan Marshall was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1972 and raised in North Carolina and Tennessee. She came of age as a musician in New York, where, in the early nineteen-nineties, she began recording under the name Cat Power. Her first releases, made with the drummer Steve Shelley, of Sonic Youth, reflect the city’s antagonism and discord. Sometimes, when you are young and far from home, it feels good to camp out in the corner of a dim, sticky dive, strum a single chord on a two-string guitar, and mumble the word “no” for fifteen minutes.

Marshall is now forty-six. In the decades since her début, she has provided a rare and important template for generations of indie-rock singers, and particularly for young women trying to come up in an aggressively male genre. It’s not difficult to draw a direct line from Marshall to contemporary artists such as Mitski, Angel Olsen, Phoebe Bridgers, Snail Mail, and Soccer Mommy—tough but vulnerable singers who write and often produce their own material, independent of a band. “Wanderer,” released this week, is the first Cat Power album since 1996 not to be on Matador, the independent record label that signed Marshall shortly after she moved to New York. (The album is being put out by Domino.)

“Wanderer” is about the complex, protracted condition of leaving home only to spend the rest of your life plagued by some invisible force luring you back. On much of the album, Marshall connects to a lineage of American searchers, from the itinerant bluesmen of the prewar Delta to drifting troubadours like the Texan folksinger Townes Van Zandt, all restless spirits who took off with only their songs to sustain them. Marshall is largely uninterested in the trappings of modern adulthood, and seems to place little value in the notion of being held down, or in holding someone else down. But a life of even gentle goodbyes can still exhaust a person.

Tickets on sale

• Food is available for purchase from El Sur Empanadas and Da Poke Man

• NO outside food, drink, chairs, pets or bad attitudes.  Food truck(s) will be available.

• Wine is, of course, available for sale by the glass and by the bottle, so thirst is covered too

• Parking is free for motos, full two seaters, electric cars, cars with three or more people and Bacchus Wine Club members. Everyone else is $10