A child in front of her is climbing up the art deco brass railings. Marshall leans forward and waves at him. Meeting Marshall, you understand her music in an instant.
The music, hopping between folk, gospel, rock, blues and pop, is sad, but not depressing. There is still that melancholy, though. But then she flashes a reassuring smile and everything seems immediately OK again. Yeah, I made a choice to live in a bottle.
Three years later, around the release of her seventh album, The Greatest , she suffered a psychotic breakdown and was hospitalised and put on medication for bipolar disorder. Although a period of stability followed, as she settled down with Giovanni Ribisi, that nimbus of self-doubt returned in when the actor left her for British model Agyness Deyn, and Marshall ended up cancelling her European tour. A duet with Lana Del Rey, the song is a declaration of solidarity, brimming with defiance.
Enjoy unlimited access to 70 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a day free trial. Marshall, who moved to the Domino label after Wanderer was rejected by Matador, her home for 20 years, says the camaraderie she felt with Del Rey while they were recently on tour together reminded her of the Nineties.
To have [Lana] as a comrade, especially at a time when I was told my album was no good, really made me feel very nice. Another inspiration, says Marshall, was her friend Asia Argento, the Italian actress and one of the leaders of the MeToo movement. I ask her what she makes of Argento — who tweeted Cat Power lyrics after the death of her partner Anthony Bourdain earlier this year — being accused of sexually assaulting a year-old Argento has denied the allegations.
Individuality is key for Marshall — in her eyes, the artists who have it are the ones who change lives. Madonna got her scholarship to Martha Graham Studio from Detroit for dancing. Their bodies are language.
She also talks about Aretha Franklin. But when I heard her sing, all the garbage was cleared away. This album contains a lot of layered vocals, where she records herself singing the same line again and again, creating her own echo. The purpose is served. Marshall grew up in a chaotic, poor family with a largely absent blues musician father and a mother from whom she would later become estranged.
In her late teens, Marshall got involved in the rock band scene in s Atlanta, a community that she says was full of loss, with people dying of Aids or heroin overdoses before their talent had seen the light of day.
That minor sound — sad — is the representation of most of my songs. Talking to Chan Marshall, it is always clear to me what she means. Yet when I come to transcribe the tape recording, it is hard to write up some of the sentences that stop and start, the missing words. Take the song In Your Face, with its slowed-down Cuban ballroom syncopation and lyrics about a man who protects his conscience with a military fanfare and by forbidding himself to think.
Might this, paradoxically, be the first truly beautiful song about Donald Trump? She smiles and explains the title. But I think industrialised countries, the people, are becoming more infuriated. Rather than expecting a superhero, you know, a Churchill or a JFK to swoop in, I think people are actually becoming more and more open to paying attention to opposing positions.
So you have some hope? Or self-destruction. But it is clear that creating peace of mind for herself is something she takes more seriously now. I only wanted to think about what arrived in my brain. Something else that reinforced her, this year, was playing the 20th-anniversary concert of her album Moon Pix in the Sydney Opera House in May. The concert cemented something in her head about her own sanity; her own power. The more stories she heard, the more she realised what her small act of creation had achieved.
But when we played them, I realised the great love that I had had for myself. People wrote her off — but she was right. No one brings up her name. When I was born my mom left me at the hospital. I think I was very afraid of feeling disconnection from the baby.
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