Chan Speaking about Wanderer

I put links to these interviews in the interview topic. But here I have picked out the most interesting quotes from the current press about the album, and the making of the album. I'll try to update this a bit more soon. 

About Matador:

10/1/18 The Cut Interview:

They had said that I needed top producer, famous band. And I chose to become very stubborn and did everything myself. I did my very best, I worked so hard on it. I was so proud of it. I was so happy with everything I had created, and out of thin air. They weren’t betting on the horse to win. Just because somebody told me I was their family, I didn’t need to believe them. It was business to them, and they knew it was business. But I didn’t.

This new life, these new songs, I’m going to protect them. I’m not going to fight anymore with [Matador]. I’m going to make whatever comes to me, and that’s that, and that is art. I have to trust art because I’m here. I was so with my own child, and my own fucking songs that I wasn’t going to let any outside influence in. Just to make art! That’s all.

The 70-year-old me, whom I have yet to meet, was like, ''You ain’t got no time for this shit. You fucking fuck those motherfuckers. You got your kid here. Keep working, do what you do. Life will continue. You’re going to be okay.''

Days after she delivered the record to Matador — her home for seven albums and 20 years — they rejected it, and Marshall was suddenly, unexpectedly on her own.

9/20/18 New York Times Interview:

But Matador rejected the album.

“They said, do it again, do it over,” Ms. Marshall explained. (Mr. Slater confirmed that Matador told him “Wanderer” was “not good enough, not strong enough to put out.” The album will be released by Domino.)

Ms. Marshall said she’d received the same mandate from Matador during recording as she had for “Sun,” her previous album from 2012. “It was like, ‘We need hits!’” she said. “And I did it — I got Top 10. I did the best I could to give them hits” on “Sun,” using bright synths and more modern sounds. (“Sun” has sold 114,000 albums to date including streams, according to Nielsen.)

But to Ms. Marshall, the label had always represented artistic freedom. “Looking back, I know they were using me,” she said, recalling a Matador executive playing her an album by Adele and telling her that that was how a record was supposed to sound. “I understood that I was a product,” she said, “and I always thought I was a person.”

Matador said in a statement: “Chan Marshall is without question one of the most talented, brilliant artists we’ve been fortunate to know,” adding: “Our working relationship with Chan has not been without difficult moments. We’ve had disagreements over matters both artistic and business, but none of that changes our respect for her as a person or performer.”

10/1/18 Stereogum Interview:

When Matador rejected the first version of the album, Marshall’s confidence plummeted, but she didn’t want to back down, she still believed in the work.

“I learned the hard way that it’s just another business transaction. Even though they said I’m their family, for countless years. I learned the hard way that you know they’re not family. They actually went to business school and they’re a business. And indie rock means nothing,” Marshall says of her split with the label. “Artistic integrity actually means nothing. It’s about hit music, it’s a commodity, a product for sale.”

A label spokesperson points out Matador’s owners did not attend business school. They provided Stereogum with the following statement regarding Wanderer:

“Chan Marshall is without question one of the most talented, brilliant artists we’ve been fortunate to know.  Cat Power is a huge part of Matador’s history. Our working relationship with Chan has not been without difficult moments. We’ve had disagreements over matters both artistic and business, but none of that changes our respect for her as a person or performer. We hope the new album is an unqualified success and remain very grateful for the opportunity to work with someone this special.”

10/10/18 - Toronto Star Interview:

She found out that the label had been calling her mixer (former Elliott Smith producer Rob Schnapf) behind her back, “just being a force on his phone,” trying to get him to sway her to write more pop-oriented material. She was gutted. “When they said it was no good and they handed the record back there was a year of time that went by and I wasn’t sure where I was going to be releasing it and if I would release it.” 

10/9/18 - Beat Interview:

“For this record, I had the pressure on me again. I knew there was pressure to do a hit record. When they asked for it and when they returned it and said it was no good, that I needed to change it - I worked very specifically on this record. I had clearly visualised my path of recording this record right after my little boy was born. Sun was so overpowering. It was so dominating. I worked so hard to make sure that I created and formed sound and words with integrity. It’s so hard, because the idea of a ‘hit record’ just doesn’t make sense to me. Fame and wanting to be famous, I’m not comfortable with how absurd and how pointless that is.”

About Making Wanderer:

10/1/18 The Cut Interview:

I had my child. Went on tour when he was 2 months old. When he was 3 months old I started working [on Wanderer]. The question is usually, “How has your son changed your songwriting, and changed you as an artist?” He hasn’t changed my songwriting, as an artist, he hasn’t changed me. But as a human being, he’s fortified something.

10/3/18 Now Interview:

The label told her they needed a new record. So she moved to Miami and started recording once her son was three months old. She bounced around to different studios and cities. She turned to Rob Schnapf for mixing because of his production work with Elliott Smith. The first thing they recorded was a stunning, strings-and-piano version of Rihanna’s Stay. When she sent the record to Matador, she says they rejected it for lacking any hits. Then she didn’t have a label for a year.

10/9/18 Beat Interview:

“If I hadn’t left Miami, my comfort zone, and gone to mix somewhere else, I probably wouldn’t have recorded the song ‘Wanderer’, because it was so personal. It was more of a meditation. I wouldn’t have recorded ‘Stay’; that whole recording was just a soundcheck, basically. He had been recording and I didn’t know. My ex-label was calling him and asking if there were hits and he kept that information from me. He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t find out until  recently. He upheld his integrity as an artist too. Working with him, it was like being in his house. It was so comfortable.”

The importance of finding beauty in nuance was crucial for Marshall on Wanderer and in Schnapf, she found a comrade.

“He did a lot of work with Elliott Smith, who was a friend of mine. He understands the elegance of simplicity, you know? That’s really important. It was similar with Lana,” Marshall adds, reflecting on her relationship with Lana Del Rey, who features on ‘Woman’. “When she asked me to go on tour with her, there was an understanding of, ‘Hey, we’re a team’.
That’s what we’re meant to do. We’re meant to relate. If you see an old man who’s just broken down on the bus corner crying, we’re meant to put our hand on his shoulder and ask him if he’s okay or if he needs help, you know?”

10/5/18 The Independent Interview:

“The title of the album...” she says, trailing off. “Some people possibly can grow up in a very small town and never step out it their entire life, but the whole time they may have never even wondered what’s beyond the fence. Only through my own experience have I, you know, whether I wanted to or not, had to continue moving and wandering. So I never felt like I had a home. My son is now my home.”

10/1/18 Stereogum Interview:

“I chose the image on the cover because that’s my state of consciousness now in my life,” Marshall says slowly, deliberately as she looks down at her bare feet and fiddles with a Juul e-cig between inhalations. “There are two things I know for certain and that is my words — my songs — and my son. I am a reflection of those two things.”

About "Woman":

10/1/18 The Cut Interview:

Us having these conversations, I was like, ‘Dude, do you want to sing on this song with me?’ Lana is singing with me, loaning her credibility as a female who sings about darkness. It’s not sad Cat Power singing about her experience of being a woman. It’s we are multidimensional beings. All these other projections that had been on me from the press, the ex-label. Having another female opened the door for the listener to understand that I wasn’t alone in it. The subject wasn’t me, it was us.

10/10/18 Toronto Star Interview:

“Woman,” which was actually the first song she’d started recording for Wanderer but had left off the final track listing.

“ ‘Woman’ wasn’t attached to the album. It wasn’t a part of the album,” she says. “I didn’t know how to articulate why I wasn’t able to or ready to release this song, but through becoming friends with Lana and speaking about businessmen we’d dealt with and fathers and lovers, men, that’s when I realized that I probably wasn’t putting ‘Woman’ on my album because I would be alone with my sad song. So I asked Lana would she sing on it because I understood then it wouldn’t just be my ‘alone’ perspective, which it had always been. Then I asked Domino if I could include this on the record right before the mastering and that became the single.”

About "Stay":

9/20/18 - New York Times Interview:

“Stay” had stuck with her since she’d heard it years ago in someone’s car, she said. “An old lover, he was picking me up and he opened the door and that song was on the radio,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Oh, there’s my girl,’ and I thought he was talking about me, you know? Then the song ended and he turned off the radio, and I realized he was talking about Rihanna.” A few years later, not long after the birth of her son, she heard it again in a taxi and cried the whole ride. That night, she had plans to meet a friend at a karaoke bar, and decided “Stay” would be the only song she performed. She sang it 16 times.