Many artists with stage fright avoid the stage. So, why does Chan travel the world performing all the time? “That’s something I can’t answer,” she says. “I don’t know what else to do. In a perfect world, I would be in love and have children and have a reason to stay in one place and not do this anymore.”

When I say it seems like she might be running away from something, she gets upset. “Running away from what? What is there? I think about this a lot. I’m just alone.” Maybe stability?

“Well, where do you find that?” Chan asks loudly. “You can’t buy that anywhere!”

Before there was Cat Power or Chan Marshall, there was Charlyn Marie Marshall, born in Georgia in 1972. Her parents divorced and remarried shortly thereafter. She shuffled all around Georgia and Alabama, living with her mother or father or grandmother, and never staying anywhere long enough to make permanent friends.

At 16, Chan became estranged from her mother (she wouldn’t speak to her again until she was 24—they’re still not close) and moved in with her father, who’s also a musician, in Atlanta. “When I moved in,” Chan recalls, “he got a baby grand. I wasn’t allowed to touch it.” She switches to a stern, exaggerated man’s voice. “ ‘Chan! The piano is not a toy.’ Like I’m a child. I’m fuckin’ 16 years old. It would make me so sad, because I loved it. So, he’d leave and I’d beat the shit out of it. Imagine if he’d let me play and taught me? Imagine.” During her senior year, Chan dropped out of school and moved out. Her father’s no longer in her life.

Chan bought a fifties Silvertone guitar when she was 18. She thought it was beautiful, but she didn’t touch it for a year. “It was art in the corner.” Only later, on days off from work, would she play with it.

Atlanta had a vibrant but unheralded rock scene. After joining in some impromptu basement jams, Chan hooked up with a local scenester named Glen Thrasher, a guitarist named Mark Moore, and a couple of other musicians. Another band asked the loose collective to open for them, but they needed a name. Chan was working the register at a pizzeria when Moore called. “There was a line of people,” she recalls. “Mark was yellin’, ‘We need a name!’ This old man came in wearing a ‘Cat Diesel Power’ cap. I was like, ‘Cat Power!’ and hung up the phone.”

One of Cat Power’s early songs was titled “We All Die”—“I thought those songs were triumphant,” she says.

Drugs hit the group’s social circle hard. “Everyone started doin’ heroin,” Chan says, “and becoming a junkie.” Chan never uses the word die; she says “pass away,” and a disproportionate number of her friends have passed away. After one death, “I wanted to escape Atlanta,” so in 1992, Chan and Thrasher moved to the East Village.

New York was a new beginning. “I felt like I survived something,” she says. Thrasher took her to the club ABC No Rio, which was an awakening for Chan, whose eclectic but limited tastes extended from the Jesus Lizard to Hank Williams. “The lights were superbright, and there was a naked girl and some guy beating metal. It was so inspiring.”

She and Thrasher gigged around with an ever-evolving lineup. Gerard Cosloy, co-founder of the label Matador, who first saw them perform at a loft party, recalls that “Chan had extremely short hair, almost shaved in a military style. She was very tentative about the audience, but she had a presence that said, ‘This is a serious thing.’ ”

Chan waitressed and did odd jobs like organizing the apartment of a woman who had obsessive-compulsive disorder. (“She would have twelve bottles of shampoo in the shower, the same damn thing, with a little bit in each one.”) She found a cheap room in a shared East Village apartment for $150. She still has it. The rent is now $199.

In 1993, Thrasher moved back to Atlanta. Cat Power was now officially Chan and whoever else (if anybody) playing with her. For the next few years, she worked with Sonic Youth’s drummer, Steve Shelley, and Tim Foljahn from Two Dollar Guitar. In 1996, after she’d recorded two albums, including Myra Lee (named after Chan’s mother, something they’ve still never discussed), Cat Power was signed by Cosloy to Matador. The first few releases were characterized by often nightmarish and impenetrable lyrics. In “Good Clean Fun,” she sings, “After this there will be nothing / After this there will be heads on different bodies.” One song is titled “We All Die.”

“I felt that those songs were triumphant,” Chan says. “In order to survive, I had to explain reality. Those songs were a way of feeling stuff and seeing stuff, and there was a narrative. There was someone who was able to get through it to tell it.”