Catfight!
Shelby Lynne and Cat Power in a feline brawl for best 'covers' album.
Alison Powell
January 30, 2008
Shelby Lynne, Just A Little Lovin’ (Lost Highway)
Cat Power, Jukebox (Matador)
Interpretation can be as rare and mesmerizing a talent as the act of writing great songs—and these two new covers albums prove it. Finally making good on all those comparisons to Dusty in Memphis, Shelby Lynne has recorded Just A Little Lovin’, an album of songs made famous by Dusty Springfield. The hits are there, but in place of Springfield’s dramatic sweep is the spare intimacy of Lynne’s voice, a casual triumph of feeling. There is one Lynne original, “Pretend,” but the real highlights are revelatory versions of songs we only thought we knew, such as “How Can I be Sure,” “The Look of Love,” “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me,” and the seductively perfect title track. Jukebox, Cat Power’s second covers album, transforms numbers inviolably linked to their original artists such as Sinatra’s “New York, New York” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue”—even one by Billie Holiday (“Don’t Explain”)—into songs only Power could sing.
Like Lynne, Power is all about inflection, here bending the bars so deftly that her lone original, “Song to Bobby,” ambles with the easy gait of Bob Dylan; the Dylan cover (“I Believe in You”) sounds like Power wrote it. One can only imagine what Frank would have to say about this enigmatic chanteuse’s wholesale reconfiguring of his theme song. Plenty. But Cat Power is an artist who takes in music like smoke—she exhales only after it has sunk into her lungs and run through her bloodstream. Take a hit.
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