Cat power: at times she has seemed like the second coming of Bob Dylan—at others. Fit for scratching post. And no matter how far Chan Marshall falls, she always seem to land on her feet

There's a quietness, a slowness in the music made by Chan Marshall--who performs alone or with others as Cat Power. You can feel her feel herself into a song, into the idea or the impulse behind the song, so that the song itself--whether hers or that of someone else-becomes a kind of scrim, a veil held over an emotion or an event that will never come completely into focus. That's where the always-building suspense in Marshall's music lies--because whatever lurks behind that curtain might come into focus--and it's where the drama is, when Marshall breaks out, chanting, yelling, whispering, blowing up her own tempos like a kid hiding firecrackers in her jeans.

Marshall was born in Georgia in 1972; she began her career in Atlanta and moved to New York City in 1990. Her first album, Dear Sir, appeared in 1995, but it was What Would the Community Think, in 1996, that began to make people ask what kind of name Cat Power was. In 2000, The Covers Record, a collection of songs by Bob Dylan, Moby Grape and Lou Reed, plus "Wild Is the Wind" and "Sea of Love," made it plain that, as much as any singer who has appeared in the last 15 years, Marshall was capable of creating her own musical territory and of mapping it song by song. The sometimes shining, sometimes deadpan-cool You Are Free (2003), and the celebrated The Greatest (Matador), made in Memphis with Memphis musicians from the classic soul era, were, like the work that preceded them, fully realized beginnings.

I reached Marshall in Miami Beach, where she now lives. Right off, we found ourselves talking about an artist central to her, both when she was starting out and now. GREIL MARCUS: Have you listened to Bob Dylan's radio show?.

CHAN MARSHALL: I don't have a satellite! Yet. A friend of mine promised to download it all for me.

GM: I know something about older music, and when I listen to that show I might recognize half of the people he's playing. Sometimes it's not even a quarter. But when you did "Moonshiner," a song Dylan did long ago, you got way under the surface of that kind of music.

CM: When I heard that song, when The Bootleg Series came out, I would play it over and over. it brought me out of wherever I was and to the land where those songs take us, or leave us.

GM: I hear you're working on another covers album. What might be on it?

CM: I do Smokey Robinson, "The Tracks of My Tears"--more like talking to the band: "Since you left me if you see me with another boy/seeming like I'm having fun." Anyway, it's a, it's really--i'm sorry, I get nervous. Because I know this is being tape-recorded.

GM: But I'm not tape-recording it. You're not tape-recording it.

CM: But I know who is: our government. Just kidding. There's "Makin' Him Believe" by Kitty Wells. "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" [by Sandy Denny]. I'm not sure about which James Brown song, "Try Me" or "Lost Someone." Then 'I've Been Loving You Too Long." [by Otis Redding]. I want to do "I Believe in You," the Dylan song; Aretha Franklin, "It Ain't Fair"; Hank Williams, "Ramblin' Woman"--"Ramblin' Man." I'm a little nervous about it, because I always record live. I want it to be really good. My last record [The Greatest], everybody thought it was really good--it sounds beautiful, but vocally I wasn't able to relax. I never have been able to do that when we're recording. I'm hoping that this time I'll really push myself to deliver how much I love those songs.

GM: I've never heard you do someone else's song in a way that sounds like a cover. It's always sounded as if you emerged from the song, rather than someone addressing herself to a foreign object. How does it feel singing someone else's song as opposed to your own?

CM: I know why it sounds technically wrong musically. I love singing--the songs I cover, if I'm driving or at the market or the grocery store, I'm singing to myself. If I can remember to get an instrument when I'm singing, I just start. I'm not a learned musician, I don't really know where what chords are and where they graduate and where to gather keys, so I just kind of mess with the notes, just playing them physically so that an elementary and disconnected musicality shows up. That's when I start singing the song that I've been singing all day. On the airplane or somewhere--I can't wait to get to my guitar or my piano to start singing it louder, or to start singing it with resonance. The reason they don't sound the way they're supposed to, the way the original vocal lines or melodies are set, is because I don't know how to play them on the instrument and I'm too impatient to learn. I don't feel like it's so much of a necessity to be exact. With writing and painting, all the arts, going through the action of creating something original with the foundation of something truly loved, like a great old song or a great concept from an old painting, there can be something new--it makes you feel like it is alive now. I love covers when I'm playing live. Younger people tend to be going to my concerts, my peer group, and a lot of times they don't really know the covers that I'm playing. I love it when they ask me, "What is that?" and I'll say, "This is Nina Simone." I think young people don't really have a connection with past great music; there's never a forum for them to get educated about it, so I love sharing.