Renowned singer-songwriter Cat Power is set to release her captivating new live album, Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, via Domino Recording Co. on Friday, November 10. Pre-orders are available now.
Recorded November 5, 2022 at London’s vaunted Royal Albert Hall, Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert sees the artist otherwise known as Chan Marshall delivering a song-for-song recreation of one of the most fabled and transformative live sets of all time. Held at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in May 1966 – but long known as the “Royal Albert Hall Concert” due to a mislabeled bootleg – the original performance saw Bob Dylan switching from acoustic to electric midway through the show, drawing the ire of folk purists and forever altering the course of rock ‘n’ roll. Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert both lovingly honors Dylan’s imprint on history and brings an enchanting vitality to many of his most revered songs, including “She Belongs to Me” and “Ballad of a Thin Man,” both of which premiere today.
“More than the work of any other songwriter, Dylan’s songs have spoken to me, and inspired me since i first began hearing them at 5 years old,” said Marshall.
Her rarefied intimacy with Dylan’s material illuminates every moment of Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert. From the very first seconds of the set-opening “She Belongs To Me.” Marshall creates the strangely charmed sensation of sharing songs that have lived in her heart for decades.
“When singing ‘She Belongs To Me’ in the past, sometimes I turned it into a first-person narrative – ’I am an artist, I don’t look back.’ I really identified with it like that,” said Marshall. “But for the show at Royal Albert Hall, I, of course, sang it the way it was originally written – with the respect for the composition…and the great composer.”
For her hypnotic and haunting performance of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Marshall’s vocal delivery skews toward soulful rather than sneering, yet still achieves a thrilling ferocity. In a nod to the most storied moment from the original concert, an audience member cries out “Judas!” just before “Ballad of a Thin Man” starts; Marshall then responds by serenely invoking the name of Jesus.
“It was something impulsive. I wasn’t expecting the audience to recreate their part of the original show as well, but then I wanted to set the record straight – in a way, Dylan is a deity to all of us who write songs.”
There are few voices more deeply embedded in the iconography and mythology of American indie rock than that of Chan Marshall. Under the musical nom de plume of Cat Power, Marshall has released music for nearly 25 years now and her prowess as a songwriter, a producer, and most notably – as a voice – has only grown more influential with time. Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert marks the latest in a series of albums that see Marshall reimagining classics from the American songbook, rock ‘n’ roll history, and beyond, including 2000’s The Covers Record, 2008’s Jukebox, and 2022’s Covers, the latter of which was hailed by Pitchfork as “her widest ranging yet, illustrating her talent for radical reinvention.”
Now Cat Power recreates Dylan’s epochal 1966 concert – a 15-song set featuring classics like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Mr. Tamborine Man,“ “Like A Rolling Stone” as well as several cuts from Blonde on Blonde including “Just Like A Woman” – with both heartfelt reverence and a deep understanding of the delicate nature of song interpretation. Like the original concert (and all of Dylan’s 1966 world tour), Marshall kept the first half of her set entirely acoustic, then went electric for the second half with the help of a full band including guitarist Arsun Sorrenti, bassist Erik Paparozzi, multi-instrumentalists Aaron Embry (harmonica, piano) and Jordan Summers (organ, Wurlitzer), and drummer Josh Adams. In her own rendition of that historic night, Marshall inhabits each song with equal parts conviction and grace and a palpable sense of protectiveness, ultimately transposing the anarchic tension of Dylan’s set with a warm and luminous joy.
