I found out about the show late. I had asked the magazine for a photo pass and was told Chan wasn’t allowing photography. No cameras in the audience. That was the boundary. Instead, they handed me a viewing ticket at the last minute, which felt generous and slightly strange. I’m usually moving around the pit thinking about light and angles. This time I took a seat. Front row balcony, the Fox opening up beneath me.
The line had started wrapping around the corner earlier that afternoon. It felt devoted. The kind of crowd that knows the catalog. The show began right at eight. No opener. Just an evening with Cat Power performing The Greatest in full.
The Greatest came out in 2006, recorded in Memphis with players who knew their way around real soul records. Even back then, you could hear that the songs had widened. In the early 2000s, she carried something different onstage. A Ramona Quimby aesthetic. Brown bedhead, dark liner, slouchy denim, boots. There was a visible fragility in those years. Not drama. Just tension. I saw her at All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2004 and at Bimbo’s around that same era, and you never quite knew how the night would go. That unpredictability lived in the room with you.
The band opened with a loose, jazzy stretch that let the room settle before she walked out. She didn’t rush. She greeted the audience, which longtime fans know wasn’t always the move. The lights stayed low and warm, almost like a romantic dinner instead of a spotlight.
Someone shouted, “I love you, Chan,” and she laughed and said, “I love you too, but you guys, it’s always been Sean.” Then someone yelled back I love you, Sean spelled CHAN, and the whole place softened. It was small, funny, and human.
She wore this oversized bell-bottom suit that felt part Elvis, part Tammy Wynette, but it didn’t read as a costume. It just looked right on her.
The band was beautiful. You could tell they’ve spent real time together. At one point, she said that when she used to play, it wasn’t spiritual for her the way it is now, and that she gets to spend so much time with her friends. You could see it in how they watched each other and how the songs unfolded without anyone forcing anything.
Hearing The Greatest straight through in that room felt full. Her voice filled the Fox in a way that didn’t feel precarious. A Nina Simone breadth and depth of tone was present. It felt grounded. It settled into the songs and brought the reverence of her growth to the set.
After finishing the album, she walked off stage, and the band stayed. For about fifteen minutes, they slipped into this slinky, slightly jammy stretch that felt somewhere between mid-century lounge and Grateful Dead drifting into modern fusion jazz.
When she came back out, the room shifted again. She did a few more numbers after that, moving into deeper cuts and songs longtime fans hold close. She talked between them. Told stories. It felt easy. When she sang Good Woman the entire theater leaned forward without realizing it. She described meeting a man who sounded rough and magnetic and how he broke her heart. Then he came back. She paused, smiled at herself, and said, “And then he did it again.” The laugh that followed felt knowing.
What stayed with me was the steadiness. The absence of that old flicker of uncertainty that used to hover around her sets. She seemed comfortable in her own name. Sean. Spelled CHAN.
And the Fox held it quietly.
