Cat Power Credit: Photo by Mario Sorrenti

The setlist for Chan Marshall’s last Tampa Bay appearance—opening for Alanis Morissette at the old Gary—included a cover of The Rolling Stones. The 50-year-old indie songwriting icon’s last local headlining set in September 2019 included takes on Nick Cave, The Velvet Underground and even Lana Del Rey.

To casual listener’s the interpretation from Marshall—better known as Cat Power—might have sounded like originals, and that’s no coincidence. In her 30 years on the scene, Marshall’s covers have always had a life of their own, marked by her own idiosyncrasies and unique humanity.
Tampa Bay fans again get a chance to see Cat Power do her thing when she headlines Ferguson Hall at Tampa’s David A. Straz Center for the performing arts on Thursday, Sept. 22 at 8 p.m. Tickets for the show start at $39.50 and are available now.

UPDATE: On Sept. 13, Straz Center said that Cat Power’s Tampa show has been canceled due to a scheduling conflict. “All purchases made via credit/debit card for this Straz Center engagement will be automatically refunded. The refund process may take two to four days. Purchases made by cash or check will be refunded by check in seven to 10 days,” a press release said.

Covers , released in the spring, is Marshall’s third album featuring other artists’ songs, which she and her smoky vocal have made entirely their own. Del Rey, Cave and The Velvet Underground (via Nico) get revisited again on the effort, but so do songs by The Replacements (“Here Comes A Regular”), Frank Ocean (“Bad Religion”), Bob Seger (“Against the Wind”) and Ryan Gosling’s Dead Man’s Bones (“Pa Pa Power”).

Marshall even revisits one of her tunes, “Hate” from 2006’s The Greatest, transforming the cut from a wispy acoustic tune into a straight-up survival anthem. The song has a new title, “Unhate,” as a result of how Marshall’s life changed on a tour while she carried a child while continually learning to deal with suicidal thoughts she’d dealt with from her teenage years to the release of The Greatest.