LATE SHOW

Half past midnight and a strange, ectoplasmic gust from the TV: an out-of-nowhere, out-of-body sound, a hum of self-effacing displacement. Its source is a stoic, private-worldly vocalist accompanying herself on piano who looks and sounds like nothing so much as the long-lost daughter of Neil Young and Nico—hello, cowgirl in the sandbox. Playing slow, seesaw chords, she feels her way through the music like a nursery-rhyme torch singer, with every careful syllable weighing whether she wants to be found or stay on the lam forever. Each hovering, halting note makes the hour grow much later—as though the singer came from a place where it is always four in the morning, a land of the permanent full moon.

This flannel-swaddled insomniac performs under the name Cat Power, a sobriquet fit for both a cult figure and an occult one, your neighborhood oracle reading life’s intestines as though they were the earliest known form of Braille. Not the sort of act you expect to see on television these or any other days, especially not following Bob Dole on the Late Show with David Letterman less than a week into the invasion of Iraq—a moment of unreconstructed culture shock. This is too quiet, too opaque, too intimate, too abstract: Something recessive and contrary in her voice draws you in and pushes you away in the same breath. “There’s a dream that I see,” she softly insists, and now the TV studio is gone, its place taken by the shadow of an undiscovered country, a new world or a buried one. Words hang in the air like fog over a bog: “Shake this land.” “We all do what we can.” “[N]othing to lose.” “We could all be free / Maybe not….”

The song turns in, doubles back on itself—not as some navel-directed gaze, but a vision shaped like a question mark. Equally striking/intimidating, there’s the sheer concentration of the performance, all of Cat Power’s ageless, free-floating gravity, as though the song’s ellipses harbored great undigested tracts of dark matter. What you hear then is not the sound of a singer singing, addressing an audience, conveying a particular set of meanings or some kind of message, projecting a version of herself outward. Rather, it is her listening hard to some inner murmur, leaning forward, trying to make out what that archaic, unaccountable voice is saying (“The turn of the tide is weathering thee”), patiently waiting for it to answer her.

PHANTOM EMPIRICIST

The stillness in Cat Power’s voice recalls another moment of listening, an absolute attentiveness to the call of the unknown: the scene in Ghost World (2002) where Thora Birch’s Enid puts a blues LP on...