Cat Power, Bob Dylan, and finding direction through covers

Bob Dylan is a legend with an equal only in David Bowie for reinvention throughout his career, but Cat Power has also radically changed her approach at different times in her 30-year career. At pivotal moments of uncertainty in their careers, Bob Dylan and Cat Power both routinely turned to covering music as a way to discover their paths forward through the music they loved.

Cat Power’s first covers record

Cat Power’s ascent to indie music stardom was difficult, especially the need to perform live. Back in the ‘90s, she suffered from terrible stage fright that made it unpredictable whether an audience would catch a revelatory performance by an interesting young artist, or if she would break down into tears after a few songs. After 1998s’ Moon Pix elevated her profile and put pressure on her follow-up album, right at a moment when she was ready to quit the business, she decided to release an album of covers as her next record. The Covers Record (2000) is a sparse collection of songs primarily from the pre-‘70s era, along with a cover of her then-boyfriend Bill Callahan’s song, “Red Apples,” and a re-recording of her own song, “In This Hole.” She also recorded two Dylan tracks, “Paths of Victory” and “Kingsport Town.”

Rise to fame for Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, one of the world’s most famous songwriters, began his career performing covers. It’s even said that he stole someone else’s entire cover act and made it his own: that of Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, who was already making a name in the folk scene for using the sound and style of Woody Guthrie. When Dylan arrived in New York in ’61, he quickly ingratiated himself with the local scene and recorded his first album in 1962, which had 13 songs and only 2 originals.

Dylan’s follow-up record, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, from 1963 featured 13 songs again, but this time, only one was a traditional cover. The rest were all original (albeit still steeped in the folk tradition of adapting ancient melodies). By his third record, The Times They Are a-Changin’, he would usually not include any cover music on his main records.

But, behind the scenes, he would still use covers to help him stimulate his musical creativity. Take 1967, when Dylan moved to Woodstock and retreated to the basement of Big Pink with The Band for rehearsals after his motorcycle crash halted his rise to pop star and instead made him an eternal legend. The tapes of these rehearsals, released as Bootleg Series Vol. 11, saw Dylan returning to the world of folk and country song covers to establish a base with The Band. Then, in 1970, he released his first critically-disclaimed album, Self Portrait, which featured many covers amongst re-recordings and live recordings of his own material. He details both of these periods, along with another stint in the ‘80s, in his autobiography, Chronicles: Vol. 1.

Cat Power’s return to covers

Cat Power's Covers record.

In 2006, Cat Power released The Greatest, which was her first album of all original material. It became her highest charting album at the time and features a lighter, more soulful sound than that found on her earlier material. She decided to follow-up her commercial breakthrough with her second set of nearly-entirely cover songs, Jukebox. This collection of 12 songs featured a beautiful cover of a song from Dylan’s religious period, “I Believe in You,” as well as Cat Power again covering herself with a re-recording of a song from Moon Pix.

The 2010s would find Cat Power exploring new sounds, first with the electronic-influenced Sun in 2012 and then the powerful Wanderer in 2018, which featured a cover of Rihanna’s “Stay.” As of 2024, her most recent studio album is her third collection of cover songs, called Covers. At the time, it was notable that it was her first covers record to feature no Dylan covers, and was almost exclusively covering music made from the ‘60s onwards, including covers of Frank Ocean and Lana Del Rey, but she would soon be going deep into the world of Dylan covers.

Bob Dylan returns to covers

Two of his most derided albums from the ‘80s were mixes of cover songs and original music. The process didn’t fully work that time, but in the early ‘90s, he decided to return to folk music with two albums of solo cover music: Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong. These were the first times in several generations that Dylan performed entirely solo acoustic music.

In 1996, he began recording the tracks that would make up his next set of original music and the birth of another classic era of Dylan’s work, Time Out of Mind. The album found Dylan deep in the blues and far away from the modern world that he had been trying to conform to in the ‘80s. Throughout the next decade, he would release album after album of original music that would often reach further and further back in sound and lyrical references to times earlier than the 1960s… along with an album of Christmas songs.

Dylan found himself in another era of reinvention via covers in the 2010s. A cover of an old Frank Sinatra song, “Stay With Me”, emerged in his live sets in 2014. He released Shadows in the Night in 2015, consisting of covers of pop standards made famous by Sinatra, and followed that up with the record Fallen Angels in 2016 and a triple-record set of Sinatra covers called Triplicate in 2017. At one point in the mid 2010s, his set was completely split between originals and Sinatra covers.

Dylan emerged from decade without original music with the pandemic-era release of “Murder Most Foul” and the album Rough and Rowdy Ways. The album found Dylan perfectly merging his dark worldview with the smooth beauty of the Sinatra era. He pushed his chronically underrated vocal chords to re-learn how to sing and the results have been a stunning success in the eyes of many fans.

Cat Power in the 2020s

In the fall of 2024, Cat Power will tour North America with a live set covering Dylan’s 1966 live concert performance. It’s her most ambitious project with covers yet as she’s been consumed in Dylan’s set since 2022 at least, but as with many of us, those performances have been swirling in her mind long before 2022. There’s a power to hearing her take on this music, and whatever happens as a result of this is bound to be another interesting turn in Cat Power’s story.

Written by Matthew Long

Edited by APT Editing