Cat Power Channels Dylan at Carnegie Hall: Concert Review

Cat Power carried out a night of Bob Dylan covers at Carnegie Hall in New York City on Wednesday, executing a mesmerizing show of inventive admiration in one of many world’s most well-known venues.

Power’s present, billed as Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, has now made its option to a handful American cities. The singer-songwriter first carried out the set in November 2022 at the celebrated London venue, enjoying the identical set of half-acoustic, half-electric songs Dylan carried out there almost 60 years in the past.

“Happy Valentine’s,” she stated from the Carnegie stage, “especially for us who have been low a long time.”

Dylan’s work has been coated for years and can proceed to be, however Power is ready to set herself aside. For one, her deep, wealthy, nearly-tenor voice nearly instantly calls for full consideration, significantly in an area the place the acoustics are among the many absolute best.

READ MORE: A Look Back at Bob Dylan’s Infamous ‘Judas’ Concert

For one other, maybe owing to now having carried out the fabric dwell for a yr and a half, she has an uncanny capacity to imitate Dylan’s personal method to performing his songs, enjoying with the supply of her vocals in a lot the identical means he does himself. Some traces are delayed, others are unloaded early in order to virtually catch the listener off guard. Some are reduce off seemingly mid-word, others are dragged out for max impact. This is, Power’s efficiency emphasised, not the time for perfection, grandiose showmanship or expectation.

Power’s association of the songs sticks intently to the originals, although now and again she threw in an advert lib or an additional phrase. “She acts like we never met, you know the type,” in “I Don’t Believe You,” or “I just wish he’d take that fucking thing off his head” in “Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat.”

READ MORE: When Bob Dylan Played His First Major Show

There can be one thing to be stated in regards to the innate energy, no pun supposed, of a girl singing a Dylan music with none gender-specific lyrical adjustments — traces like “she aches just like a woman” are dropped on the viewers with a unique weight.

As the electrical portion of the set started, an simple shift occurred within the viewers, as if a hidden change had been turned on. But in contrast to in 1966, when concert-goers booed Dylan for plugging in, Carnegie’s crowd rose to their toes — just a few daring attendees even took it upon themselves to jokingly shout “Judas!” It is straightforward to see, looking back, the type of shock concert-goers then may need skilled, immediately hit with a wall of sound.

“I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough,” Power sang in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” incomes a rapturous spherical of applause. Over many years, Carnegie has hosted historic occasion after historic occasion — the sixtieth anniversary of the Beatles’ first NYC present just lately handed — and if Power’s present proves one factor above all, it is that rock ‘n’ roll music, no matter how exactly you outline it, belongs in Carnegie Hall.

Power is one thing of a grasp interpreter of others’ songs, in a position to see the imaginative and prescient as having been born out of another person’s artistic effectively, however solely her personal, too. “A song changes when someone else sings it,” she stated in a press release printed within the present’s program, “whether they’re trying to stay faithful to the original version or not.” Accurate as that could be, Power’s translation is arguably one which speaks to one in every of Dylan’s most vital truths: there may be at all times a unique means to dissect the established, at all times innovation to be discovered throughout the previous.

Cat Power, Carnegie Hall, 2/14/24, Set List
Acoustic
1. “She Belongs to Me”
2. “4th Time Around”
3. ‘Visions of Johanna”
4. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”
5. “Desolation Row”
6. “Just Like a Woman”
7. “Mr. Tambourine Man”

Electric
8. “Tell Me, Momma”
9. “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)”
10. “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down”
11. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”
12. “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”
13. “One Too Many Mornings”
14. “Ballad of a Thin Man”
15. “Like a Rolling Stone”