Friday Morning Cat Blogging

This is Cat Power (Chan Marshall) doing a mashup of Skip Spence's shambolic murder ballad "Weighted Down" and Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia" and making it her own as "Schizophrenia's Weighted Me Down". This was the b-side of the single "Nude as the News" released in 1996. As far as I know the only place you can get the song now is iTunes, it was never on any of her albums. And no, it doesn't sound like either of the songs that she mashed up, she took lyrics that meant something to her from both songs to make her own song, so "cover" is not a good description for the result.

Chan's older sister had a psychotic break and was diagnosed with schizophrenia somewhere around this time and had to be institutionalized for some time. Her older sister was the one Chan always admired for being the wife and mother, the ordinary sane one, as vs. the crazy weirdo of the family (Chan). I guess this was Chan's way of dealing with that situation. Given all the bad shit that has happened to her and her family over the years, I doubt Chan is going to run out of material anytime soon... though she's starting to feel a bit ambivalent about writing so many sad songs for her next album, she says. Which might be the truth. Or might not. You never know, with Chan, because of her tendency to say what she thinks people want to hear, yet another survival skill carried over from a fucked-up childhood growing up with a schizophrenic parent (where figuring out what the parent wants to hear is a valuable skill to prevent a blow-up and subsequent abuse)...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin