The inimitable Chan Marshall on turning 50, dogs versus cats, the “atrocity” of modern-day America and an encounter with “God Dylan”. Read all about it in the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops from Thursday, Sept 15 and available to buy from our online store.
“It’s such a crazy time,” says Chan Marshall. The way she talks – constantly undercutting herself and punctuating her musings with jokes and apologies and silly accents – it’s hard to immediately tell if she’s talking about her own life or the world in general. Quite possibly both. “It’s always a crazy time,” she continues. “Time keeps comin’. And the American country is upside down, inside out. Things are a mess. Things are an atrocity. So I don’t know what to do. And neither do you!”
This, in a roundabout way, is Marshall’s justification for her latest wheeze: recreating one of Bob Dylan’s famous 1966 shows from his controversial “Judas” tour at the Royal Albert Hall in November. “If this is the first and last time I’m ever going to play there,” she reasons, “might as well make it a humdinger!”
Marshall is currently “decompressing” between two legs of her world tour at a friend’s house in upstate New York. At various points, our interview is interrupted by a meadowlark, a giant spider, a sudden windstorm, a miniature golden retriever called Tino, and filmmaker Jem Cohen dropping by for a chat. Marshall is also prone to fly off on a tangent before apologising profusely: “Are you mad at me?” In general though, she is happy with her current lot.
“My track record for enjoying what I do hasn’t always been very good,” she concedes. “Sometimes I feel like I’m hanging on by the skin of my teeth. But it’s been a really good run, and I haven’t had a really good run in a really long time. A lot of people don’t recognise that they’re an artist ’til it’s too late. So I’m very thankful for that opportunity to thrive and keep going, you know?”
What made you want to recreate an entire Bob Dylan show, and what do his songs mean to you?
– Mathias Kleiven, Oslo
What does God Dylan mean to me? Period. Dot, dot, dot. Nervous laugh… God Dylan means something to anybody who loves him, right? Anybody who loves what he’s done knows what it means to them. I don’t know how to put that in words.
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