Moon Pix is the fourth album by Cat Power, the stage name and eponymous band of American singer-songwriter, Chan Marshall. It was released in September 1998 on Matador Records.
Much of the album was written in a single night, following a hallucinatory nightmare Marshall experienced while staying at a farmhouse in South Carolina. Prior to that, Marshall had intended to retire from music. The album was recorded in Melbourne, Australia with Mick Turner and Jim White, of the Australian instrumental band Dirty Three, on guitar and drums, respectively.
Released to modest acclaim, the album has since been described as Cat Power's "magnum opus" and "one of the Nineties great singer/songwriter triumphs." In 2022, it was ranked at number 66 in Pitchfork's "The 150 Best Albums of the 1990s" list.
Composition
Several songs on Moon Pix— "No Sense," "Say," "Metal Heart," "You May Know Him" and "Cross Bones Style"— were written "in one deranged night," following a hallucinatory nightmare Marshall had in the fall of 1997, while alone in the South Carolina farmhouse she shared with her then-boyfriend, Bill Callahan. "I got woken up by someone in the field behind my house in South Carolina," she explained. "The earth started shaking, and dark spirits were smashing up against every window of my house. I woke up and I had my kitten next to me...and I started praying to God to help me...So I just ran and got my guitar because I was trying to distract myself. I had to turn on the lights and sing to God. I got a tape recorder and recorded the next sixty minutes. And I played these long changes, into six different songs. That's where I got the record."
In a 2013 interview with Rob Hughes of The Daily Telegraph, Marshall again recounted the experience:
About two days before Marshall's nightmare, she had received a call from a friend who had challenged her to record something new. "He was like, 'Dude, what are you doing? You're fucking up. You could be really doing something, and you're just not putting anything in the universe, you're just a loser,'" Marshall recalled, in a 2012 interview with Caroline McCloskey of The Fader. "I was so pissed off." After the nightmare, Marshall went to New York City unsuccessfully seeking help, which included talking to priests. The afternoon that Marshall returned from New York, she received a call that her friend had died. Later that night, she heard that another friend of hers had died the same day. "So that's when I woke up," Marshall recalled. "I was like, you know what? What am I doing?" With the cassette of the songs recorded the night of her episode still in her possession, Marshall decided to fax Turner and White, whose band the Dirty Three she had played shows with, and asked if they wanted to record. She asked her record label, Matador, for money to travel to Australia, and spent three months there "hanging out and having a great time" until being told by White that Turner would be leaving Australia in two days, at which point they entered the studio to record the album.
"Stepping into Australia was stepping into something more positive and triumphant as a young woman," Marshall explained in a 2018 Guardian article. "I was, on purpose, choosing a path out of solitude. I found joy I had never felt; some part of the freedom I got there."
According to Marshall, some of Moon Pix was also inspired by two months she spent alone in South Africa, Mozambique and Tanzania, an experience that she said "dented" her. "Cross Bones Style" was written about two children she met in Africa who slept in trees at night after their parents were killed.
The song "Colors and the Kids" was written in the studio, and the lyric "Yellow hair, you are such a funny bear" refers to several people, including Marshall's nephew, a former bandmate, and American singer/songwriter Will Oldham, whom Marshall drank with in Australia, and who she says reminded her of the South.
Recording
The majority of Moon Pix was recorded at Sing Sing Studio in Melbourne, Australia by house engineer Matt Voigt. In a 2006 interview with Mess+Noise, Voigt revealed that work on the album started the day after New Year's in 1998, with Marshall arriving with her guitar and asking Voigt how he wanted to set up for recording. Most of the songs were recorded with Marshall singing and playing guitar at the same time, with Marshall and a microphone in one room and a small guitar amplifier in another.