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Cat Power, aka Chan (pronounced “Sean”) Marshall, precedes me along the hotel corridor – as, in the forefront of my mind, does her reputation. We’re heading for her room because, in newly ciggy-free France, we can smoke there. Sober since 2006, after years of being shackled to alcohol, Marshall nonetheless gives off the sharp scent of chaos and manic behaviour. When we arrive in her tiny room, the first thing she does is tear back the duvet cover, then remove her socks. Now, not even I would extrapolate something suggestive from these actions, but for a millisecond I’m nonplussed, and reminded of the occasion several years ago when, awaiting an interviewer in another Paris hotel room, Marshall stripped naked, turned off all the lights and cowered, sobbing, in the corner. Today, she snuggles beneath the covers, sparks up a Gitane and says: “I’m afraid you’re going to nail me to the cross.”

Mention Cat Power to music fans and they will either purr, dreamy-eyed, with approval or register vague acquaintance with a tricky, strange customer they have semi-registered as making tricky, strange music; or, in some cases, simply look baffled and ask what it’s got to do with cats. Before the release of her 2005 breakthrough album, The Greatest, Marshall had won a devoted but tiny following for her amalgam of blues, folk and punk, with lyrics that sounded as though they’d been ripped from her chest and a delivery that seemed to do everything it could to obscure the hair-raising beauty of its owner’s voice.

“Oh, hidey hidey hidey,” Marshall sang on her 1998 song Metal Heart, “what you tryin’ to prove? By hidey hidey hiding, you’re not worth a thing.” It took decades of wrestling with her demons before she could reconnect with the little girl who’d skipped around the house singing, unfettered by self-consciousness. “Listen to the way my records sounded,” she says now. “I didn’t even want to hear my own voice.”

On Jukebox, her new album of cover versions (plus two of her own songs), Marshall returns to Metal Heart. Tellingly, the original’s dense fog of finger-picked, out-of-tune guitar and double-tracked, semi-catatonic vocals is replaced by singing that is crystal-clear and upfront.

“I was under so many layers of self-hatred,” she recalls, “that I couldn’t open up. It never dawned on me that I was a singer until two years ago. I was on tour, I’m singing and I’m sober, and I’m like, ‘Holy shit, I’m singing, and this is easy and fun.’ Before, it was always so emotional, because it wasn’t where I’d pictured myself being. I pictured myself living in a cold coastal town, no tourists, an alone person. I never wanted to be a singer. I wanted to be a painter, or a dancer, or a baker, or a teacher – or president of the United States.”

Flight, retreat or escape were, she says, hallmarks of her drinking days, a replication of a peripatetic childhood that began 36 years ago in Atlanta, Georgia, and saw her musician father and hippie mother divorce, and Marshall constantly on the move either with or between them. “I guess I felt like I was unnormal,” she reflects, “because I was always travelling, going to different schools, the new kid.” Alcohol became, she admits, something that was “available to interact with. It’s almost like you’re camaraderising with pain. I would drink to escape. And I grew up around it in my immediate family, so I was always aware”.

When she moved to New York in 1992, leaving behind the first incarnation of the band she had named after bumping into a man wearing a cap emblazoned with the logo Cat Diesel Power, Marshall fell in with a crowd of experimental musicians. Two years later, while holding down three jobs, she recorded her first two albums, Dear Sir and Myra Lee, on the same day, and subsequently signed to the Matador label. Following the release of 1996’s What Would the Community Think?, Marshall suddenly upped sticks again, disappearing to Oregon with her then boyfriend the musician Bill Callahan, and working as a baby-sitter. One morning, waking from a nightmare, she sat down and wrote a batch of songs that would make up her comeback record, Moon Pix, but while promoting the album at a show in New York, she broke into screaming, her band walked off stage and she ended up face down, weeping. Further acclaimed albums – the self-ex-planatory Covers Record and You Are Free (2003) – were made, but by the time of the latter’s release, Marshall was unravelling. She played on the David Letterman show, her face completely obscured by her hair. Her boyfriend, a model seven years younger than her (whom she refers to now as “the ex-love of my life”), left her.

It was a time of constant touring, of guaranteed – and possibly sought-after – impermanence. “I was always moving, moving, moving,” she says, “which was conducive to drinking a lot.” Her boyfriend was almost always at her side. “It was one of the most painful things I’ve ever had to experience,” she says of their split. “Seeing what my touring had done to him, emotionally, psychologically, physically; then him just being unavailable, being gone. That remorse, that mourning... I was punishing myself.”

She hit the bottle, hard, conducting interviews over breakfasts that consisted of vodka on the rocks, or as rambling, through-the-night encounters with multiple bottles of wine. “Nobody could talk to me,” she says.

“I would make a joke out of everything, not letting anyone get close. You know, ‘Here, have a drink; here, close your eyes too.’

Now, I can’t. A friend of mine, who’s known me since I was 23, said that maybe, when I was younger, I didn’t feel I had anything to live for. He says I’m much more reserved, safeguarded and apprehensive now; that I used to be much more reckless, that I’d run out into the traffic and say, ‘Come on, let’s try to make it to the other side.’ And I do not remember that.”

The wheels finally came careering off on the very day The Greatest was released. Recorded with a crack band of veteran Memphis soul musicians, the album would go on to win awards and give Marshall her highest sales figures to date. Yet, with a tour booked to promote it, and rave reviews hitting the press, the singer lay in a psychiatric ward in Miami, placed there by a friend. “I always figured, with every record,” she says of her earlier releases, “‘This’ll be it, I won’t tour any more, it’ll die down, the response, the offers.’”

In January 2006, that prediction seemed set to come true. “I definitely didn’t want to live,” she says. “I wanted to crawl into a hole and for nobody to ever see me. But I had to accept the reality of my life. On paper, I’m an artist; on paper, I have a career. And, through therapy, when I had to quit drinking, that’s exactly what I had to face.”

Where once she would, in concert, switch to covering other people’s material because she had grown to hate or fear her own songs, Marshall chose to make Jukebox for quite different reasons. She had, for the first time, admitted to herself that she was in love with singing. You can hear that joy – and, of course, that pain – on her Sinatra-banishing version of New York, on James Brown’s Lost Someone and Janis Joplin’s Woman Left Lonely, among others. Her own Song to Bobby, about meeting Bob Dylan, may imply a status at least within touching distance of the great man himself, but the Cat Power canon justifies this.

We can be so in thrall to the idea of the tortured addict-artist – whose talent is somehow dependent on their illness, and whom we watch, aghast and thrilled, from the sidelines – that we risk losing sight of the possibility that their talent might flourish away from their addiction. Two years on from her lowest point, with a new album, a new voice and the first dawnings of clarity, with modelling contracts from Gap and Chanel, and a film role alongside Jude Law in My Blueberry Nights, under her belt, Marshall is proof that it can.

You can count on the fingers of one hand the truly great female singers at work near or in the mainstream today, and she is one of them. Right now, she may be only semi-visible behind the tobacco fug and the duvet, but Chan Marshall is no longer hidey hidey hiding away. She’s got down from the cross and discovered that the view is better down here.

Cat Power plays Shepherds Bush Empire, W12, tonight; Jukebox is out now on Matador

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