Long before Chanel declared an interest in her, the denim-clad elders of the music press fell hard for the woman known to her divorced, dysfunctional parents as Chan Marshall – and you can see why. Her drink problem is apparently behind her, as is the heroin-afflicted peer group she left behind in her native Atlanta to start afresh in New York. The backstory does no harm, but neither would it serve that much purpose were you not somehow able to hear all that autobiography in the grain of Cat Power’s voice.

Eight years after her first covers album and two years after she hooked up with Al Green’s old session men for The Greatest, Jukebox suggests that the rarefied company she keeps has compounded her belief in what she can bring to a song. The growth in confidence is illustrated by a version of her own Metal Heart that dresses the original’s emotional wounds in the sort of rich soulful blues she may have been too timorous to attempt a decade previously.

There’s no underestimating the empathy her current band, the Dirty Delta Blues, bring to the picture – in particular, sometime Delta 72 keyboard player Gregg Foreman, whose electric piano work brings a body-temperature ambience to Hank Williams’s Ramblin’ Man and George Jackson’s Aretha, Sing One For Me that calls to mind Joe Sample’s work with the Crusaders.

Memories of a porcine, sweaty Sinatra on the hit version of New York are casually obliterated on Power’s version – whose protagonist coquettishly dares her subject to impress her.

Power can rescue a a well-worn standard from stifling ubiquity. On Jukebox, though, there are lesser-known songs that her versions may propel into ubiquity. Swapping the unadorned tambourine of Jesse Mae Hemphill’s original for a reverb-drenched guitar accompaniment, Power’s take on Lord, Help the Poor and Needy is a case in point. Light(ish) relief comes like the cavalry in the form of two songs that come one after the other: Bob Dylan’s I Believe in You and her own paean to meeting Dylan, Song for Bobby. What intrigues here is that her delivery of the former is pure Cat Power, while she delivers her Dylan song in her best Bob impression.

This moment had been coming for a while, but finally we’ve reached it. The line between Power’s worship and emulation of her idols has all but evaporated.

(Matador)

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