I saw Cat Power in the days of her nerves, when she did The Covers Record… She was absolutely wasted and banging her head on the piano, accidentally unplugging her guitar. She was sitting on the stage asking people to hold the mic stand for her. She would tell jokes and no one got it but us. I found it to be both terrifying and amazing; I hadn’t known that this was par for the course. I thought I was witnessing the biggest breakdown in history! Like, This is gonna go down in the books, the end of her career. I don’t think she finished one song all the way through. At the end it just degenerated into jokes and 30-second covers of Britney Spears. Then she laid her head on the piano for five minutes, got up, and left. It was ten times better than when I saw her recently with her blues-rock band.

—Edward Droste, BOMB 112, 2010