India, Oct. 18 -- A waiter in Bengaluru shook his head from side to side when Cat Power asked if there was milk for her tea. She told us this from a stage in Helsinki; mused on whether "no" is expressed the same way elsewhere. She was in Bengaluru? That was the bit that surprised me. After the gig, I looked it up, and learnt that she had visited in 2007, not to perform but to work with the non-profit Charity: Water. But I'm getting ahead of myself. On a recent Wednesday, Charlyn "Chan" Marshall aka Cat Power, the indie rock icon known for her minimalist yet deeply emotional music and haunting husky vocals, sang all 12 songs from her 2006 album The Greatest, live and in sequence. No, wait. She switched it up, replacing Hate with Unhate, a cover of her Greatest song that appears on Covers (2022), a bluesy, majestic album that strips down songs by artists from Frank Ocean to Billie Holiday and rebuilds them with signature Cat Power intimacy. (How cool to do a cover of your own song!) Marshall, 54, is currently on the Greatest 20th anniversary tour. And her live shows are unforgettable, not because she exudes charisma or works the crowd. She doesn't. What gets you is how she performs, using live vocal treatments as an artistic tool. In Helsinki, her voice kept shifting in texture, sometimes within a song, because she works with two set-ups. The dry mic is kept clean and catches her raw, natural tone. The wet mic is drenched in slapback delay, echo and deep reverb. She pivoted between them, or sang into both at once, giving the songs a lush, psychedelic vibe and a dreamy haze. At one point, someone in the crowd, a surprisingly diverse group of balding hippies, preppy types, oversized-hoodie wearers and young people in LBDs and boots, shouted, "We love you, Chan!" "And I love you too," she said, huskily. Her banter is minimal, but enough to disarm the room. That melancholy minimalism has deep roots. Marshall was born in Atlanta in 1972, into an unsettled, nomadic childhood. Her parents' lives were chaotic; her grandmother did much of the child-raising. Music was her refuge. As a child, she found her stepfather's record collection, with Bob Dylan in it, and was hooked. She picked up the guitar as a teen, and played by instinct. She never had formal lessons. But solitude can extract a price. Depression and crippling stage-fright dogged her, and she turned to alcohol as she struggled to cope. Those early gigs became notorious: songs abandoned halfway, tears on stage, tempers with the crew. In 2006, just as The Greatest was earning her a name, she had a breakdown and spent time in a Miami hospital. That was the turning point. She got sober and, over time, found her way back into the light. It's hard to listen to The Greatest now without wondering how someone in such pain produced an album this warm and sunlit. Back in Helsinki, after the last song was done, the band came back for the encore: I Don't Blame You, Good Woman and Manhattan (all by Marshall); It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels (Kitty Wells); Nothing Compares 2 U (Prince); Try Me (James Brown); and I'll Be Seeing You (Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal). Then the band left and Cat, alone, entreated us to "be gentle and kind to yourselves". The ovation that followed went on long after the lights came up. Whatever the shake of a head may mean in Bengaluru, a standing ovation needs no translation....