A friend of mine encouraged me to listen to Cat Power's album You Are Free because, he said, "It's the best Sinead O'Connor album since I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got."

I think what he meant was that Cat Power's record echoes the spirit and sound of the hushed, haunting songs from that O'Connor album... songs like "Black Boys on Mopeds" and "This is the Last Day of Our Acquaintance."

And yes, the similarity is at times spooky. But singer/songwriter Chan Marshall lacks the range O'Connor has, staying in that one quiet, haunted mode through the entirety of the album, even when drums and bold backing vocals come on. But she makes powerful use of the voice she has. And her spare use of guitar and piano keep things powerfully focused. Like Suzanne Vega, she invites us into her quietest thoughts. We feel privileged to be there. In fact, the whole album sounds like it was recorded in Cat's closet, and that the magnificent string accents, inventive drum signatures, and gorgeous harmonies are just something she's imagining as she whispers her quiet thoughts into a microphone.

Thus her work reminds me of other vocalists as well... the playful, lazy, luxuriant, melancholy sound of Edie Brickell from "What I Am" days, and the lonely tones of Beth Orton's "Daybreaker." There's no doubt this is honest, heartfelt songwriting, sung fearlessly by an artist who feels intensely and is, likely, a bit uncomfortable to be voicing such cryptic sentiments to a crowd.

And they are cryptic. I've been puzzling over the lyrics, which are at times intriguing poetry and at others frustratingly opaque. You Are Free opens with a song of sympathy for a suicide, perhaps Kurt Cobain or some other tormented misunderstood artist. It's called "I Don't Blame You", and it reveals a deep understanding of those who live misunderstood, who grew up persecuted and fail to connect with others later in life.

Where most artists would cop out by merely saying that love is the answer for those who are lost, Marshall complicates matters by voicing the painful turns that love can take:

i want to be a good woman
and i want for you to be a good man
this is why i will be leaving
this is why i can't see you no more...

...this is why i am lying
when i say that I don't love you no more.

The sense of isolation and inability to connect continues in "Speak for Me":

Pick us up we're all by ourselves
The great big howling is about to begin...

And in her cover of "Werewolf", she expresses more affinity for those who find a dark side in themselves inevitably taking over.

In spite of this current of despair and fractured relationships that run through these songs, there is a stark awareness that possessions provide no answers, no fulfillment. Death is an encroaching reality that shows the vanity of all these materialistic pursuits. In "Fool" she sings,

The USA is our daily bread
and no one is willing to share it
why can't we see our fortunacy
living as legends have lived
bane and dismannered
we coax all the time
knowing that nothing is left when we die....

That similarity to Sinead is never clearer than on "Maybe Not", the album's most gorgeous song, a hymn sung against materialism, a song for the human race minus the "race".

There's a dream that I can see
I pray it can be
across the land
shake this land...

Her dream peers out at us, indistinct, but its strongest detail is her rejection of "stuff." Instead, freedom is found in being quiet, in simple and true relationship. It's an echo of U2's "Running to Stand Still", the lament for the girl who will never get what she's trying to get because she can't hold still, open up, and receive.

We all do what we can
So we can do just one more thing
We won't have a thing
So we've got nothing to lose
We can all be free...

Her vision for a better life also involves avoiding looking to one another for fulfillment. People let each other down. In "Names", she tells several short stories about young people plunging into ruined lives through abuse, through sexual corruption, through drugs. Her characters tend to just disappear without a trace.

In "Half of You", she points to sustenance coming from some elusive quality within us...

An empty batch of chips
will tell you
what can be sold at market
and what can't
belongs to you...

I am moved at times by the searing intensity of Marshall's whispering grief and longing. And yet it is also painful to hear her prayers for freedom, because there is no indication of whether or not she is actually praying to anyone. In the final song, which is rather cryptic, listeners may find many different interpretations of her conclusions about hope and the future. She voices the failing of "the ships" and "the captain", the "porterman" and the "guys on the deck." All of these sources of security are failing.

She then makes the jump to another source of security and it too seems to lack any real comfort: evolution.

The album closes leaving us feeling pressured to call upon some kind of help, to sign up with some kind of flawed solution: "Better make your mind up quick."

In Bob Dylan's voice, that might be the same exhortation as "You gotta serve somebody." But Dylan leads us to the conclusion that God is the only one we can serve who offers us any hope. Cat Power's record seems to conclude that our best hope is to rely on the best we have within us.

The record thus reminds me of yet someone else... not another star, not another artist, but a girl I knew in college. She loved to sing melancholy songs. She wrote rants against old boyfriends, rants against the school administration, rants against the government, rants against materialism. She wanted the things that chain us to go away. She never found an authority she couldn't discredit. She just wanted to live in joy and peace and freedom. She was, in the popular sense of the term, "a free spirit."

She was so focused on freedom from something (especially her own past and her own mistakes) that she never understood this important principle: True freedom comes not from escaping all authority or from self expression or from self-reliance. It comes from submitting to the the One who made us for a purpose. The more we discern that purpose, the more we trust and obey, the more we can discover lasting joy instead of disappointments.

The American notion of freedom has warped over time, becoming more and more about "freedom to do whatever we want" instead of about finding a way of life that gives us freedom from evil. We are coached, everywhere we turn, by voices telling us to break free, be ourselves, and escape anyone else's notion of how to live. As Bono sings, "You hurt yourself, you hurt your lover / then you discover / that what you thought was freedom is just greed."

Those who refuse to follow any Higher Authority will only have their own will to follow. And our wills are flawed and prone to selfishness. We cannot meet our own needs. That girl was "free" as far as she was concerned... free to be everything but fulfilled.

I come away from this record sharing the singer's grief for the lost. And I agree with her--we will not be "found" through the chase for endless stuff. Breaking our bonds to worldly things, we can find freedom from the enslavement that they bring. But "freedom from" and "freedom to" are different things. If you want the freedom to discover joy and fulfillment, you gotta serve somebody other than yourself. To find and enjoy that Someone requires the surrender of one kind of freedom to receive the much richer benefits of another.