You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Shawn Marshall is a singer-songwriter who's been making records under the name Cat Power since 1995.
In 2018, she put out her 10th album, Wanderer.
It includes this song, Woman, which has Lana Del Rey on backing vocals.
In this episode,
Sean breaks down the song and what it means to her
as she tells the story of how she made Woman in Miami and Los Angeles over the course of a few years.
My name is Sean Marshall.
The song Woman was inspired by events that happened in my life that I'm not ready to talk about.
But the reason I wrote this song is
because I couldn't find the words to describe how I was feeling inside,
very alone, because I wasn't feeling empowered or strong as a woman.
The beginnings of writing it was just a few of these guitar chords that I've been strumming in my alone time.
And then I began singing.
The beginning lyric where it says, if I had a dime for every time you tell me I'm not what you need,
I would take it to the bank and leave,
is because I would have been a billionaire with all the different situational abusive times this had been in my ears that I wasn't good enough or whatever.
And that was the beginning, was this just lament.