Robert Ker on Cat Power’s Sun (2012) and The Shins’ Port of Morrow (2012) (Rdio, Spotify, iTunes / Rdio, Spotify, iTunes) The way they presented themselves on stage revealed much about them. Chan Marshall took up a guitar as Cat Power and hid her eyes behind her bangs, sometimes performing with her back to the audience as if slightly ashamed. When James Mercer played early concerts with The Shins, he hid off to the side, deferring the audience’s attention to the extroverted keyboardist Martin Crandall. Marshall was prone to abruptly stopping her performances and breaking down. Mercer looked as if he were eyeing the exits and making preparations for a quick escape. If you never got to see them perform, there was always the music. In “Colors and the Kids,” one of Cat Power’s most arresting early songs, Marshall tries to figure out why she even bothers living. In “Chutes Too Narrow,” one of The Shins’ best early songs, Mercer fantasizes about grabbing the yoke from the pilot and flying “the whole mess into the sea.” This deep depression, and their skill at conveying it in a powerfully relatable way, was a big part of their image and eventual success. When Hollywood licensed their music, the filmmakers took The Shins’ “New Slang,” a song that sounded like a sigh and a shrug on the long, slow march to death, for Garden State. In V for Vendetta, filmmakers opted for Cat Power’s cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I Found a Reason”—a song that makes the final stop on this march seem like a relief. This background made Marshall’s cry of “you want to live” on 2012’s “Nothing But Time”—a message so important she borrowed Iggy Pop’s dive-bar baritone to invoke it with proper gravity—mean something. Much ink has been spilled about Marshall’s personal turnaround and her hopeful and deeply humanistic album Sun, but Mercer’s less-talked-about Port of Morrow strikes a similar nerve. Neither one was my “favorite” album of the year but neither one was ever far from my thoughts. If Mercer seemed slightly obsessed with death on The Shins’ first two albums, Port of Morrow sounds like he was visited by the third ghost in A Christmas Carol, actually saw his lonely funeral, imagined how his life could have been happier, and wrote the album as a message to himself (according to Time Out London and other sources, this is not far from what happened to him at Heath Ledger’s memorial service). And so the man who sung about flying the whole mess into the sea now says, in a “Simple Song” line that never fails to move me, that once you confront your fears of accepting love and companionship you “feel like an ocean, being warmed by the sun.” An especially meaningful aspect of Marshall’s and Mercer’s creative evolutions is how they’ve gotten out of their own heads to embrace a level of empathy that they hadn’t often shown before. Their early music was frequently first-person and self-involved. But Sun and Port of Morrow find them exploring the second person and reaching out to others. “Nothin But Time” opens with “I see you kid, alone in your room, you got the weight on your mind and you’re just trying to get by”—lines of understanding that beautifully summarize so much of what makes music important. On “It’s Only Life,” Mercer—a man who once sung of having his head to the wall and feeling lonely—sings, “I’ve been down the very road you’re walking now, it doesn’t have to be so dark and lonesome.” You learn from the hardships of your past, and share with others. I’ve never been the biggest fan of either artist, but I’ve had a certain affection for them, mostly thanks to my wife. Before we started dating in the 1990s, she made me a Cat Power mixtape, a gesture I’ll never forget. She was also an early adopter of The Shins (meaning pre-Garden State) and played them a lot through our time together. So both of these artists have been in my life for a long time, even though I never quite warmed to either one—Marshall was always a little too directly painful for me, and Mercer was a little too obtuse in covering up his pain. For now, it seems, that pain has subsided. It’s a little odd how much reassurance I’ve drawn from this development. Maybe it’s on account of my age: Marshall is three years older than me and Mercer five years older, so it’s comforting to know that age 40 doesn’t hold the horrors I’m sometimes moved to mentally prepare for—quite the opposite, in fact. One of the major things I like about the internet is knowing that people my age are doing OK, whether they’re old friends that I’ll probably never see again, new friends from around the world that I might never meet, or complete strangers. This is my generation; these are people that came into the world at roughly the same time I did, and will leave the world at roughly the same time I will, and the people that I’ll share this whole, general life experience with. It helps me to know they’re doing well, Marshall and Mercer included. When it comes to those two, you can still tell a lot by how they present themselves in concert. Marshall’s performances are still hit-and-miss, if reviews are to be believed, but she now occupies a large stage, walking back and forth with a microphone in hand, her long bangs now replaced by a short locks that shows off her deeply expressive face. Mercer now has an entirely different band behind him and he now stands front and center, full of smiles, full of thanks. Robert Ker is a writer living in Portland, Maine.