Free Cat Power by Elizabeth Goodman

you're probably tuned into one of them.’
    “Out of the seven days of the week, we each got to pick what we would have for dinner,” Charlie remembers. “Everybody else had to agree, and then we could pick a movie. Chan had her movies that she loved. I really didn't care for Whoopi Goldberg at the time, and she made me watch
The Color Purple
. Now it's one of my favorite movies!”
    Occasionally Charlie would take the girls to the record store, where they would sort through the stacks and beg their father to buy them the newest new-wave single. “They'd always go to the back of the store where they kept the black-and-whites—that's what I called imports,” Charlie remembers. “The girls were fans of the Cure when they first came out. I said, ‘Yeah, they're a really good band. They need one crossover hit and they'd be even bigger.’ Both girls looked at me like, ‘They don't need a crossover hit—they're fine just the way they are!’”
    With Chan and her father finally living in the same house, Charlie had the chance to encourage his daughter's interest in his chosen profession. He could have taught her how to play guitar, he could have let her in on his own songwriting process. Music could have become an indelible bond between the two of them. Instead, Charlie was so intensely territorial about his work and forbidding about sharing his instruments that he made Chan feel she wasn't worthy of following in his footsteps.
    “My dad was always writing songs,” Chan has recalled. “But if you ever wanted to touch the guitar or piano, ‘
Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh
.’ There would be this huge, what's the word? Soliloquy about, ‘The guitar is nota toy. The guitar is a musical instrument.’” Instead of perceiving his professional life as an inspiration, an interest they had in common, Charlie gave Chan the impression that music was his, not hers. “My father never encouraged me to be interested in music in a personal way,” she has said. “Because he was a musician, he thought it was his territory.”
    Chan's increasing curiosity about her dad's music clashed with his resentment of her interest. “When I was in tenth grade, he had a baby grand,” Chan remembered. “He'd come home and I'd be figuring it out. I liked music like every teenager. It was this massive thing, and it just made sense to me.” Chan felt a natural affinity for the piano, but instead of developing an organic relationship with the instrument, she heard her father's admonishing words in her head: “The piano is not a toy.” When Charlie left the house, Chan relished the opportunity to beat the crap out of her dad's prize. “I'd kind of bang on it,” the singer has recalled. “It really made me rebellious.”
    Before Chan moved in with her dad, music was still a private pleasure and solace giver, but living with him corrupted the purity of her connection to writing and singing songs. It was also the beginning of her lifelong inferiority complex regarding her skills as a musician. “When he was gone I'd always play it to prove that this thing isn't so powerful. It's just a piano. It's supposed to be messed with, and there's no right or wrong,” Chan has said. “That maybe created my rebellion to not learn to play.”
    Chan's father says he doesn't remember this. In fact, he has no memory of Chan writing songs or displaying any particular interest in playing instruments, but if she had, Charlie says, he would absolutely have encouraged her. “She never asked me about how to chord the guitar, so I never taught her how to play the guitar,” he says. “Don't get me wrong, she loved music and she had her own little collections of musicand everything, but she didn't seem interested in the instruments, not really.” And if she had? “Well, I've always told the girls that these instruments are professional instruments, they're not to be played with. If they were abusing them, that was not allowed.” Sensing that he might be coming across as