Cat Power’s “Cherokee”: First Video from the Sun Album

In September 2012, Chan Marshall released the self-directed video for “Cherokee,” the opening track of Cat Power’s album Sun. It arrived as the first proper music video tied to that record—a desert-set clip that matched the album’s restless new palette of electronics, drum machines, and harder drive. For listeners who knew Marshall mainly through quieter guitar rooms and covers, the clip was also a visual statement: she was steering the look as well as the sound.

Sun itself landed in early September 2012 on Matador (U.K. on the 3rd, U.S. on the 4th), Marshall’s first album of all-original material since 2006’s The Greatest. “Cherokee” opens the sequence at nearly five minutes—long enough to establish mood before the shorter, punchier cuts that follow. A Nicolas Jaar remix circulated alongside the track; the video gave the song a public face.

What the song is doing

“Cherokee” does not behave like a conventional radio single. It builds from pulse and refrain more than from verse-chorus scaffolding. Marshall’s voice stays close and conversational even when the arrangement thickens. The lyric that stuck with many early write-ups—“If I die before my time, bury me upside down”—lands like a folk proverb dropped into an electronic frame. That tension is the song’s point: old fatalism, new circuitry.

On the album, “Cherokee” is followed by the title track “Sun,” then “Ruin,” which had already appeared as a free download earlier that summer. The sequencing matters. Side one announces change before settling into the record’s wider range—from compact songs like “Always on My Own” to the long, patient “Nothin’ But Time” with Iggy Pop. Opening with “Cherokee” told listeners that Sun would not pretend to be a soft return to earlier Cat Power moods.

Musically, the album leaned into synths, programmed rhythm, and a cleaner, more assertive mix than the soul-band glow of The Greatest. Marshall produced the record herself after years of false starts, abandoned “depressing old Cat Power” sketches, and a long fight to finish without handing control to an outside producer. Philippe Zdar’s mixing helped the final shape cohere, but the authorship remained hers. “Cherokee” carries that authorship in miniature: skeletal beginnings, then a finished track that still sounds slightly unfinished in the best way—alive, not polished into anonymity.

The video as desert allegory

Marshall directed the “Cherokee” video and appears in it. Shot in the California desert with Greg Hunt as director of photography, the clip sketches a near-future wasteland: dusty roads, survivalist figures, and zombie-like wanderers washed in unnatural color. Marshall moves through the scene with a small band of allies and, in a detail that softens the apocalypse without undercutting it, her French bulldog. The tone sits between music-video fantasy and homemade science fiction—low on glossy CGI, high on atmosphere and gesture.

Contemporary coverage called it a post-apocalyptic desert adventure, sometimes a “zombie” clip, sometimes a rainbow-monster fever dream. All of those descriptions are partly right. The images are not literal illustrations of every lyric; they stage a mood of pursuit, endurance, and odd fellowship. Marshall’s dual role as singer and director made the video feel less like a label add-on and more like an extension of the album’s DIY stubbornness. She had financed large parts of Sun herself. Directing the first video fit the same pattern: keep the frame personal.

Wardrobe and styling (Camille Garmendia) keep the look practical rather than couture-apocalypse. Faces and color matter more than costume spectacle. That choice suits Cat Power’s long habit of letting presence do the work that props usually do. Even when the video tips into the surreal, Marshall remains the still center—watching, moving, surviving the frame.

Why “first video from Sun” mattered

By late 2012, album cycles still used the first video as a public thesis. For Sun, that thesis was change without apology. Marshall had already previewed new material live; “Cherokee,” “Ruin,” “Real Life,” and others surfaced on the road before the record existed as a finished object. The video closed the gap between rumor and release. It told casual viewers what dedicated fans already suspected: Cat Power was not circling the same room forever.

Critics received Sun warmly overall—Metacritic landed in the high seventies—and several year-end lists placed it among 2012’s stronger albums. Commercial response was notable too: the album debuted in the U.S. Billboard 200’s top ten, a first for Marshall. “Cherokee” was not the free-download lead single (“Ruin” held that job), but as the album opener and first video, it became the visual hook for the campaign. Search pages and share chains still treat “Cherokee” as the face of Sun’s arrival.

That is fair. Openers do disproportionate work. They set tempo, timbre, and emotional contract. “Cherokee” contracts for restlessness: movement through hostile ground, a voice that refuses to flatten, electronics that push rather than decorate. The video literalizes hostility as landscape. Together they make a coherent introduction even for someone who never hears the Iggy Pop epic later on the disc.

Listening with the images in mind

Watching the clip once, then returning to the audio alone, changes how the song sits. The desert dust sticks to the drum-machine grit. The upside-down burial line feels less like a joke and more like a rule for a world that has already broken its ordinary ones. Marshall’s calm delivery reads as survival technique—keep speaking, keep walking—rather than as detachment.

It also helps to hear “Cherokee” against earlier Cat Power landmarks without ranking them. Moon Pix and You Are Free built intimacy out of spare rooms; The Greatest borrowed Memphis warmth; Sun reaches for propulsion. Continuity lives in Marshall’s phrasing and her willingness to make discomfort audible. Discontinuity lives in the tools. “Cherokee” is where that discontinuity announces itself most clearly on the album’s front edge.

If you come to the song cold in 2026, treat the 2012 video as period art, not as a nostalgia prop. The desert sets, the colored undead, the self-directed framing—those choices belong to a specific moment when Marshall was reclaiming authorship after bankruptcy, stalled sessions, and label pressure. The clip is entertainment, yes. It is also a document of an artist insisting on her own production myth.

Where it sits in the Cat Power timeline

After Sun, Marshall continued to rewrite her catalogue and her public role—later records would again shift tone and company. That makes the “Cherokee” moment especially sharp as a waypoint. It is not the whole story of Cat Power. It is the story of one album’s first public image: an electronic opener, a self-shot desert parable, and a singer who refused to look like a guest in her own release cycle.

Play “Cherokee” loud enough to feel the low-end push. Watch the video without multitasking once. Notice how little dialogue the images need. Then decide whether the song sounds braver with the desert attached or braver alone. Either answer is useful. The point of the 2012 release was never to settle the argument; it was to start Sun with a claim you could see as well as hear.

For a record built on risk—self-funded stretches, abandoned early takes, a refusal of the “needs a producer” lecture—the first video’s handmade apocalypse still feels on-brand. Marshall did not hire a glossy myth. She directed a dusty one, put herself inside it, and let “Cherokee” open the door.