As Cat Power, Chan Marshall has spent more than 20 years making dreamy music, music that would sound great in an empty dive bar in the South as you look at the sunlight reflected in a glass of bourbon you’re too hypnotized to drink. Music that would sound great reverberating from a room in the back of a house, gliding around walls. Her new album, Wanderer, is her 10th, and her first in six years. It was prompted by the death of a friend, but it’s not a sad album. It’s a searching album about life and survival and, like all of her music, it’s hard-traveled and bone-deep soulful.

As I wait in the dark, ornate lobby of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont, I’m told Marshall is ready for me. I go past a gate to the piercing sunlight of the hotel courtyard, where Marshall guides me through the maze of bungalows to the one where she’s staying. On the way, she tells me about how she was supposed to record a song with Johnny Cash, but it didn’t happen. She also tells me about a dream she had where she met Johnny in a diner, and he told her his wife June bore him a son, and the son’s name was Icarus. We find her bungalow and sit down.

The room is hot and muggy, shockingly so, and there’s a lot of energy in the air. Not just because Marshall is rapidly walking to and fro, plugging things in, taking clothes out of her suitcase, or because a photographer is about to come in and set up equipment. It’s also because Marshall is talking as fast as she can manage, juggling five or six thoughts at once and trying not to let any of them fall away. She’s working hard.

As our conversation goes on, as she makes iced tea and discusses the musical influences of her Georgia childhood in the 1970s, I notice her voice begin to drift south. It’s something in the melodies of her sentences, the way she says “pecans,” the offhanded mentions of tobacco towns, the asides about “smokin’ and drinkin’.” By the time she lights her first cigarette, we’re not in Hollywood anymore, we’re in Atlanta.