India, July 26 -- Two months ago, Chan Marshall (the American singer-songwriter better known as Cat Power) was touring Europe with her Cat Power Sings Dylan '66 tour, recreating Bob Dylan's legendary 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert, complete with the same acoustic-to-electric arc that scandalised folk purists nearly 60 years ago.

For Marshall, it's been a remarkable journey to this point. As musician and actor Carrie Brownstein recently wrote in The New Yorker, Richard Avedon's iconic 2003 photograph of her - cigarette in hand, holding a Bob Dylan T-shirt askew over a bare torso, jeans left half-unzipped - captured an artist seemingly indifferent to the grandiosity of being featured in this magazine.

That image, from a chaotic period in ...