Before musicians could deliver their songs through mass-produced vinyl, and then 8-track tapes, and then CDs, and then MP3s, and then the cloud, and then vinyl again, songs were primarily delivered in sheet music. Radio stations had their own in-house musicians to play what songwriters sent them, and the biggest musicians sent versions all over the country in hopes of covering the market. This is where, historians guess, the notion of “covering” a song originates.

Covers have their roots in the Great American Songbook, a tradition that rarely changes. A cover can be wacky (Weezer’s “Toto”) or it can be wistful (Bob Dylan’s Triplicate) or it can be used to bolster someone’s reputation (Johnny Cash’s American series). But what Cat Power does with covers is unlike anyone else. Her third album of covers, appropriately titled Covers, brings vitality to one of music’s oldest traditions.

Cat Power, otherwise known as Chan Marshall, uses her cover albums to deconstruct the idea of what a Great American Songbook means. Who’s to say that Frank Ocean shouldn’t be seen in the same league as Hoagy Carmichael? That spirit drives her cover of “Bad Religion,” one of Ocean’s most startling songs off of Channel Orange. A song full of panicked confusion, where Ocean confesses his sexuality to a taxi driver, takes on a blues-y sense of propulsion and urgency in Cat Power’s telling.

Power’s music, from Moon Pix to The Greatest, has often relied on a stripped-down sound, letting the intensity of her words and repetition carry the song. This technique works to great effect on Covers, like on her surprising cover of Dead Man Bones’ “Pa Pa Power.” A trademark of late-aughts hipsterism featuring Ryan Gosling, the original “Pa Pa Power” featured a haunting children’s choir, which she cuts. The result takes on a new urgency in an age of protest, asking what power is, exactly, and who gets it in the first place. Elsewhere, she adds a DIY urgency to Lana Del Ray’s “White Mustang” and tightens Iggy Pop’s “The Endless Sea” into a song that feels cozy: “Oh, baby, what a place to be,” she says, “in the service of the bourgeoisie,” and suddenly a listener is transported to a jazz bar where it’s just them and Cat Power working the room.

Cat Power lets the songs change her style too, like on her romantic, woozy take on The Pogues “A Pair of Brown Eyes.” But perhaps her most remarkable cover is one where the changes aren’t too dramatic at all: “These Days” by Nico. Cat Power’s version, which slows things down and loses the strings, feels just as charged with memory and regret as the original. Covers shows how music can change and shift throughout the years, but sometimes that just means a new understanding is right around the corner. —David Meir Grossman