This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Over 20 years ago, in the summer of 2003, the musician Sean Marshall, better known as Cat Power, was on tour with an album called You Are Free.

Staff writer Hilton Owls went to see one of those shows, and he wrote a wonderful profile of Cat Power in The New Yorker.

Along with it was a full-page portrait in black and white by the great photographer Richard Avedon.

Avedon's photograph put her in the lineage of rock and roll icons going back to the old days.

So in the portrait, Cat Power, aka Sean Marshall, she's holding a cigarette, which has a long ash dangling off the end of it.

She has a lot of bracelets on. She's wearing a pair of low-rise jeans.

That's Carrie Brownstein, a member of the band Slater Kinney, and a co-creator of the sketch show,

Portlandia.

And for the series we call takes, Brownstein wrote in the New York about that photograph that was taken right at the moment that Cat Power was going from Indie Darling to a wider

musical phenomenon.

She has a smirk on her face, some smudged mascara or eyeliner, and she's holding up a Bob Dylan

t-shirt, and the shirt's neither on or off her body.

And I just, I like the cheekiness of it.

There's something very canny about her holding this up.

You know, you're not sure whether

the shirt is covering Cat Power or Cat Power is covering the shirt. And of course, Cat Power

famously, is a fan of Dylan. And her most recent album is Cat Power sings Dylan at the

1966 Royal Albert Hall concert.

Yeah, she does and she aches just like a woman.

She breaks just like a little girl.

I'm trying to imagine what a 2003 New Yorker audience would think of this photo.

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