I don’t know when I started thinking of songs as spells, but “Metal Heart” by Cat Power (the moniker of singer-songwriter Chan Marshall) was among the first that felt like one. It was part of that small, sacred handful I clung to when everything felt like it was coming apart. It isn’t loud or obvious and it doesn’t build like an anthem or demand to be heard. It unravels slowly, like thread pulled through grief. And in the years I’ve spent trying to hold myself together, that’s what I needed most: a song that didn’t try to fix me, just made space for me to be undone.

I was around thirteen when Metal Heart came out. Looking back, maybe it was too deep for me to fully grasp on a literal level, but I knew I needed it. Some part of me understood before I had the words. That’s the thing about spell-songs: they often speak for you when you don’t know how to speak for yourself. That was me. I was clinging to it tightly and quickly, even if I didn’t yet know why. As a teenager trying to survive emotional turmoil I didn’t know how to name, Metal Heart became a kind of translator. It told the truth my mouth couldn’t form.

The song stayed with me through high school, into college. There were stretches where I didn’t listen to it for months, maybe even years. But it always came back, often right when I needed it most. There’s something eerie and comforting about that. Like it knew.

Even at my most alone, when I didn’t feel like I had much left to fight with, Metal Heart would return. Not to rally me with power chords or screams, but to sit with me quietly. And somehow, that stillness helped me get back up. The spell wasn’t in shouting. The spell was in surviving.

I used to listen to it on repeat, loud in my headphones, disappearing into that hushed world. There was nothing else quite like it. It didn’t demand attention, it offered a hand. A hand that didn’t pull or push, just held.

Years later, the song found me again. Metal Heart first appeared on Cat Power’s 1998 album, Moon Pix, and was re-recorded for her 2008 album Jukebox. I hadn’t listened to it in a while when the new version found me, not long before I was to finish college. And it hit me in a different way. I was no longer that 13-year-old with tangled emotions and nowhere to put them. I had changed. And somehow, the song had too. The edges were slightly sharper, her voice had more weight to it. More presence. It was like we had both grown up, quietly, in parallel.

I still listen to it now, decades later. It holds a kind of sacred familiarity, like it knows me. Like we’ve been through something together. And we have.

If I had to name the kind of spell this song is, I’d say it’s a spell of return. Not triumph. Not transcendence. Just the act of coming back to yourself when everything has scattered.

Metal Heart simply says: I see you. You’re not gone.
And that kind of spell is everything.