The symbolism of a jukebox would normally bring to my mind a dive bar on the corner, the kind of place to hunker down for the night and drink and talk shit and maybe dance sadly, slowly with someone you know too well or regret knowing not nearly well enough while a succession of lived-in, solidly built songs unspools from the back of the joint. But Cat Power’s Jukebox actually feels more like a cross-country road trip spent listening to local radio stations as they drift in and out of reception. The album rolls, feels restless, ambulatory. It wanders across a landscape of varying genres and artists and musical eras, yes, but there’s also a more indefinable nervous energy shot through the tracks. Maybe it’s just Chan Marshall’s general skittishness seeping through? Who knows, though, whether that skittishness is actually there or if it’s just an aural hallucination conjured in my ears courtesy of the frequently, and boringly, repeated received wisdom about her formerly unpredictable stage presence and how it’s morphed into an incarnation somewhat more dependable if not exactly lacking a certain caged volatility.

But it also might be a more complex there missing there, the molecules of these songs constantly wiggling, refusing to resolve into anything solid or easily grasped. It’s as if you can hear the places where these recordings were built on memory and emotional association, rather than faithfully reproduced lead sheets and chord progressions. The privacy and intimacy of the endeavor is fascinating, confounding, yet somehow also off-putting. Instead of the sublime mystery of a new lover waiting to be learned and unlocked and obsessed over, the album comes across like a particularly complicated and opaque acquaintance who resists closer friendship with a curt smile and evasive answers about her life while clearly wearing the pain of her back story like a snugly fitted business suit.

Which is not to say that the album is not achingly lovely. Marshall’s husky, intoxicating midnight voice seems like it’s all at once come to embody the beloved Mountain Goats lyric from The Sunset Tree, “So this is what the volume knob is for.” You can hear her discovering a whole range of color and expressiveness in her voice that she’s rarely used before, clearly getting a bang out of grooving to the sound of her own gift — the private bedroom anguish of her early career transforming into the private bedroom celebration of rocking out with a hairbrush microphone in front of a mirror. It’s frankly thrilling to hear the immediacy of self-discovery recorded like that.

From the late-night, big-city feel of “New York” and “Ramblin’ (Wo)man” to the dusty summertime exhalation of “Silver Stallion” and “Aretha, Sing One for Me” and beyond, these songs are, weirdly, actually served really well by the amorphousness of the album as a whole; as a listener, I can’t decide if they make me feel like a carefree, playful child in the early 1980s or a carefree, sexually active adult in the early 1980s — or both, simultaneously. Either way, it’s all terrycloth tennis shorts and roller skates, the sound somehow both innocent and languorously sensual. Which maybe lives up to the promise of a jukebox after all: a chance to sample from a whole array of experiences and vices and hangups and wisdom and foolishness for a few minutes’ time.