Marianne Faithfull
NPR ran a feature a couple Sundays back on the new Marianne Faithfull record, playing snippets from a couple of songs in between interview segments. One week later, they read a purportedly representative letter of complaint, saying that Faithfull’s voice is something “nobody wants to hear on a Sunday morning.”
Hard to believe 30 years after the release of the masterful Broken English album that Marianne Faithfull is neither a household name nor an easily accepted vocalist. Some remember her pure soprano in the 1960s when she sang the song Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote for her, “As Tears Go By”. But the sound that still causes controversy is the earthier, smoke-inflected, cracking voice which resulted from her hard times.
Faithfull’s new album reunites her with producer Hal Willner, who helmed her other career high point, 1987’s Strange Weather. As he did then, Willner collaborated with Faithfull to choose an intriguing selection of songs from a century’s worth of great ones material as diverse as “Solitude” by Duke Ellington, “Hold On Hold On” by Neko Case, and “Dear God Please Help Me” by Morrissey.
Her strength is in that voice, and its ability to convey worlds of emotion and depth and experience. Few interpretive singers get further inside the lyrics of a song, or use phrasing to greater effect. On Dolly Parton’s “Down From Dover”, she captures the belief of the young pregnant girl that her man will return, and then manages to slowly dissipate it until the horrific ending. On Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home”, she reunites with Richards to add personal memories to the nostalgia of a prisoner doomed to the gallows.
Wrong turns? Maybe the Billie Holiday title track, which doesn’t quite feel natural enough, and definitely the overwrought take on Smokey Robinson’s “Ooh Baby Baby”, which suffers from the theatrically earnest co-lead vocals of Antony (from Antony & the Johnsons), who has never earned a single emotion he couldn’t assume was his right. For the most part on the disc, however, great vocals meet great arrangements of great songs.