I read a concert review the other day about a recent Marianne Faithfull show. I've been a fan since sometime around "Broken English." Faithfull brings to mind a tough-yet-tender late-night chanteuse, and she would be on my short list of people with whom I'd like to share a closing time drink. Today her tipple would likely be sparkling water; I'd stick with my usual.
Anyway, the reviewer mentioned her most recent album, "Easy Come Easy Go," which reminded me to pick it up. I had downloaded a single track last spring--"Sing Me Back Home" (sung with old friend Keith Richards)--and I meant to buy the whole thing then. It's moody and atmospheric and colored by some killer arrangements and that wizened voice of debauchery and survival.
Here's an excerpt from a piece on MSNBC.msn.com:
"The first party I went to in London where I was discovered by Andrew Oldham — all the Beatles were there and the Stones were there too," says Faithfull. Soon after, Oldham brought the soprano with an angelic voice into the studio to record the melancholy "As Tears Go By," the first song co-written by Keith Richards and her soon-to-be boyfriend Mick Jagger.
"It's a strange song to get a 17-year-old to sing. It's all about a woman looking back on her youth, not participating, I couldn't really feel it. ... But now I can really feel it and it's very beautiful... I got to the right age where the woman in the song is," says Faithfull, who now sings the song in her world-weary contralto voice roughened by too much tobacco and booze in her colorful past.
But Faithfull has little in common with the song's protagonist who is content "to sit and watch" as her life goes by. She has gone from singing light folk-rock in the '60s to becoming a leading interpreter of the dark pre-World War II Berlin theatrical music of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.
Faithfull is proud of her role as muse to the Rolling Stones in their early years, inspiring such songs as "You Can't Always Get What You Want," "Wild Horses, and "Sister Morphine" (for which she belatedly received credit for writing the lyrics). And she was a muse to the Beats — Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughts and Gregory Corso — in their later years.
The latest script is her new album "Easy Come, Easy Go," on which she interprets songs spanning nearly a century of popular music from Duke Ellington and Dolly Parton to Neko Case and the Decembrists. It has a contemporary feel thanks to collaborations with younger musicians such as Chan Marshall, known as Cat Power, and two children of her musician friends, Rufus Wainwright and Sean Lennon.
"It's not just an old person singing covers, no, thank God," she says, distinguishing it from albums by contemporaries like Rod Stewart. It's also stylistically eclectic — a mix of jazz, blues, country, folk and rock — because she explains "nobody listens to one style of music, nor do I."
Faithfull credits Richards for inspiring the album through bootleg recordings he made of his favorite songs in the '60s.The album closes poignantly with Faithfull and Richards joining voices on Merle Haggard's death row ballad "Sing Me Back Home," a tune she first heard the Stones' guitarist play with Gram Parsons in the '60s. The two longtime friends sing lyrics like "Make my old memories come alive."
Here's the standard track list (there's also an import version with a second CD.)
Pick it up:
"Down from Dover", (originally by Dolly Parton)
"Hold On, Hold On", with Cat Power (originally by Neko Case)
"Solitude" (originally by Duke Ellington & Eddie DeLange)
"The Crane Wife 3", with Nick Cave (originally by The Decemberists)
"Easy Come, Easy Go" (originally by Bessie Smith)
"Children of Stone", with Rufus Wainwright (originally by Espers)
"How Many Worlds", with Teddy Thompson (originally by Brian Eno)
"In Germany Before the War" (originally by Randy Newman)
"Ooh Baby Baby", with Antony Hegarty (originally by Smokey Robinson)
"Sing Me Back Home", with Keith Richards (originally by Merle Haggard)
No comments:
Post a Comment