Marianne Faithfull Returns With Cover Music
Guest Performances by Nick Cave, Rufus Wainright, Keith Richards
Mar 21, 2009
Titled Easy Come Easy Go, the new album is her first since Before The Poison in 2005. It is also Faithfull’s first album since her treatment for breast cancer and publicly admitting that she has Hepatitis C.
Her no-holds barred attitude to life emerges through this latest work as a collection of unique cover song interpretations. The album’s central piece is her cover of Merle Haggard’s Sing Me Back Home, a song about death row during which Faithfull is appropriately joined in duet by Keith Richards.
Other guest performers include many of Faithfull’s fans such as Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, and Jarvis Cocker.
Cover Collection Highlights Range of Talents
Easy Come Easy Go is a refreshing entry into a cover collection owing to the diversity of tunes, the musical arrangements and Faithfull’s soulful and heartwrenching interpretations. The album is subtitled 12 Songs for Music Lovers and it delivers on a range of cover songs that satisfy a spectrum of listeners.
For example, she covers country music great Dolly Parton’s Down From Dover in a jazz style with Faithfull’s sultry voice at its deepest. The title song by blues queen Bessie Smith is a curious arrangement of saxophone, trumpet, clarinet and piano.
Faithfull makes instant classics of Neko Case’s Hold On, Hold On, the Decemberists’ The Crane Wife 3 and Morrissey’s Dear God Please Help Me.
The cover songs for the album were chosen by Faithfull and producer Hal Wilmer who has demonstrated his masterful treatment of her broken voice with arrangements on two other Faithfull albums, Strange Weather and Blazing Away. The actual recording of Easy Come, Easy Go took only 10 days.
Marianne Faithfull Cover Songs Span Generations
Marianne Faithfull’s work spans more than four decades. As Time Goes By, her 1960s hit, featured her angelic voice and was written by devotee Mick Jagger. The song propelled her to fame as did her relationships with members of The Rolling Stones and drug abuse in the 1970s.
Fans were shocked with her emergence in the late 1970s with a blues-bottom voice hardened by years of drug and alcohol use on a milestone album, Broken English, and its hit title track. Her work has been the subject of enormous critical acclaim despite her personal drug and health struggles.
For this latest album entry, Faithfull told Rolling Stone in a March 2009 interview that she needed a break from writing and decided to use this album as a way of getting a different perspective on some of the themes from her own life. In this way, her new album allows her to channel other artists’ work through her full life experiences.
Marianne Faithfull’s new album adds to a long collection of her inventive work spanning more than 40 years. Easy Come Easy Go allows her to continue adding fans with her interpretations of cover music by both classic and more modern musicians as well as partnering with some of rock and roll’s greatest.
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