Music Scene: Marianne Faithful reborn as a smoky-voiced chanteuse
01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, September 24, 2009
By RICK MASSIMO
Pop Music Writer
http://www.projo.com/music/content/wk-pop24_09-24-09_85FJKHF_v19.21821a5.htmlMarianne Faithfull will perform on Saturday in New Bedford.
Jean-Baptiste Mondino
Marianne Faithfull’s career started off with her 1964 rendition of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’s “As Tears Go By,” and ever since —through decades of personal turmoil, substance abuse and iconic status — she’s been making loss and angst sound dignified and gorgeous. On last year’s Easy Come Easy Go, Faithfull, 63, collects songs from sources ranging from Bessie Smith to Dolly Parton to Smokey Robinson to The Espers and makes them her own, singing in her low, emotion-laden voice with authority and grace, in front of a small band that includes the brilliant guitarist Marc Ribot. And she employs guest vocals from Antony Hegarty, Chan Marshall, Nick Cave and old friend Keith Richards, who adds poignancy to “Sing Me Back Home.”
Producer Hal Willner was also behind the board for Faithfull’s breakthrough record, 1987’s Strange Weather, a collection of covers that recast the rock chick from the film Girl on a Motorcycle into a weather-beaten chanteuse whose voice fairly smelled of cigarettes and Scotch. They continued to collaborate over the years, but Easy Come Easy Go is their first full-length disc together since Strange Weather.
Willner came to Faithfull in October 2007 with song ideas, and she had some, too. The original recordings might have sounded very different, but Faithfull says she was listening for the underlying song.
“I love emotion, of course. But really what I like is songs that tell a story, and songs that create an atmosphere.” From Parton’s “Down to Dover” to Colin Meloy’s “Crane Wife 3” to Morrissey’s “Dear God Please Help Me,” she found songs that did just that.
After they winnowed the options down, Willner made her a CD of their choices, and she spent the rest of the year listening and singing along. “I understood the songs before, of course. But to reinterpret them, they almost had to become like mine. They have to belong to me. And that takes a bit of time.”
Once they got to the studio, however, it only took nine days to get the record together. Some of her duet partners recorded their parts live with Faithfull in the studio; others overdubbed them later.
Even though the songs don’t necessarily sound joyous — many of them in fact, are full of regret and forlorn hope — Faithfull says that the process was a joyous one.
“It’s especially joyous when you get to New York and go into the studio and it starts to happen. That’s the craft — the art of doing it. There is quite a lot of technique in it, and it’s a fabulous feeling when you have it at your fingertips.”
Faithfull says that she and Willner bring out the best in each other, and that their collaboration improves with time.
“We’re terribly good friends, practically soulmates. Hal was always very talented, and Strange Weather is wonderful, but I think he’s got better and I’ve got better as well.”
That’s what happens when you stick together with someone over a long period of time.
“Yes,” Faithfull says, adding with a laugh, “and I’m not very good at that usually. But I’ve managed that with Hal.”
Faithfull has said elsewhere that one of the driving forces behind her dependencies was stage fright. She says that these days her state of mind about performing has a lot to do with how the show is coming together and how it’s received, and that lately the results have been encouraging.
“It’s getting a little better, actually. But I do get stage fright. I think a lot of people do; they may not always say so. It’s one of the classic reasons why people drink and take drugs, I’m sure.”
Her European tour was sold out, and on the American leg she’ll have the core quartet from the recording. Many of the songs on Easy Come Easy Go have horns and strings over the top of them, but the small-band core manages to shine through. That’s held true in live performance, Faithfull says, and the music has benefited.
“It just made me much more conscious of all the things you really wish you had — the ability to really listen to people, and play ‘with’ instead of playing on top of.”
Faithfull’s songwriting hasn’t gotten as much attention over the years as her singing or her travails, and the co-writer of The Rolling Stones’ “Sister Morphine” says that there may not be a lot of songs coming from her any time soon.
“Oh dear. I’m stuck. I think I’m actually very happy, very content. And I’m also bored with my own life at the moment. I think it will change — I hope it will. But at the moment it’s not easy.”
That state of being often sets the stage for self-destructive behavior, it’s pointed out.
“Well, I’m not going to do that. And if I can’t write another song for the rest of my life, I don’t really mind. I’m not going to make problems for myself because I can’t write.”
In the early days, Faithfull got a lot more notoriety from being Jagger’s girlfriend than anything else. She says she spent the ’60s and early ’70s feeling held back, pigeonholed as a bird-voiced singer of nice pop songs — “although I have to admit that my first career was almost a perfect little career. It’s a complete moment, isn’t it? … But I never felt I had really revealed who I was.”
That changed in 1978 when, in the midst of a decade of drug abuse and turmoil, she released Broken English, a raw nerve of a record that cast Faithfull as the new wave’s Marlene Dietrich, singing with a blasé attitude to the decadence around her and with much more vocal punch — in a lower register — than had ever been heard from her before.
Faithfull says that the change in her voice was “just what happened. But I think it’s the right voice.”
That was the start of the second stage of her career, and Faithfull says it’s the record that first showed “what I was really like. And it was such a shock for people!” Now, “it doesn’t seem so strange, because we know what happened, and we know all the later records, too.”
It’s suggested that society places expectations on who gets to be taken seriously and have long careers and who doesn’t.
“Well, it is peculiar. I never thought it would be me. But I’m glad it is.”
Marianne Faithfull sings at the Zeiterion Theatre, 684 Purchase St., New Bedford, Saturday night at 8. Tickets are $45, $40 and $35; call (508) 994-2900 or go to
www.zeiterion.org.
The Calling Planet Earth Festival brings 40 bands on three stages to Ninigret Park Friday through Sunday, and co-organizer Robert Callender, of Warwick, says that the goal is to spread “the message of love, peace, music and shared prosperity for everybody. It sounds like a hippie thing, but it’s true.”
The headliners are The Pat McGee Band on Friday, Assembly of Dust on Saturday and Adam Schnier, the singer of moe., on Sunday. Some of the other big deals include Entrain and The Wood Brothers (Friday), Peter Francis of Dispatch on Saturday and Virginia Coalition on Sunday.
Callender says that the jam-band label fits on most of the acts at the festival, but “to me, it’s just really fine musicians. And their fans don’t care whether they have records in the top 10.”
If Callender’s name rings a bell, it’s probably from his groundbreaking psychedelic-soul work in the mid- and late ’60s, especially the ultra-rare freakout masterpiece le Musee de L’impressionisme. He’s working on a multimedia project, but says he probably won’t be performing this weekend. “I’m there to meet and greet anyone who’s curious about what happened to me.”
The festival runs 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday through Sunday at Ninigret Park, in Charlestown. For tickets, go to
www.showclix.com.
Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry comes out with his latest solo disc, Have Guitar Will Travel, on Oct. 6; I’ll have an interview with him about the disc and the future of Aerosmith in the paper a couple of days before that, but you can hear the music yourself when he plays at Club Hell, 73 Richmond St., Providence, Sunday night at 8. Tickets are $20; get ‘em at
www.etix.com or the Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel box office at 79 Washington St.
[email protected]
Pages: 1
Marianne Faithful reborn as smoky-voiced chanteuse (Read 1,913 times)
