The British singer, who was hospitalized for covid-19 last year and suffers from the virus persistently, recites texts by romantic poets on her new album, a work of ‘spoken word’ and sound landscaping half signed with the multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis and produced with the help of collaborators such as Nick Cave and Brian Eno.
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If there is a voice that the passage of time does not take its toll in terms of musical art, it is that of Marianne Faithfull, beaten even in her middle age, successively, by breast cancer, hepatitis C and a broken hip (when she acted lame at the Palau, on her last visit, in 2014). The last has been the coronavirus, who sent her to the hospital a year ago and she continues to suffer in persistent mode. But there she is, posting a beautiful and anti-commercial album, ‘She walks in beauty’, signed half with Warren Ellis.
This time we are shown saved by poetry, that of her young romantic heroes, as Lord Byron, Shelley Y Keats, whose verses he recites, with extra layers of experiential grain and wise inflections, on soft musical mantles elaborated by Ellis in complicity with the piano of Nick Cave, the electronic settings of Brian Eno and the cello of Vincent Ségal. Farewell record? Who knows. At age 74, which may be three times that of an ordinary citizen, now fatigued and weakened by covid-19, she says she works her voice at home when, in an interview with the agency France Press, she is asked if she will sing again. “Honey, we don’t know, I hope so, I practice once a week with a friend who comes to my house,” he reveals, although he adds: “Not being able to sing again is a horrible thought, but if that happens, I won’t be able to do anything to her.”
The decline of the giants
As if foreshadowing the possible meltdown as a singer, ‘She walks in beauty’ does not show her singing melodies but rather declaiming verses in a serene exercise of ‘spoken word’. Influencing that sensation of twilight, the chosen poems speak of lost youth, vital contemplation and the decline of the giants. Marianne Faithfull is one of those artists who, without composing songs, has always known how to make great albums, endowed with unity, depth and aura: the post-punk ‘Broken English’ (1979), the sumptuously decadent and ‘avantgarde’ ‘Strange weather’ (1987, entente with Hal Willner, the friend that the covid-19 took), the majestic ‘A secret life’ (1995, played by Angelo Badalamenti). This is also the case, although it connects with the listener in other lanes, more slow and mental.
The atmosphere is twinned with that of Warren’s latest productions with Nick Cave, minimizing rhythmic inflections and prioritizing landscaping. Focus the voice, transmitting calm, warmth and experience. Marianne oracle and testimony of life, consolidating the poetic link with Ellis, a sound architect and multinstrumentalist who has been common in his work since ‘Before the poison’ (2005), his post-9/11 album, in which Cave also participated, along with PJ Harvey and Damon Albarn.
Beauty and innocence
‘She walks in beauty’ is the title of the poem that opens the album, which Lord Byron wrote in 1814 after the impression that caused him to see his beautiful cousin Anne Beatrix Wilmott, dressed in mourning, with her pale skin and her “raven braids”. Verses that speak of beauty as a majestic magnet, and of “a heart whose love is innocent”, and that make one think of that Faithfull who lost her purity in the 60s after entering the snake garden of the Satanic Majesties. She came, literally, from the nunnery in Reading, which took her in after her parents’ divorce and given her mother’s financial problems. But it was there A teacher of whom he has a grateful memory, Mrs. Simpson, introduced him to these romantic poems.
It is now when she can read each verse with an amplitude hardly suspected when she was a teenager, certifying all its meaning with her old-fashioned voice. The history of ‘Ozymandias’, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet, which, in relation to Pharaoh Ramses II, alludes to the decline of leaders and empires, however high and great they were. And the triumph of the passage of time, crushing youthful vigor, appears in ‘So we’ll go no more a-roving’, another text by Lord Byron: “We will not wander again / so late at night / although the heart continues to love / and the moon keep the same radiance ”. A poem to which Joan Baez gave other lives, on his fifth album (1964), and Leonard Cohen on ‘Dear Heather’ (2004).
The lady in the tower
The allusion to beauty returns in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the ode to the nightingale in which John Keats extolled the magnificence of the bird’s song, perennial and alien to worldly tribulations. A Keats who already enlightened Faithfull in his previous album, three years ago, entitled ‘Negative capability’ in attention to an expression used by the poet, according to which great writers, such as Shakespeare, inhabit an idea of autonomous beauty. to the spoilers character of reason and factual perception, a state of mind impervious to doubts and uncertainty.
The climax of the album puts it ‘The lady of Shallot’, ballad of Arthurian origins about the sad lady trapped in the tower who, mocking his fate, sees Camelot daily through a mirror and dies of love while trying to chase the reflection of the handsome knight Lancelot. Recitation that extends with all parsimony until almost twelve minutes, on an impressionist background, leaving a trace of romantic sublimation. This poem inspired Mick Jagger in the lyrics of ‘As tears go by’, and Faithfull relates it, in her memoir (‘Una autobiografía’, Celeste Ediciones, 1995), with her own history with the singer. The Lady of Shallot looked in the mirror “watching life go by,” she wrote, and the song was about “a woman who remembers her life with nostalgia,” as herself in the future. “It’s as if our entire relationship is already foreshadowed in the song,” he reflected then.
With earthly traffic on hold due to the coronavirus, Marianne Faithfull is now the lady who watches life go by, and ‘She walks in beauty’ is her letter from the tower, in which he describes the world and paints the sunset, his own too, through poetic and musical beauty. In this crazy context, we can perceive it a little more if possible, and savor the specters it invokes, including that Marianne with big pop glasses and a miniskirt who allowed herself to be entertained by ‘Swinging London’, imagining that perhaps she could handle it.
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