Marianne Faithfull

This special performance is the culmination of a yearlong tour by Marianne Faithfull and pianist/ arranger Paul Trueblood. The breathy, frail, and innocent voice of the '60s, wilted by too many years of hard living, now conveys deep layers of emotion, and the rasp of her voice goes straight to the soul. This concert revisits her album 20th Century Blues and her passion for Kurt Weill, especially the songs composer for his theater collaborations with Bertolt Brecht (among them 'Alabama Song,' 'Pirate Jenny,' 'The Ballad of the Soldier's Wife,' and 'Surabaya Johnny').

This special performance is the culmination of a yearlong tour by Marianne Faithfull and pianist/ arranger Paul Trueblood. The breathy, frail, and innocent voice of the '60s, wilted by too many years of hard living, now conveys deep layers of emotion, and the rasp of her voice goes straight to the soul. This concert revisits her album 20th Century Blues and her passion for Kurt Weill, especially the songs composer for his theater collaborations with Bertolt Brecht (among them 'Alabama Song,' 'Pirate Jenny,' 'The Ballad of the Soldier's Wife,' and 'Surabaya Johnny').

The Very Best of Marianne Faithfull' is a particularly strong collection of Marianne's earliest recordings made for Decca between 1964 to 1968. This album contains every one of her singles which made the charts both in Britain and America during those fruitful four years.

There is no shortage of Marianne Faithfull collections, but the compact, digitally remastered, 11-track 20th Century Masters set comes close to being the best document of her post-comeback period, which began with 1979's Broken English. That addictively eccentric album is well-represented here with the title track, Shel Silverstein's "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan," and John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" making up the three leadoff tracks. Faithfull's '80s versions of "Sister Morphine" (which she co-wrote with the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger and Keith Richards) and "As Tears Go By" are also here, along with her exotic cover of Patti Smith's "Ghost Dance" and the anti-ballad "So Sad."

Few stars of the '60s reinvented themselves as successfully as Marianne Faithfull. Coaxed into a singing career by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham in 1964, she had a big hit in both Britain and the U.S. with her debut single, the Jagger/Richards composition "As Tears Go By" (which prefaced the Stones' own version by a full year)…

Because more than half of the 35 songs on this two-disc retrospective of Marianne Faithfull's 1979-95 output come from her three great albums – Broken English, Dangerous Acquaintances, and Strange Weather – or are previously unreleased outtakes or B-sides from them, A Perfect Stranger: The Island Anthology makes a fine primer to Faithfull's often challenging, always mesmerizing (or would that be always challenging, often mesmerizing?) music…

As the liner notes to this intriguing release tell, Faithfull had a long-simmering interest in German cabaret, particularly the work of Kurt Weill. It came fully to life via her role as Pirate Jenny in a staging of The Threepenny Opera in Dublin as translated by Frank McGuinness and her attendance at a workshop organized by Allen Ginsburg. After a series of initial performances with pianist Paul Trueblood, Faithfull took her revue of many classic songs from the mid-century, titled "An Evening in the Weimar Republic," to the road…