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Dreamin’ My Dreams (1976; re-released in 1978 as Faithless) ***

Imagine Lotte Lenya singing Patsy Cline’s greatest hits and you’ll get a sense of Marianne Faithfull’s first comeback, Dreamin’ My Dreams. Faithfull’s voice had changed strikingly from her Sixties albums. It was lower, husky, cracked, ravaged by drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes. One can already hear the changes coming in the 1969 “Sister Morphine” and on her earlier, unreleased comeback attempt, Rich Kid Blues. Honestly, though, it is an improvement: infinitely more characterful and expressive.

Dreamin’ My Dreams also gives Faithfull’s voice the right setting: lush and resonant. Her voice becomes tiresome against more stripped-down arrangements. The songs are also well-chosen: strong, dynamic melodies set off her voice, which rapidly becomes grating in less forgiving contexts.

Dreamin’ My Dreams stakes out one side of the space in which Faithfull would flourish: the sophisticated, melancholic ballad, which ranges from the best of country music through folk and rock to Anglo show tunes and Weimar cabaret music.

Dangerous Acquaintances (1981) ***

A Child’s Adventure (1983) ***

For some reason, after Broken English, Faithfull went for a more conventional pop sound, with less emotional rawness. Her next two albums were Dangerous Acquaintances and A Child’s Adventure. The music is slick and Steely Dan-like, with fewer rough edges. Faithfull is in good voice. The production is excellent. The songs are melodic. But they just aren’t as consistently good as the ones on Broken English. The best songs on Dangerous Acquaintances are “Intrigue” and “Truth, Bitter Truth.” The best songs on A Child’s Adventure are “Times Square,” “Falling from Grace,” and “She’s Got a Problem.”

A Secret life (1995) ***

I was pretty much checked out of popular music during the Nineties. I was focused on classical music and to a lesser extent on jazz. (I never even heard of Nirvana until 2002.) But when I happened upon A Secret Life in a CD store, I was intrigued. What sold me, though, were the words, “Produced by Angelo Badalamenti.”

Badalamenti is one of my favorite film composers simply for his work with David Lynch. Badalamenti not only produced A Secret Life, he co-authored the songs with Faithfull, who is in fine voice throughout. In terms of style, the two are a perfect match. His music sets off her voice beautifully. I just wish the songs were better. This is a good album, but not a great one.

My favorite tracks are “Love in the Afternoon,” “Flaming September,” and “The Stars Line Up.” Perfect night music. The album should have included Faithfull and Badalamenti’s ballad, “Who Will Take My Dreams Away?” from the soundtrack to The City of Lost Children.

In 2023, Island re-released A Secret Life on vinyl for Record Store Day with an appealing extra track, “You’re Not In London Anymore.” I found the presence of the strings, woodwinds, and bass to be superior to the CD. But the pressing is not the best.

Before the Poison (2004) ***

Before the Poison is an album of collaborations with younger artists. Five of the ten tracks are with P. J. Harvey, three are with Nick Cave, one is with Damon Albarn, and the last is with Jon Brion. Most of the songs are quite good, both lyrically and melodically, and Faithfull sings them exquisitely. The only flaw is the production: Faithfull’s voice is often mixed too low, and the arrangements are often too dry. Most of these flaws could be removed with a simple remix. The best tracks are “Crazy Love” with Cave, “Before the Poison” with Harvey, “Last Song” with Albarn, and “There Is a Ghost” with Cave (the best arrangement). I could have done without Cave’s “Desperanto,” though.

20th Century Blues (1996) **

The Seven Deadly Sins (1997) **

In 1985, Faithfull worked with Hal Willner covering “The Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife” by Kurt Weill (pronounced “vile”) and Bertolt Brecht for Willner’s Weill tribute album Lost in the Stars.

It seemed inevitable. Weimar cabaret music was suited to Faithfull’s talents as well as her decadent image. Besides that, it was something of a family tradition on her mother’s side. Faithfull even sounded like Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife who recorded many of his songs. But in a better world, Faithfull would have been singing Cole Porter, not Kurt Weill.

20th Century Blues is a live album of Weimar and Weimaresque cabaret songs accompanied by pianist Paul Trueblood. Ideally, there should have been more than a single accompanist, for Faithfull’s voice is left a bit overexposed. She’s also occasionally out of tune. The best tracks are two songs associated with Marlene Dietrich, Friedrich Hollander’s “Want to Buy Some Illusions” and “Falling in Love Again,” as well as Noël Coward’s “20th Century Blues,” a much better rendition of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” and Harry Nilsson’s gorgeous “Don’t Forget Me.”

Unfortunately, most of the album is devoted to Weill’s Judeo-Bolshevik collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, which are cynical Communist agitprop set to angular, herky-jerky oom-pah music, mostly from A Threepenny Opera, which is basically Antifa: The Musical, a celebration of hatred, depravity, and criminality as a tool of Communist subversion.

I really wish that Faithfull had recorded much more from Coward and Nilsson. They were far better composers but still suited to both her talents and image.

The Seven Deadly Sins is a Weill-Brecht collaboration for the concert hall, not the stage. Faithfull is accompanied by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. It is a first-class production and recording. There are places in which Faithfull is obviously not up to the music’s demands and brazens it out on sheer personality. Lotte Lenya’s performance remains a benchmark, but that just means it is a better-polished turd. I wish I could get back every minute of my life spent listening to Brecht and Weill. Naturally, these albums got rave reviews.

Strange Weather (1987) *

Strange Weather is Faithfull’s first album after kicking heroin for good. It is a disaster: bleak, boring, depressing. Many of the songs are wrong for Faithfull. For instance, she should never sing “blues.” It is simply too primitive. Moreover, a couple of good cabaret-style song choices (“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays”) are ruined by flat arrangements and dirgelike performances. The same is true of her new version of “As Tears Go By.” I blame producer Hal Willner, whose production style was simply not right for Faithfull’s voice and talents.

Kissin Time (2002) *

After Vagabond Ways, Kissin Time was a terrible letdown. I am sure it sounded good on paper: rock legend Marianne Faithfull collaborating with a hip younger generation: Beck, Billy Corgan, Jarvis Cocker, etc.

The problem is that most of the songs are terrible: absolutely terrible, terrible for Faithfull, or just terribly done.

Two tracks, however, are excellent: “Song for Nico” and “Sliding Through Life on Charm.” “Like Being Born” is also intriguing and would have been at home on Vagabond Ways. All were co-authored by Faithfull. Also the cover of Goffin and King’s “Something Good” is surprisingly appealing. In short, we have two singles and two B-sides. Once more, Faithfull’s talents were smothered by flat production and melodically primitive blues vamps and electronic noodling. Most of this should have simply been shelved.

Easy Come, Easy Go (2008) *

Horses and High Heels (2011) *

As if Strange Weather was not bad enough the first time, Faithfull returns to Hal Willner’s embalming table for two more records of primitive blues and honky-tonk music, as well as good songs like Dolly Parton’s “Down from Dover” rendered as dry, stripped-down dirges. As if it wasn’t bad enough the first time, Easy Come, Easy Go has been reissued with a second disc with eight more tracks, as well as a DVD documentary about the recording session.

Negative Capability (2018) *

Negative Capability is a Hal Willner album without Hal Willner: boring and bleak.

The best tracks (relatively speaking) are “The Gypsy Faerie Queen” with Nick Cave and “They Come at Night,” a song about terrorism and crime in Europe today, inspired by the Bataclan massacre in Paris, which doesn’t mention that these problems come from the Middle East and North Africa. No, the “Nazis” have returned. Granted, she uses “Nazis” as a metaphor, but it is a silly and tired one.

The album also contains remakes of “As Tears Go By,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and “Witches’ Song.” But they are all inferior to earlier versions. This waste of time is a sad comedown after Give My Love to London.

She Walks in Beauty (2021) Unrated

By 2021, Faithfull could no longer sing. Her last release is a recording of her reading—in a ravaged whisper—English Romantic poets to the ambient electronic music of Warren Ellis. It is not a pleasant experience.

A Perfect Stranger: The Island Anthology (1998) ****

Songs of Innocence and Experience (1965–1995) ***

If you want to explore Faithfull’s best work, my recommendation is simply to get Broken English (expanded edition), Vagabond Ways (expanded edition), and Give My Love to London.

If you want the best pieces from her other albums up to 1995, you should also pick up A Perfect Stranger, which has the best tracks from her Island years, plus way too much of her work with Hal Willner, and several unreleased tracks.

Songs of Innocence and Experience also ends at 1995 but goes back to her first music from the Sixties. It is less a “best of” collection (though it contains some of her best songs) than a collection of rarities and odds and ends. It is more for completists than beginners.

Aside from her foray into Weill and Brecht’s disgusting cultural Bolshevist agitprop, Marianne Faithfull’s work is more personal than political. Indeed, some of her songs, like “Broken English” and “Working Class Hero,” which she made her own, seem anti-Leftist, but from an essentially apolitical point of view. In Budapest in 2014, when she introduced Roger Waters’ “Sparrows Will Sing,” she made a point of saying that his progressive sentiments did not accord with her cultural and political pessimism, which comes out in such songs as “Mother Wolf,” which is what Savitri Devi would call an “impeachment of man.”

Faithfull preferred to make art by confronting her own failed attempts to find happiness in drugs and relationships, as well as her compulsion to repeat the same mistakes. I can’t imagine reading about Marianne Faithfull’s life and listening to her music, then deciding to be a junkie and a whore. At her best, she was a great singer and songwriter. But she offered herself less as a role model than as a cautionary tale.