A unique new album of poetry and music featuring Marianne Faithfull, set to the music of Warren Ellis, and featuring Nick Cave, Brian Eno and Vincent Ségal.
Marianne Faithfull releases one of the most distinctive albums of her extraordinary life and career with composer and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis. It was recorded just before and during the first Covid-19 lockdown – during which the singer herself became infected and almost died. Together with musical friends and family, She Walks in Beauty fulfils Faithfull’s long-held ambition to record an album of poetry with music.
Delving deep into her past, it’s a record that draws on her passion for the English Romantic poets, a passion she fostered at St Joseph's Convent School before leaving for London at the age of 16. There she entered the world of As Tears Go By, of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, setting her on a left-hand path to pop stardom. Sixties iconography and outrage followed, as did her subsequent battles with addiction before her 1979 return to powerful female and artistic autonomy with Broken English.
Her subsequent albums in the 90’s and 2000’s pay homage to her fond appreciation of poetry, but it is only now that a project she had nursed through the decades has come to fruition.
Instrumental in making She Walks in Beauty a reality is her longtime friend and manager Francois Ravard. The album was recorded in part at her London home with PJ Harvey’s producer Head.
Working together although apart, the music was composed by Ellis in his Paris studio. Nick Cave adorned the tracks with piano while Brian Eno created compelling sound textures on the likes of La Belle Dame Sans Merci and The Bridge of Sighs, while Vincent Ségal added cello parts to Shelley’s liminal, otherworldly To The Moon, and Byron’s late night lament So We’ll Go No More A-Roving, among others.
The album is a radical departure and a return to her original inspirations as as an artist and performer. Drawing deep on the poetry of Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Thomas Hood, Faithfull’s vocals set to Ellis’s subtle collages of sound draw out the heart and the vibrant living matter in these eleven great poems. Marianne renews the poetry, inhabiting each text with the complex, lived-in timbres of her voice. Adorned by a palette of ambient musical settings, she invites the listener into a world she shares wholeheartedly.
She Walks in Beauty is scheduled for release 30th April 2021, with artwork created for the album by British artist and lifelong friend, Colin Self.
The physical album will be available in form of a CD-Book and a vinyl with 28 pages booklet including the full poems.
Listen/download HERE.