We had sad, but not shocking news yesterday with the news that the great singer and musician Marianne Faithfull had died at the age of 78. The rough road of her life is well known and her hospitalization in 2020 as one of the early Covid-19 cases had me thinking that with her background, it would have been her end right there. But as time proved, Ms. Faithfull was made of sterner stuff. So she was able to tread the earth for another five years. I had gone to her website a month or two ago as I had not heard anything from her in some time. I saw that she had an auction of her collections and personal effects at Sothebys so she left a cleaner slate than many at life’s end.

My experience with her music was from the point zero of her incredible “Broken English” album of 1979. I can’t consider it an artistic rebirth as much as the point where she ceased to be an object and made of herself an artist. I was 15 years old then and my friend in high school was visiting his older brother in Louisiana. Somehow it transpired that I gave him a few C-90s to tape some of his brother’s collection to hear something new. I can’t remember if it was his idea or mine. And from that initial impetus came two tapes that were critical to my musical development from that point onward. One was a tape of “CHANGESONEBOWIE” backed with “The Rise + Fall Of Ziggy Stardust + The Spiders From Mars.” The other was “Broken English. Each were clearly works of excellence that even a greenhorned teenager like me could recognize.

I wasted little time in buying my copy of the “Broken English” album once I discovered used record stores in 1981. I have to say that it took longer before I bought the “Ziggy Stardust” album in comparison! Everything that Ms. Faithfull brought to that album was intense, considered, and believable. I appreciated the “Prog players-go-Post-Punk” vibe it had for miles. At the time I had no idea how harrowing her life had been as a homeless drug addict even during the making “Broken English.”

Lots of 60s artists were buried by Punk Rock. Instead, she was energized by it. She came by her affectations honestly as she had married Ben Brierly of The Vibrators and he had written “Brain Drain” for the album and played on it with the eclectic and accomplished crew of musicians. The music was accomplished and could even be called slick, but the attitude behind most of the songs was not complacent in the slightest. It was very confrontational. Very Punk Rock.

I moved through the 80s frightened to buy her subsequent albums since I felt at the time that ‘Broken English” was a singular achievement, but by the Mid 80s, I started buying the newer albums. I’d really enjoyed the “Trouble In Mind” film by Alan Rudolph, and the Mark Isham/Marianne Faithfull soundtrack album was the next step I took down the Faithfull path. By the 90s, I just started buying everything I came across.

In the 90s I had married and my loved one was an inveterate garage/estate sale person and she bought the first US Marianne Faithfull album from 1965 and when we played it the young girl singing those songs on “Go Away From My World” was completely unrecognizable from the raspy crone whom we knew as Marianne Faithfull. This same scenario would play out once more as we became Leonard Cohen fans and one day heard performances from the early part of his career. In both cases, having come first to the mature version of the artist, we could not come to grips with their earlier selves.

The 90s were very good to Ms. Faithfull. She had more success connecting with an audience through mediators like Kurt Weill, Angelo Badalamenti, and Hal Willner. As the 90s progressed, all sorts of Art Rock royalty were clamoring to collaborate with her. They had probably grown up with “Broken English” the same as I had, and she found herself writing and singing songs with the likes of P.J. Harvey, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Beck Hansen providing support. She had come to a point where she was valued and revered as an elder artist with the ability to invest herself in writing songs with a wide variety of partners or else interpreting a song without peer.

We had one shot at seeing Ms. Faithfull perform when she was booked at the local top club The Orange Peel in October of 2009. My wife had eagerly bought the tickets, but before it could happen the show was cancelled. Then, when she was able to book another show locally, she ended up playing the make-up date instead at the Don Gibson Theater in Shelby, NC. A deal-breaking 90 minute drive each way on a weeknight. So sadly, we never got to see her perform live. But I kept buying her albums, finding value in the various projects that came into the Record Cell over time.

Thought he last one we bought was 2008’s “Easy Come, Easy Go.” She had had four more studio albums since that time but I’ve yet to encounter any of these in the wilds. Following her hospitalization for Covid-19 in 2020, her final album from 2021, “She Walks In Beauty,” was a spoken word affair with the artist assaying some of her favorite British poets with musical accompaniment by Warren Ellis and his buddy, Nick Cave. She began recording it before her illness but afterward, singing was out of the question, so she recited the poetry instead of singing. Following that she seemed to retreat from public life to live out the rest of her days at her Paris apartment.

But even if she had recorded only “Broken English” and then disappeared mysteriously, it was the kind of achievement that stands with a handful of towering artistic statements that like it, have only gotten better with age over the decades. Albums like Peter Gabriel’s third or Simple Minds’ “Empires + Dance” are her rightful peers. My first act this morning while driving to the gym was to put “Broken English” on. Side one carried me there, and as I drove away from the gym I heard her magnificent, achingly empathetic reading of “The Eyes Of Lucy Jordan” as I began driving to work. Choking down sobs whilst hot tears stained my face. Her art managed to touch a rarefied plane, so sleep well Ms. Faithfull. You’ve more than earned your eternal rest. Love and respect to her friends and family who will also be processing the loss of this powerful artist. In the meantime, play your copy of “Broken English” today and re-live the magic that never dims.

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