‘She means every word she sings’: inside a starry tribute to Marianne Faithfull

In the spring of 2020, news came that Marianne Faithfull was deathly ill from Covid. The virus was at a murderous high then and it affected her in the worst way possible, causing her to lose consciousness, necessitating a rush to an intensive care unit where she was intubated with little hope of survival. “All I know is that I was in a very dark place,” Faithfull told the Guardian in an interview one year later. “Presumably, it was death.”

Faithfull survived, but the intensity of the virus, combined with her underlying condition of emphysema, compromised her lungs to the point where she may never be able to sing again. That left her with a double whammy – the potential loss of any fresh source of income and the steep cost of recovery from long Covid. While her situation has been deeply concerning for many fans, one of them actually decided to do something about it.

Related: Marianne Faithfull: ‘I was in a dark place. Presumably it was death’

“I wanted to come up with something that would make as much money for Marianne as possible,” said Tanya Pearson, who heads the Women of Rock Oral History Project, which chronicles the work of female rock musicians. “I considered organizing a benefit concert, but at the time the pandemic was still going.”

Instead, she decided to try to create a combination tribute/benefit album featuring stars covering songs Faithfull has famously recorded. “The easy part was finding musicians who were willing to donate their time and effort,” Pearson said of the project, which began more than two years ago. “Finding a label to forgo any profit was a lot harder.”

First, she tried big labels like BMG and Island, for whom Faithfull recorded some of her best-known work. “They all said, ‘We love Marianne, but we can’t do it,’” Pearson recalled. “I told them: ‘Well, you could. You just don’t want to.”

After much searching, Pearson finally found a small label called In the Q, which this week, in conjunction with Bandbox, will issue a double vinyl set titled The Faithfull. The package, which will also be available on streaming services, boasts 19 tracks by stars such as Shirley Manson, Cat Power, Iggy Pop, Peaches, the Bush Tetras and more. Though most of the artists involved are women, Pearson said that was solely due to the industry contacts she has through the Women of Rock Oral Oral History Project. Even so, the result had a nice side-effect: “The album winds up making a statement about Marianne Faithfull as a progenitor and an inspiration to so many women,” Pearson said.

Among them is Shirley Manson, who, in a duet with Peaches for the album, covers one of the songs most closely associated with Faithfull, the spewing Why D’Ya Do It? “When I first heard that song, I was 15 and it resonated with me deeply,” said Manson. “I had been betrayed by a lover and that song gave me words for what I was feeling. I also loved that the lyrics were so venomous. To this day, it’s extremely rare to hear a woman sing so explicitly about sex and betrayal.

“Marianne was singing about hash and pussy and getting revenge in that song, and I loved it!” said Peaches. “I also loved that her voice was so crazy and scathing. That was a big influence on me and my music.”

Tanya Donelly, who helped form the bands Throwing Muses, the Breeders and Belly, came to Faithfull’s music from a very different angle. When she was growing up, her parents played Faithfull’s 60s recordings, back when her voice had a light quaver and her music a folk tinge. For the tribute, Donelly paired with the harmony trio Parkington Sisters on a cover of This Little Bird, a major hit for Faithfull in 1965. “Her voice on that song was very much a part of my childhood,” Donelly said. “I also sang it to my kids as a lullaby.”

Despite the delicacy of Faithfull’s original recording, Donelly detected a tug of sadness in it. “Her singing in that song has that sweetness and that darkness,” she said. “She’s a master at balancing the two.”

In assembling the tribute, Pearson encouraged the participants to select pieces that would represent the full arc of Faithfull’s career, which includes 22 solo albums issued over six decades. The selections they chose stretch from her 1964 breakthrough hit As Tears Go By (covered by Tracy Bonham), through songs of this century, such as Before the Poison (by the group Feminine Aggression) and Sex With Strangers (delivered with louche allure by the Toilet Boys’ Miss Guy). The album’s repertoire underscores the diversity of Faithfull’s catalogue, which was a major draw for Tammy Faye Starlite, who covers The Ballad of Lucy Jordan on the album and who created a successful, recurring cabaret show based around the Broken English album. “Marianne’s career is so varied,” Starlite said. “You have the 60s pop songs she recorded and then the country songs she did in the 70s, and then Broken English with that great rasp, then the Brecht-Weill songs and on and on. With certain singers, every song has the same production and the same sound until you want to scream. With Marianne, it’s always different.”

The range of her work also extends to the dreamy orchestral song cycle A Secret Life, which she created with Angelo Badalamenti, and a clutch of albums for which she co-wrote pieces with a subsequent generation of musical mavericks such as Beck, PJ Harvey and Nick Cave. Linking it all is the intentionality of Faithfull’s performances. “She means every word she sings,” Donelly said.

To Manson that’s what makes her a master interpreter. “I often hear singers covering songs and while they may sing them beautifully it’s almost like they don’t understand the words,” she said. “In Marianne’s case, she brings a full life of understanding to whatever song she injects herself into.”

Faithfull’s experience as an actor, in roles from Ophelia to the Three Sisters to the Brecht-Weill pieces, helps greatly in that pursuit. “When Marianne sings The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, she both is Lucy Jordan and she’s the narrator of her story,” Starlite said. “She can embody the character’s plight while also objectively describing it.”

Skills like that, along with the individuality of Faithfull’s timbre, solve a potential compositional problem the tribute album might have faced. Most of the pieces it includes weren’t written by Faithfull. Yet, when she sings them, she becomes their spiritual co-author. Some artists on the tribute strove to match that feat by casting their renditions in a far different light from Faithfull’s. Joan As Police Woman transformed Broken English from a menacing rocker into a gurgling brood, while Lydia Lunch put a Dylan-esque snarl and a flinty guitar into the blues song Life, Love and Money.

Despite the individuality and range of Faithfull’s original recordings, in the media she has often been reduced to the garish headlines of her life, drawn from her days with the Stones and her drug struggles. To counter that, Pearson wrote a book a few years ago titled Why Marianne Faithfull Matters, which prioritizes her music. “If I were this prolific artist who is constantly creating things and the headline of every article about me was that I was once a homeless junkie, it would really piss me off,” Pearson said. “As documentarians and gatekeepers, we have some power to change how women like Marianne are treated so they’re respected for their artistic output.”

At the same time, singers like Starlite believe it’s impossible to fully separate Faithfull’s story from her work. “Her art and life are like twins,” she said. “One feeds the other in a way that’s very specific. Her life choices affected her voice.”

In Faithfull’s case, however, the damage to her voice only wound up deepening her sense of expression. The change began with the grit she gained for Broken English in 1979; it has only magnified in meaning since. On her album in 2018, Negative Capability, Faithfull leaned into the comparisons with her past by including some songs she had sung decades earlier, including As Tears Go By. It was her third run at the piece. “When she last recorded that song, in 1987, and sang the line, ‘It is the evening of the day,’ it sounded like twilight,” Starlite said. “This time, it really sounds like the end. And that’s incredibly moving.”

On Faithfull’s most recent album, She Walks in Beauty, which she completed after she survived the initial ravages of Covid, she didn’t sing but instead offered spoken word renditions of classic Romantic poems. The result was no less than stirring than before. To Donelly, the changes in Faithfull’s voice provide a role model. “For all of us who are starting to lose range she’s inspiring,” she said.

Small wonder the participants in the tribute project relate to Faithfull so deeply. The reason Starlite created her cabaret show in the first place, she said, was “because I wanted to be Marianne Faithfull”. She even went so far as to include in her show the guitarist Barry Reynolds, who worked with Faithfull for years and who wrote some key songs for her, including Times Square. Not to be outdone, Pearson has an image of the star tattooed on her right shoulder.

In assembling the tribute, Pearson has been in periodic contact with Faithfull, who, she said, loves the musical result. At the same time, the 76-year-old star continues to suffer with respiratory problems and brain fog, which may have figured into her decision not to do interviews to promote it. Even so, Pearson said she was taking singing lessons in hopes of maybe regaining more of her voice. In the meantime, those involved in the tribute hope it will do more than just raise money for the star. “Many fans of the artists on this record are probably unaware of Marianne,” said Manson. “My hope is that they’ll listen to this album and then to hers, so her music is kept alive for generations to come.”

• This article was amended on 6 December 2023 to add the information that the cover art for The Faithful is by Jill Emery.

• The Faithful is out on 8 December. Tammy Faye Starlite will perform a benefit show for the singer at the New York club Pangea on 22 December. The show, titled She’s a Rainbow, will feature songs that Marianne Faithfull inspired.