Easy come easy go

They had me at hello. Marianne Faithfull’s 22nd album is also her first with producer Hal Willner since 1987’s Strange Weather. The house band includes Tom Waits alumni Marc Ribot and Greg Cohen, plus Sean Lennon, Dirty Three members Warren Ellis and Jim White, and full strings and brass sections. The songbook is groaning with beauties from Duke Ellington, Randy Newman, Smokey Robinson, Merle Haggard and Morrissey alongside younger writers like Neko Case, Decemberist Colin Meloy and Philadelphia’s Espers. The guest-list includes Keith Richards, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Antony Hegarty, the McGarrigles and Rufus Wainwright.
In rookie hands this could have been a kitchen crammed with too many kooks, but Willner’s used to wrangling ensemble casts. More importantly, his A&R skills are as sound as ever. The opener, Dolly Parton’s heartwrenching ‘Down From Dover’, could have been tailor cut for Faithfull. And while we know she can do the fag-handed jazz singer with ease on tunes like the Duke’s ‘Solitude’ or Webster & Burke’s ‘Black Coffee’, it’s as an Anglo-American folk rose she most impresses, particularly her approach to Meloy’s ‘The Crane Wife 3’ and Espers’ ‘Children Of Stone’. True, the version of Neko Case’s ‘Hold On, Hold On’ isn’t all it could be (the original is one of the most ghostly, lovelorn songs of the last decade) although star turns from Warren Ellis and Chan Marshall still lend it a certain ragged beauty.
The rest of the record groans with treasures: Brian Eno’s ‘How Many Worlds’ features a blinding performance from Ribot allied to White at his most scattershot (half the fun is hearing these highly idiosyncratic musicians play to and against type). Newman’s ‘In Germany Before The War’ is, as always, stark and chilling. Smokey’s ‘Ooh Baby Baby’, featuring Antony, morphs from Hendrixian starchild ballad into a funky, sexy soul-burner. Morrissey’s ‘Dear God Please Help Me’ and the traditional ‘Kimbie’ are lost gospel cries in the desert. And Haggard’s ‘Sing Me Back Home’, featuring Faithfull framed by Richards’s warm growl, is a slow country-western sway.
With its bountiful array of songs and styles, from the ancient to the avant garde, Easy Come Easy Go is a mini history of 20th century music. Only a presence as formidable as Faithfull could have held it all together.

Key Track: ‘The Crane Wife 3’