The Many Resurrections of Marianne Faithfull

Marianne Faithfull, who died last week at 78, had her first brush with death in her early 20s. It was 1969, and the English singer had just arrived in Sydney, Australia, with her then-boyfriend, Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger. Reeling from a recent miscarriage and the gilded chaos of being a muse to the World’s Greatest Rock-and-Roll Band, she ingested more than 100 sleeping pills and didn’t rise from her coma until six days later. The times ahead brought more trouble: She survived a decade and a half of heroin dependency, homelessness, legal battles over songs she’d helped write, the loss of her son in custody proceedings, and a lover who threw himself from an apartment window on the morning she broke up with him.

Life hadn’t always been so bleak for Faithfull, and it would brighten in the future. While still a teenager, she had spun her cover of the rueful Jagger-Richards ballad “As Tears Go By”—about an older person lamenting the passing years—into a modern standard. She would never be a bigger star than she was on the heels of this hit, as a youthful beauty, a songwriting inspiration, and a swingin’ London stalwart—but she only became a better artist with age.

Faithfull’s greatest comebacks were musical, beginning with the glittery sleaze of Broken English in 1979, an album that reintroduced the former starlet as a 32-year-old pop veteran with a croaky, drug-scorched voice. “I feel guilt,” she proclaimed in “Guilt,” though it sounded like I feel good. Faithfull might have had regrets, but she was not one for redemption narratives or performative apologias. Guilt was just another feeling—pointed, painful, and part of being alive.

After Broken English, Faithfull was always making some sort of comeback. The Stones continued to sell out stadiums as their own recorded output grew boring. Faithfull, rounding the bases of midlife in a superficial industry, was forced to repeatedly reclaim her sense of dignity in public. During the ’90s, she resurrected classics by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, ushering a cabaret element into her performances that matched her equally sophisticated and bawdy persona. In the 2007 film Irina Palm, she played a 60-year-old who turns to sex work and finds it liberating. These comebacks bore no taint of compromise, resignation, or shame. Her spirit was proud and transgressive; she retained a sharp edge as many of her male counterparts embarked on toothless adventures in decadence, advertising car insurance and enjoying the perks of knighthood. Faithfull appeared in fashion ads later in life—dancing and ad-libbing to the Staples Singers in a 2002 Gap TV spot, looking elegant and posh in a Saint Laurent print campaign—but these commercial opportunities were at least of a piece with her past reputation as trendsetter who left a mark on ’60s couture. As she grew older, Faithfull kept finding ways to be herself in front of the media and her audience.

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Of all her late-career resurgences, Faithfull’s 2014 gem, Give My Love to London, might be the most lasting and unexpected. Made after a fight with cancer and debilitating back and hip problems, London captured a wistful air of retrospection in Faithfull’s voice that sounded rollicking, loose, and at times anxious. “The river’s running bloody / The Tower’s tumbling down,” she sang on the title track, responding with unease to an era marked by the tumultuous momentum of Brexit. “Sparrows Will Sing,” written by Roger Waters, imagined a future in which “the corridors of power will be / walked by thoughtful men,” but Faithfull took Waters’s Pollyannaish bent as a provocation: She once claimed that she chose to perform the track because its author had “a lot more hope than I do.” Throughout London, Faithfull sang with sorrow, but also fervency, and the balance felt wise. She might not have shared Waters’s apparently rosy outlook, but still she knew the social purpose of hope: not just a reaction elicited by good fortune, but a feeling that people tap into when prospects look rough.

Give My Love to London also reclaimed Faithfull’s biography, twisting her life into something theatrical and enigmatic. A stretch in the ’70s when she was unhoused and living in an abandoned lot seemed to reappear in the magnificent “Late Victorian Holocaust” as an image of a couple throwing up in a park, only to sleep sweetly in each other’s arms. The song was written by Nick Cave, another gifted songwriter who similarly surfaced from addiction with a more generous take on humanity. Faithfull could write wonderful lyrics, but she was unparalleled at filtering the words of others through her poignantly cracked voice, using a mixture of covers, collaborations, and originals as though to confuse any speculation about whether she was drawing from her life. In “Mother Wolf,” a collaboration with the songwriter and longtime Madonna associate Patrick Leonard, Faithfull sang about a canine with a cub in its mouth that isn’t hers, though still she must protect it from violence. The singer might have been thinking of her son, Nicholas, yet the point of this LP was not memoir. Faithfull seemed to be freeing her life story, shirking the songwriter’s prerogative toward confessionalism in order to find more clever ways of describing her experience.

One of her best covers came near the album’s end: a treatment of Leonard Cohen’s elegiac masterwork “Going Home,” which he had released just two years earlier. The song’s first line is “I love to speak with Leonard”—which, as sung by Cohen himself, was a bit of self-referential solipsism. Performed by Faithfull, the song instead addressed an elderly contemporary and their shared sense of mortality, while reversing the persistent notion that her greatest legacy was as an inspiration for talented men. “He does say what I tell him … like a sage, a man of vision,” she sang. It was an elegant example of how Faithfull could imbue her mythology with new energy, recovering her life from society’s gaze, and reminding us that she and these so-called rock gods were headed to the same place, separately: to the grave.