Marianne Faithfull on 50 Years of Music, Her New Photo Book, and Her Latest Album — vogue.com

Deep and haunting, occasionally anthemic, alternatively subtle, and wittily tongue-in-cheek, Give My Love to London summons Faithfull’s folksinger roots, her vast array of influences (she covers Leonard Cohen, Hoagy Carmichael, the Everly Brothers), collaborators (the roster of cowriters and performers includes Nick Cave, Anna Calvi, Roger Waters, Steve Earle), the numerous transformations that have marked her life, and the dark moments she’s never shied away from exploring (I look at everything that I’ve done, the years, the days, the hours/ Life it don’t overcome, but it opens like a flower, she sings on “Love More or Less”). The album’s name is meant, of course to be a bit ironic, if not downright lacerating, but certainly not a literal love letter to Mother England—Faithfull, the woman who schooled Mick Jagger and her other paramours in literary references and cowrote “Sister Morphine” with Jagger and Keith Richards not from life experience, but rather after the structure of John Milton’s poem “Lycidas,” is far too intelligent for that. The ode to London, written with Earle, might open the album, but a cover of Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well” finishes it out: Faithfull has been living in Paris for many years now and quite happily so, thank you very much.

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