It was clear from the start that Marianne Faithfull was no ordinary artist.  The chanteuse, who died today at the age of 78, established her long and remarkable career on a dual track.  Following the success of her singles "As Tears Go By" and "Come and Stay with Me" (gifted to Marianne by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards and Jackie DeShannon, respectively), Decca wanted her to record a pop album. Marianne wanted to record a folk album.  The result was that not one, but two, LPs were released in April 1965 showcasing two very different sides of the singer.  (For the record, the folk set outperformed the pop record.)  But whether recording the songs of Lennon and McCartney, Donovan, Bert Jansch, Bob Dylan, Tim Hardin, Carole King, Eric Woolfson, Phil Ochs, Shel Silverstein, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, or Serge Gainsbourg, Marianne Faithfull always stayed true to herself.

The Hampstead native burst onto the music and art scene as another fresh face of Swingin' London, initially garnering as much attention for being Mick Jagger's girlfriend as for her music.  But it was clear from her earliest days that Marianne Faithful was very much her own person.  She recorded just four British studio albums in the 1960s - as per the custom of the day, her U.S. label assembled its own releases from U.K. album tracks and singles - but maintained a parallel acting career, holding her own on stage and screen opposite such titans as Glenda Jackson, Alain Delon, and Nicol Williamson.

Though her voice was delicate, her resolve was steely.  Newspapers were quick to sensationalize the various dramas of Faithfull's personal life: a miscarriage, a well-publicized custody battle, a drug arrest, a suicide attempt, addiction and rehab, the breakup with Jagger, homelessness.  Yet Faithfull channeled her many traumas into her art. By the end of the 1970s, the waiflike figure of a decade earlier had been replaced with the visage of a true survivor.  Her voice was now imbued with a husky rasp bearing every wound and scar, but also reflecting an authenticity and rawness that was spellbinding.

Though earlier recordings such as Carole King, Gerry Goffin, and Phil Spector's "Is This What I Get for Loving You" and her own "Sister Morphine" (co-written with Jagger and Richards, though she had to go to court to earn her credit on The Rolling Stones' own version) hinted at the depth of Faithfull's interpretive art, she was artistically reborn with 1979's Broken English.  (Her only other released album of the 1970s was the country-flavored one-off Dreamin' My Dreams.  It featured, along with compositions by Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, a version of "Vanilla O'Lay" by Jackie DeShannon, for whose songs Faithfull long had a musical affinity.)

Broken English was the statement of an artist who might have sounded world-weary, but was in reality beginning a second act.  There was no looking back for Marianne Faithfull, with the '60s folk-pop sound replaced by a synth-heavy fusion of new wave, punk, rock, and dance rhythms.  The lyrics were hard-hitting and even graphic, leading to controversy.  But the singer wasn't about to pull any punches.  She was rewarded with a Grammy Award nomination and the album earned a Platinum sales certification.  Faithfull attained sobriety in 1985 and reinvented herself once again with Strange Weather.  Working with producer Hal Willner - with whom she had recorded a powerful take on Kurt Weill's "Ballad of the Soldier's Wife" - Faithfull eschewed rock for the dark and seamy side of cabaret.  A lived-in rendition of "As Tears Go By" sat comfortably alongside Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan's made-to-order title track, Jerome Kern and Harry Warren standards, a Lead Belly blues, and more from Bob Dylan and the team of Doc Pomus and Dr. John.  Strange Weather defied genre and expectations alike.

​Future releases would continue on this path, whether the 1995 collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti, A Secret Life, the 1996 live album 20th Century Blues (juxtaposing Kurt Weill songs with those of Harry Nilsson, Harry Warren, Noel Coward, and Friedrich Hollaender), or the 1998 recording of Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The Seven Deadly Sins.  Faithfull's final studio release, 2021's She Walks in Beauty, set poetry by Byron, Keats, and Wordsworth to new music by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' Warren Ellis.  Younger artists such as Ellis flocked to Faithfull's side, and in her later years, she worked with Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Billy Corgan, Damon Albarn, Beck, PJ Harvey, Rufus Wainwright, and Cat Power, among others.  Her 2007 book Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (her second volume of memoirs) candidly addressed her battles with both breast cancer and hepatitis C; she later fought COVID-19 during the worldwide pandemic and spent three weeks in a coma due to the virus' devastating effects.

Marianne Faithfull lived long enough to embrace her status as a true survivor and enjoy the recognition for her art that she so richly deserved.  She told The Guardian in 2021, "I really annoyed people, I think, somehow.  Maybe just everything about me was annoying at the time. You know, I wasn't a conventional artist, ever, and also, it was kind of clear that it wasn't an affectation and it just annoyed people, I think. They couldn't handle it; they just didn't want it to be true."  Listening to her varied and powerful body of work today, that truth rings out loud and clear.​