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On April 30, Marianne Faithfull and Warren Ellis will release a new album, She Walks in Beauty, via BMG. It follows Faithfull’s 2018 album Negative Capability, another collaboration with Ellis. Faithfull’s sometime collaborator Nick Cave will feature on She Walks in Beauty. Other guests include Brian Eno, cellist Vincent Ségal, and producer-engineer Head.
Faithfull recorded the album at the beginning of COVID-19 lockdowns, working with Ellis to produce songs based on poems by Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Thomas, according to a press release. Faithfull was hospitalized with the virus in March and, as the press release notes, struggled for her life. “[Marianne] is very grateful to all the NHS staff who cared for her at the hospital and, without doubt, saved her life,” read a statement given upon her release in April last year.
Of her poetry selections, Faithfull said: “I wasn’t in doubt. I’ve been thinking about it for so long, this album, it’s been in my head for so long, I think I really knew exactly what I wanted. I just picked the poems I really loved, and I can’t help but say I think I was very lucky. We got it.”
In a press release, Ellis spoke about incorporating street sounds into the recordings. “My preferred way of making music is to leave a lot of it to chance, to let accidents happen,” he said. “I’ve been moving away from structures in things. This music is me attempting to push forward. I think it’s as good as anything I’ve ever done, in terms of the spirit of it and the process I went through to make it.”
Across the album, Nick Cave and Vincent Ségal played piano and cello, respectively; Brian Eno created sound textures for “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “The Bridge of Sighs.”
She Walks in Beauty:
01 She Walks in Beauty
02 The Bridge of Sighs
03 La Belle Dame Sans Merci
04 Ode to a Nightingale
05 Ode to Autumn
06 Ozymandias
07 From the Prelude
08 Surprised by Joy
09 To the Moon
10 So We’ll Go No More a Roving
11 The Lady of Shalott
