MARIANNE FAITHFULL
Easy Come, Easy Go
(Naïve/ Love Da)
By Todd Lavoie
As gifted a songwriter as she has proven herself over the years, Marianne Faithfull has always been a flawless interpreter of other people’s compositions. Singing cover material, after all, was how the pop icon started out, upon being prodded into a musical career in 1964 by Rolling Stones producer Andrew Loog Oldham.
Her first single, “As Tears Go By” was a Jagger/Richards composition – the equally famous Rolling Stones version wouldn’t appear for another year. Back then, Faithfull had a delicate, songbird-like voice, and much of her mid-’60s material consisted of lilting, swaying string-laden treatments of other songwriters’ material: Jackie DeShannon’s “Come and Stay With Me,” The Beatles’ “Yesterday,” Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “If I Never Get to Love You,” for example.
By the time of the release of her 1969 single “Sister Morphine” – co-written with Jagger and Richards, and once again preceding the Rolling Stones version – she had begun to show the depths of her songwriting abilities, but ultimately most listeners would probably consider her first and foremost as an unimpeachable interpreter, a modern equivalent of the jazz singers of the ’30s and ’40s who would tackle whatever songs caught their ear.