A Perfect Stranger: The Island Anthology
After a decade and a half of recording everything from '60s pop covers culled from the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, country music, and pensive singer-songwriters, Marianne Faithfull signed with Island Records as a reinvented new-wave punk queen. With sharpened edge at the ready, she cut 1978'sBroken English, a harrowing purge of sexual jealousy and guilt, six cuts from which are featured here. Her voice, ravaged from years of excess, cracks with wasted beauty and lent tarnished experience to her tales of struggle and hopeless nostalgia. After several albums of modern pop (a healthy selection from all are included in this essential anthology), Faithfull hooked up with producer Hal Willner to record 1987'sStrange Weather, adopting a new role as an ageless, bluesy chanteuse.A Perfect Strangerfollows through her latest collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti (1995'sA Secret Life) and features six previously unreleased tracks, including a cover of John Lennon's "Isolation" and "A Waste of Time," a song she cowrote with Steve Winwood.--Rob O'Connor