Eamon Blog
Today's Shelf Pull: Marianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis, She Walks in Beauty
Poetry with room around the words
On She Walks in Beauty, Marianne Faithfull's readings and Warren Ellis's music ask for a different kind of attention.
Marianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis, She Walks in Beauty, asks you to listen to a sentence rather than wait for a chorus. That is a useful change of posture. The voice carries the action, and the music leaves space for its weight to register.
This 2021 album is presented here on double vinyl by BMG. Across eleven poetry readings, Faithfull and Ellis make a record that belongs beside music as comfortably as literature. Neither a book nor a conventional song album quite prepares you for its particular pace.
For today's shelf pull in Listowel, the attraction is that pace. There is no need to turn listening into homework. Start with the texture of Faithfull's voice, the way emphasis directs your attention, and the room Ellis makes around the spoken words.
The programme draws on Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Hood and Tennyson. Those names might suggest a formidable reading list. Heard as performances, however, the poems offer a more immediate point of entry: a voice taking you through one thought at a time.
Faithfull's interest in poetry predates this collaboration; here, it becomes the central business of the record. Listen to how much expression can sit inside timing. A line does not need to be sung for its pace and emphasis to change your sense of it.
Her weathered voice gives the language a physical presence. The useful listening detail is not simply roughness, but the relationship between that texture and her restraint. Words arrive through a recognisably human instrument, rather than floating clear of the person who is speaking them.
Ellis supplies an atmospheric musical setting rather than an alternative centre of attention. Notice how the spaciousness lets you keep following the reading without forgetting that this is music too. The collaboration works through that balance, not through a contest for prominence.
There is a small adjustment involved if you usually follow Faithfull through songs. Here, phrasing has to carry emotional movement without a sung melody doing the same job. Give the spoken delivery your attention before deciding what you miss.
She Walks in Beauty opens the sequence, with The Bridge of Sighs and La Belle Dame sans Merci following. It is worth hearing that opening stretch in order. The titles change, but the continuing relationship between voice and setting gives you something steady to follow.
Ode to a Nightingale and To Autumn sit next to one another in the programme. Rather than testing your recollection of either poem, listen for pace and emphasis. Familiarity with a text can make it surprisingly easy to stop hearing the person reading it.
Ozymandias follows To Autumn. Here is another chance to put recognition aside and attend to delivery: the grain of the voice, the measured movement of the words, the atmospheric space surrounding them. Knowing a title is not the same thing as having listened.
Later come The Prelude: Book One Introduction, Surprised by Joy and To the Moon. The sequence then reaches So We'll Go No More a Roving before closing with The Lady of Shalott. Eleven pieces provide several ways into the same partnership.
The two LPs give this meeting of readings and music a substantial physical form, but the format is not the argument for it. The argument is interpretive: language you might already know can draw different attention when somebody else sets its pace.
This is a good record for listeners who notice the delivery of a phrase as readily as its meaning. You need not arrive with a favourite poet. Curiosity about the voice is enough to begin.
It also offers Ellis listeners a setting in which musical atmosphere has a clear relationship to spoken language. Listen between the two rather than choosing a side. The words and their surroundings are the point of the encounter.
She Walks in Beauty rewards attention without requiring solemnity. Let a reading finish before reaching for an explanation. Sometimes the most useful thing a record can do is persuade you to listen a little longer.
On the shelf today:
Marianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis - She Walks in Beauty
2LP, 2021
Spoken Word / Comedy
EUR 34.95
Available from The Kilmorna Collection, Listowel
Buy or reserve: https://www.thekilmornacollection.com/vinyl/marianne-faithfull-warren-ellis-she-walks-in-beauty
Buying vinyl records in Ireland: https://www.thekilmornacollection.com/vinyl-records-ireland
On the shelf today
Marianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis - She Walks in Beauty
2LP / Spoken Word / Comedy / 2021
EUR34.95 / Available now
Order / Reserve