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.

On the shelf today

Marianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis - She Walks in Beauty

2LP / Spoken Word / Comedy / 2021

EUR34.95 / Available now

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