Marianne Faithfull digs deep into the well of blues music. She has, in her latter day career, come redefine what it means to be a modern-day blues singer. She’s drawn on everything from traditional American blues and spirituals, European cabaret and chanson, the mid-century rock canon and, of course, compositions of her own. Any musical tradition that draws from the well of human sorrow is blues, and Faithfull pulls it all together. Who else would put so many seemingly disparate inspirations all side by side and make it sound so coherent? On Strange Weather she picked songs by Tom Waits and Bob Dylan along with Leadbelly and Jerome Kern, and while some of it may seem like a pretty loose interpretation of the blues, you can’t get much more blues-purist than Kid Prince Moore, an artist so obscure that the only evidence of his existence are his 17 known recordings. But, as Faithfull shows, all of these artists from different times and backgrounds share the same sorrow.
