STRANGE WEATHER
In ’87, I slapped the remorse-inspiring item in question onto the turntable on Christmas Eve, as others in the house puttered with gift wrapping. The album had gotten buried in the living room, to be excavated only when it made an appearance on several other critics’ top-ten lists. So much for infallibility.
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I have to admit that I ignored Strange Weather with inordinate ease. The LP may best be described as Faithfull’s second comeback album. Some history is in order: Faithfull, best known in the 60s as a swinging London cupcake and Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, had her only U.S. hit of any size with the Jagger-penned “As Tears Go By” in ’64. After a short string of English singles, she succumbed to heroin addiction and exited the pop music scene.
On Strange Weather, Willner reverses the conceptual process he has used on his highly lauded series of composers’ retrospectives. Before, he used the writer’s work as a principle to unify the performances of a highly diverse cast of singers and players; the Weill LP, his best, features tracks by Sting, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Todd Rundgren, Carla Bley and Phil Woods, Van Dyke Parks, and John Zorn, among others. Here, he uses Faithfull’s voice–harsh, fatigued, world-weary, sometimes ironic–as the organizing factor that binds an extremely eclectic selection of ballads, blues, R & B tunes, gospel numbers, and contemporary material. The songs on Strange Weather are drawn from no one time period; they span over half a century, from 1931 to 1987.
Equally affecting is the title cut, which contains the shantylike rhythms of many of Tom Waits’s more recent compositions. Backed by Frisell, Saunders, and guest accordionist Garth Hudson, Faithfull calmly negotiates the shifting cadences of Waits and Brennan’s end-of-an-affair ballad, with its stunning line, “Strange a woman tries to save what a man will try to drown.” The album reaches its conclusion with a potent diptych: a somber remake of “As Tears Go By” and the Percy Mayfield-like “A Stranger on Earth.” She invests “Tears” with a new weight of regret, and ups the ante by mating it to the mournful, otherworldly sensibility of “Stranger”:
On this earth.
