Marianne Faithfull puts pain behind her

updated 9:49 p.m. ET Nov. 12, 2009

NEW YORK - Marianne Faithfull has never been much for nostalgia throughout a roller-coaster career that's found her constantly reinventing herself. But when her band played "As Tears Go By" on her fall U.S. concert tour, she found herself flashing back to where her wild ride all began.

"If you'd have told me that at 62, I'd still be singing `As Tears Go By' to a rapt audience, I couldn't imagine that," says Faithfull. "For years I've done it very acoustically but with this band, we decided to make a new arrangement that was more close to the original with horns and strings. It's incredibly moving for me. It's like (turning) back the years."

The song takes Faithfull back to 1964 when the 17-year-old convent school girl turned up at a party at an art gallery owned by her future first husband, John Dunbar. Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones' manager, spotted the blonde and asked if she could sing.

"The first party I went to in London where I was discovered by Andrew Oldham — all the Beatles were there and the Stones were there too," says Faithfull. Soon after, Oldham brought the soprano with an angelic voice into the studio to record the melancholy "As Tears Go By," the first song co-written by Keith Richards and her soon-to-be boyfriend Mick Jagger.

"It's a strange song to get a 17-year-old to sing. It's all about a woman looking back on her youth, not participating, I couldn't really feel it. ... But now I can really feel it and it's very beautiful... I got to the right age where the woman in the song is," says Faithfull, who now sings the song in her world-weary contralto voice roughened by too much tobacco and booze in her colorful past.

But Faithfull has little in common with the song's protagonist who is content "to sit and watch" as her life goes by. She has gone from singing light folk-rock in the '60s to becoming a leading interpreter of the dark pre-World War II Berlin theatrical music of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

Faithfull is proud of her role as muse to the Rolling Stones in their early years, inspiring such songs as "You Can't Always Get What You Want," "Wild Horses, and "Sister Morphine" (for which she belatedly received credit for writing the lyrics). And she was a muse to the Beats — Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughts and Gregory Corso — in their later years.

"I like to be involved in every time as it goes past," says Faithfull, interviewed over lunch at an Italian restaurant in lower Manhattan. "I want to write a new script for myself."

New album inspired by Keith Richards
The latest script is her new album "Easy Come, Easy Go," on which she interprets songs spanning nearly a century of popular music from Duke Ellington and Dolly Parton to Neko Case and the Decembrists. It has a contemporary feel thanks to collaborations with younger musicians such as Chan Marshall, known as Cat Power, and two children of her musician friends, Rufus Wainwright and Sean Lennon.

"It's not just an old person singing covers, no, thank God," she says, distinguishing it from albums by contemporaries like Rod Stewart. It's also stylistically eclectic — a mix of jazz, blues, country, folk and rock — because she explains "nobody listens to one style of music, nor do I."

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Faithfull credits Richards for inspiring the album through bootleg recordings he made of his favorite songs in the '60s.

The album closes poignantly with Faithfull and Richards joining voices on Merle Haggard's death row ballad "Sing Me Back Home," a tune she first heard the Stones' guitarist play with Gram Parsons in the '60s. The two longtime friends sing lyrics like "Make my old memories come alive."

"I think I'm ready to do that now. I wasn't before," says Faithfull, who has made a successful recovery after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006. "I've been very anti-nostalgia all my life, always thinking about what I'm going to do next rather than what I've done. I think maybe this is a good moment for me to just sit on my haunches and reflect."

Today, she says little remains of the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll lifestyle of her youth that claimed so many of her friends.

"I'm very professional. I don't use drugs and I don't drink... I can't help thinking that that's one of the reasons that everything is so good in life," she says, sipping a glass of sparkling water. "I'm a workaholic now. There's always sex."

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