From the liner notes:
[These tracks] marked the 1976 beginning of Marianne Faithfull’s astonishing comeback.
Though not an overwhelming commercial success in her Great Britain home environs, the album represented an amazing turnaround. She’d been living the dead-end life of a junkie on the meanest of English streets after finding fame was a fleeting commodity, even if she was once romantically linked with Mick Jagger. Now Faithfull was back in the recording studio, exploring an intriguing hybrid of country and pop that was a far stretch removed from her angelic mid-’60s folkie sound. Her vocal range had noticeably lowered in pitch, no doubt the result of years of self-inflicted abuse. Yet that granted her formerly youthful pipes a lived-in dimension not in evidence before.
Faithfull had found it difficult to interest a record label in her services until her ex-manager Tony Calder, former co-owner with Andrew Loog Oldham of Immediate Records (the British label whose ’60s roster had included the Small Faces and Chris Farlowe), gave her a shot on his NEMS imprint, which he’d recently launched with Pat Meehan. NEMS had a European publishing deal with Nashville songwriter Allen Reynolds (co-writer with Dickey Lee of Lee’s ’63 pop hits “I Saw Linda Yesterday” and “Don’t Wanna Think About Paula”), whose country song “Dreamin’ My Dreams” Calder asked Marianne to record in late 1975. As “Dreaming My Dreams Of You,” it had very recently been a Top Ten U.S. country hit for Waylon Jennings.
A huge departure from what Marianne was best known for, she gave the C&W weeper her best dramatic shot using much fuller orchestration than Jennings had employed, and NEMS issued it as a single that November. Though not a hit in Britain, “Dreamin’ My Dreams” did very well in Ireland – apparently encouraging NEMS to bankroll an entire Faithfull album. Despite recording in England, the label insisted on retaining the country/pop direction of the single; steel guitar winds through much of the project, but it’s by no means a straight county affair…”
Click below to enjoy Marianne’s take on I’LL BE YOUR BABY TONIGHT
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