Marianne Faithfull - The Rarities Collection (2015)

Few stars of the '60s reinvented themselves as successfully as Marianne Faithfull. She began her career as a pop thrush who scored an international hit with her version of "As Tears Go By," which was released well before the Rolling Stones recorded it, and a string of successful singles followed in the U.K. Initially, Faithfull was known as much for her blonde beauty and her relationship with Mick Jagger as she was for her gentle voice and talent as an interpretive vocalist, though she recorded a fine folk album, 1966's North Country Maid, that showed her gifts stretched beyond polished pop. In the late '60s, she stumbled into drug addiction (her experiences would inform the song "Sister Morphine," which she co-wrote with Jagger and Keith Richards), and was little heard until she made a striking comeback with 1979's Broken English, which found her voice rougher and deeper than before but displaying a passion and drama it never had before. The album, edgy yet adult, gave Faithfull a new career, and over the next four decades, she would mix collections of her own material (1981's Dangerous Acquaintances, 1995's A Secret Life) with collections of standards (1987's Strange Weather, 2008's Easy Come Easy Go), interpretations of the work of Kurt Weill (1998's Weill: The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Songs), and collaborations with fans and peers (2005's Before the Poison, which featured songs co-written with Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, and Damon Albarn).