Morning Sun (1965)
Marianne Faithfull’s 60s releases were wildly variable, perhaps because she seems to have been beholden to the whims of producers who didn’t really know what to do with her: one minute she was recording rounded-edged folk – Cockleshells, What Have They Done to the Rain – the next retooling the Ronettes’ Is This What I Get for Loving You? to no great effect. But, occasionally, she rose above it all, injecting her cut-glass delivery with an alarming degree of melancholy, as on Morning Sun. The B-side of her hit This Little Bird, it’s a pretty but slender song, driven by what sounds like a echoing harp, that her voice transforms into something weirdly wrenching: “I’m very sad, tears follow me,” she sings, and she genuinely sounds it.
