marianne faithfull: trouble in mind

I have never heard blues sung in the manner of “Trouble in Mind,” the performance that opens the soundtrack to the 1986 movie of the same name. It is more like a painting of the blues—or some kind of stripped-down study of the music’s elements—than a true enactment of the form. And yet it’s as definitive an example of what blues might do in these modern times as you’d hope to find.

The song opens with an ethereal, harplike synthesizer sweep—not much more than an exercise in texture—played by arranger Mark Isham. Then Isham dresses up the moment a little: some muted trumpet (suggestive of Miles Davis’ on In a Silent Way), a few moody piano arpeggios—all the elements weaving together at a snail’s pace, congealing into a cool-to-the-touch, high-tech consonance. Then a voice enters, stating its lament as directly, as simply, as brokenly as possible: “Trouble in MIND, that’s true/I have AL-MOST lost my mind/Life ain’t worth livin’/Sometimes I feel like dyin’.” The voice belongs to Marianne Faithfull, and she imparts immediately, in her frayed matter-of-fact manner, that she understands firsthand the experience behind the words: She lifts the song from blues cliché to blues apotheosis. What is remarkable, though, is how she does this without indulging for a moment in the sort of growly vocalese that many singers pass off for feeling. In fact, Faithfull does it simply by adhering to a literal, unembellished reading of blues melody. But behind that artlessness, the song’s meanings inform her tone—they even inform the silences between notes—and that tone alone nails the listener, holding one’s ear to an extraordinary performance. Not much more happens in the song, but not much more needs to. The directness of the vocal and the stillness of the arrangement virtually sound like a portrait of emotional inertia—and of course, that’s the way they’re supposed to sound.

Before Trouble in Mind’s soundtrack ends, there is one more unforgettable moment: Faithfull and Isham’s rendition of Kris Kristofferson’s “The Hawk (El Gavilan).” At the outset, a lone synthesizer delineates a melodic motif, a trumpet dips between the spaces of the strain, and Faithfull takes on the lyric in the same unvarnished manner as the earlier song. “Got to make your own rules, child,” she sings, “Got to break your own chains/The dreams that possess you/Can blossom and bless you/Or run you insane.” The textures move a bit more here, and there’s a more gradual undertow to the arrangement—an undertow as gentle and sure as the momentum that carries life to death. Couple the music’s steady, calm flow with the lyric’s images of loss and flight and yearning, and you have a performance that manages to sound both resigned and unyielding at once. Which is to say, Kristofferson-Isham-Faithfull’s “The Hawk” may be pretty-faced, high-tech pop, but at the recording’s heart, it is a spawn of the blues. Its resonance is beyond trend: It is ageless.