On April 30, Marianne Faithfull, with composer and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, will release She Walks in Beauty, one of the most distinctive albums of her long, extraordinary life and career. Recorded around the earliest days of the COVID-19 lockdown — during which the singer herself became infected and almost died of the disease — She Walks in Beauty fulfills Faithfull’s long-held ambition to record a full album of poetry with music, and features musical friends Nick Cave, Brian Eno, cellist Vincent Ségal and producer-engineer Head (PJ Harvey, Thom Yorke).

She Walks in Beauty finds Faithfull drawing deep on the works of Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Thomas. Her vocal performances, set to Ellis’ subtle collages of sound, draw out the vibrant living matter in these great poems, renewing them with the complex, lived-in timbres of her voice. It’s both a radical departure and a return to her original inspirations as an artist and performer.

For his part, Ellis describes the music of She Walks in Beauty as a kind of musique concrete, incorporating street sounds with a range of acoustic and electronic instrumentation and manipulation. “My preferred way of making music is to leave a lot of it to chance, to let accidents happen,” he says. “I’ve been moving away from structures in things. This music is me attempting to push forward. I think it’s as good as anything I’ve ever done,” he adds, “in terms of the spirit of it and the process I went through to make it.”