Marianne Faithfull has teamed up with Bad Seeds/Dirty Three member and producer Warren Ellis for a collaborative spoken word album that sets the poetry of Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Thomas to music. Titled She Walks in Beauty, the album also features Nick Cave, Brian Eno and Vincent Ségal, and will be out April 30 via BMG.

They made the album last year during the earliest days of the pandemic — which Faithfull nearly died from. "I’ve been thinking about it for so long, this album, it’s been in my head for so long, I think I really knew exactly what I wanted," she said. "I just picked the poems I really loved, and I can’t help but say I think I was very lucky. We got it.”

Ellis describes the arrangements as a form of musique concrète, where the sounds of their surroundings, city streets, etc, were manipulated and married with acoustic and electronic instrumentation. “My preferred way of making music is to leave a lot of it to chance, to let accidents happen,” Ellis 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 in terms of the spirit of it and the process I went through to make it.”

Cave contributed piano on much of the album, and Eno provided signature soundscapes “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “The Bridge of Sighs.” No music from the record has been shared yet, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, Warren and Nick are working on a new Bad Seeds album, titled CARNAGE, as we speak.

She Walks in Beauty Tracklist:
She Walks in Beauty (Lord Byron)
The Bridge of Sighs (Thomas Hood)
La Belle Dame Sans Merci (John Keats)
Ode to a Nightingale (John Keats)
Ode to Autumn (John Keats)
Ozymandias (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
From The Prelude (William Wordsworth)
Surprised by Joy (Williams Wordsworth)
To the Moon (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
So We’ll Go No More A Roving (Lord Byron)
The Lady of Shalott (Lord Tennyson)