Broken English

NPR ranked the record as the #129 greatest album made by a female artist, saying:

Eager to escape the pigeonhole of being Mick Jagger’s beautiful girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull dropped out of her life of privilege and wound up a heroin addict on the London streets. In 1979, she resurfaced with her seventh studio album, the new wave-inflected Broken English. Her sweet and lovely lilt had disappeared, replaced by a gravelly snarl that was the permanent aftermath of an untreated case of bronchitis. It turns out that this was the voice she needed to unleash her innate powers; she spat sonic bombs in the title track, summoned her dark tribe in ‘Witches’ Song,' and eviscerated a cheating lover in ‘Why’d Ya Do It.’ But it’s in ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ that her masterful reading of a lyric really shines. Here Faithfull invoked the Shel Silverstein story of a suburban housewife who, realizing ‘she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair,’ slowly becomes untethered, ending up on the roof before being taken away to a mental institution. Performed with chilling empathy, Faithfull showed that even a woman who has ridden in that sports car and stood at dizzyingly glamorous heights can still end up on that proverbial roof — the singer and the song intertwined.