A role model for surviving a druggy, tabloid-hunted British youth with creative grace intact (attention, Amy Winehouse), Marianne Faithfull confirms her status as matriarch on this brilliantly programmed covers set. Billie Holiday's "Solitude" nuzzles a lonely Neko Case song, while Bessie Smith plays off the Decemberists, whose Old English fetishism finds an ideal interpreter in Faithfull's spectacularly shot voice. The arrangements are jazzy avant–cabaret, and the mood is haunted, especially on her duet with Keith Richards on a Merle Haggard classic; when the elegantly ravaged old buddies harmonize, "Sing me back home before I die," you hear history that's un–plumbable.