Songs of experience Marianne Faithfull hooks up with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave BY TED DROZDOWSKI

There’s no song interpreter in the pop world better suited to an album about lost innocence than Marianne Faithfull. The famously thorny path of her life in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s scratched irreparable lines in her vocal cords, lines set by cigarettes, liquor, and drugs. Her voice is the very sound of experience, its dry tones the female equivalent of Johnny Cash’s baritone Moses-meets-Charles-Bukowski moan.

That voice alone, with the right material, can stir profound emotions. But given superb assistance with songwriting, arranging, and production by Polly Jean Harvey and Nick Cave, Faithfull has made an album that you live through rather than just listen to. It has a heartbeat, sometimes strong and defiant, sometimes barely beating in the throes of defeat, but always present. Before the Poison (Anti–/Naïve) is an album to get lost in. It’s sad, sweet, raw, and nuanced. The lyrics reflect on loss in myriad ways — loss of heritage, spirit, pride, self, family, and, of course, love. There are also sparks of hope in its belief in freedom and, again, of course, in love. Its sound ricochets from the grind of punk to Cave and his Bad Seeds’ dark fiery orchestrations to a concluding shadowy lullaby set to a music-box tinkle.

All of which makes Before the Poison very much an album for the times. Despite its evocations of the "whore of Babylon" and various ghosts, there’s not a purely escapist note to be found. The only way to drift off to the disc’s songs is on its soft sea of heartache.

Faithfull knows the taste of those waters. She was one of the early 1960s’ "it" girls, a beautiful young thing who became Mick Jagger’s lover and a sugar-voiced singer of pop tunes like the Jagger-and-Keith-Richards-penned "As Tears Go By," which became a 1964 smash and made her a star at age 17. But her relationship with Jagger ended badly, the hits stopped coming, and she became a junkie and a squatter in London.

She regained a grip on her career in 1979, releasing the brilliant and gritty comeback Broken English (Island), but not on her life. The voice that once seemed wispy as cotton candy was stained as a bourbon cask. She was so ill at the time, she was unable to tour. When she finally played the Paradise here in Boston a few years later, it was a harrowing and moving performance. She captured the feral energy of Broken English, singing about insanity and revenge, and lived its confusion as she staggered across the stage, obviously under the influence of something, missing cues and yet somehow getting to the wounded heart of those songs. It was proof, if nothing else, that Faithfull has no capacity for bullshit. These were songs about human damage, and that night, she did nothing to disguise her own ruin.

The profundity of that naked performance was equaled by her April 1990 return to the club. By then, she’d spent a stretch in Boston, finding refuge with friends and kicking her drug habit, but over two nights of songs that tapped her past and present, accompanied only by acoustic guitar, she proved she hadn’t shed an ounce of her honesty.

Faithfull, who is scheduled to play the Paradise on March 11, didn’t write all the words of Before the Poison’s 10 songs, but she seems to mean every one. That’s a quality she shares with Cave and Harvey, stylists both, but believers in emotional truths. Harvey is Faithfull’s primary collaborator here, with five songs to Cave’s three. There’s also a tune Faithfull wrote with Blur’s Damon Albarn and another arranged by Aimee Mann producer Jon Brion.

Faithfull’s voice opens the album, accompanied by Harvey on acoustic and electric guitars, striking a mournful tone with "The Mystery of Love." It’s a song about infatuation, but within its delights, Harvey and Faithfull also see dangers — dependency, vulnerability. The theme of love and dependence — almost of love as an addiction — continues in "My Friends Have," which begins with the familiar gnash of Harvey’s guitar set in some alternate tuning to achieve a brittle, Sonic Youth–like drone. But these friends are also redeemers. "My friends have always been there/To help me shape my crooked features/My friends have picked me up again/And pushed my enemies out of the picture," Faithfull sings at the song’s near–a cappella climax. "I love these friends of mine."

Examining the complexity of relationships is a specialty for Harvey as well as for Faithfull. Their point is that nothing is simple and direct in life, and that even sweet fruit can have a sour core. All the Harvey songs here seem like little sequels to her last PJ Harvey album, 2004’s Uh Huh Her (Island), which chronicled a descent into personal, emotional, and psychological hell, the singer full of anger and confusion, regret, and hope, until resurrection arrives. There’s not much anger in Before the Poison’s unravelings and rebuildings — not even in "No Child of Mine," which appeared on Uh Huh Her as a revved-up acoustic directive. It’s both a dismissal of an unworthy lover and an affirmation bidding a journey of self-discovery to begin. Here it gets an eerie treatment, with Faithfull singing call-and-response and a slow tempo that lets its piano and sonic manipulations hang like stalactites.

The album spins on the title track, where Faithfull sings, "Before the poison/I’d lost my fear/Maybe too happy/To even care/Safe in my dreams/Couldn’t see the fall/Coming on, coming from nowhere/My name to call." Those lyrics seem to describe the feelings many of us now have about our place in a world transformed by terrorism and blind retaliation, by the sacrifice of broad ideals to narrow dogma. It’s also, of course, a good explanation of how it feels to be blindsided by a break-up.

"In the Factory" is the final Faithfull/Harvey tune, bristling with subtle conflict from the start as the piano lines and Polly Jean’s guitars arrive in cross-currents. The song is simply about how loss takes the luster from life, how it robs us of ideals and joy and leaves a patina of numbness.

Although Cave and the Bad Seeds provided only the music for "Crazy Love," "There Is a Ghost," and "Desperanto," he could very well have co-penned the lyrics. It’s no stretch to imagine his doomed baritone wrapping around the sentiments of "Crazy Love," with its disaffected heroine. Faithfull paints her thus: "She looks as if expecting a surprise/Maybe an encounter that will change her life/Not knowing hot from cold or good from bad/If life is just a joke or if it makes her sad." And Bad Seeds violinist Warren Ellis colors in all the shadows with his fragile, weeping tone.

The same feel is sustained in "There Is a Ghost," with guitars and strings putting life into the song’s ectoplasmic symbolism. Again that sense of a pervasive pallor rises, summoned in the verse "There is a ghost/and it goes out/On the land/It’s lifted up/It feels and floats/On many hands." The spirit of Billie Holiday is also conjured by Faithfull in her references to a lost "lover man" — to say nothing of her beautifully broken voice. The song captures the state of isolation with stark, lonely perfection. "Desperanto" counters that by rocking like hell, balancing the headlong rush of the Bad Seeds with Faithfull’s chanted lyrics. The title says it all. It’s a pun on "Esperanto," which its proponents once believed would be a universal language. To Faithfull and Cave, "Desperanto" is the universal language of despair.

If anything on Before the Poison is typically English, it’s Albarn’s contribution, "Last Song." The refrain "We saw the green fields/Turn into homes/Such lovely homes" adds irony to loss. At that, the string-laden number still has a flicker of hope in its remembrance that "In the darkest time/We crossed a line/Made a song/Cause all the talk was wrong/And all you ever won/Can still be true." But by the end, when Faithfull announces, "It’s the last song for you," that light is also snuffed.

Before the Poison’s final song is its bleakest, even if Brion has written music that might be used to lull a child to sleep. "City of Quartz" is about life after the poison, perhaps the life we’re all living now. Faithfull sings of world powers gone wrong, of a scorched world turning on greed and abuse. "Only the rich make the laws," she chants in a wizened, motherly tone. "Using oppression and force. . . . Someone to fear/Hidden and very much here/Hatred summoned so near." Like the rest of the album, it’s a lullaby for a time when we all share the curse of troubled sleep — and try to recall what life was like before the poison.

Marianne Faithfull is booked to play the Paradise Rock Club, 967 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, on Friday, March 11; call (617) 228-6000.