After a decade and a half of recording everything from 1960s pop covers culled from the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, country music, and pensive singer/songwriters, Marianne Faithfull signed with Island Records as a reinvented new-wave punk queen. With sharpened edge at the ready, she cut 1978's Broken English, a harrowing purge of sexual jealousy and guilt, six cuts from which are featured here. Her voice, ravaged from years of excess, cracks with wasted beauty and lent tarnished experience to her tales of struggle and hopeless nostalgia. After several albums of modern pop (a healthy selection from all are included in this essential anthology), Faithfull hooked up with producer Hal Willner to record 1987's Strange Weather, adopting a new role as an ageless, bluesy chanteuse. A Perfect Stranger follows through her another collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti (1995's A Secret Life) and features six previously unreleased tracks, including a cover of John Lennon's "Isolation" and "A Waste of Time", a song she co-wrote with Steve Winwood. --Rob O'Connor

Disc: 1 
1. Broken English 
2. Witches' Song 
3. Guilt 
4. Ballad of Lucy Jordan 
5. Working Class Hero 
6. Why d'Ya Do It? 
7. Sister Morphine 
8. Sweetheart 
9. Intrigue 
10. For Beauty's Sake 
11. So Sad 
12. Truth, Bitter Truth 
13. Blue Millionaire 
14. Falling from Grace 
15. Running for Your Lives 

Disc: 2 
1. Ballad of the Soldier's Wife 
2. Trouble in Mind (The Return) 
3. Boulevard of Broken Dreams 
4. Yesterdays 
5. Strange Weather 
6. Gloomy Sunday [#] 
7. Hello Stranger 
8. As Tears Go By 
9. Perfect Stranger [#] 
10. Conversation on a Barstool [#] 
11. Waste of Time 
12. Isolation [#] 
13. Blazing Away 
14. When I Find My Life 
15. Times Square 
16. Ghost Dance 
17. Sleep 
18. Love in the Afternoon 
19. Bored by Dreams 
20. She