Ever since the ’60s I’ve been a big fan of Marianne Faithfull, and while most of my musical icons from that period are either dead, or even worse, so boring they might as well be dead, she never ceases to amaze me. My hot pick of the week is the album Vagabond Ways (recently listed in Gregg Shapiro’s fave raves of 2000). Anyone who can talk Elton John and Bernie Taupin into writing them an S&M love song (For Wanting You) is OK with me. Rogers Waters of Pink Floyd also contributed Incarceration of A Flower Child to the album, a song Syd Barrett might have sung on the first Floyd album, the classic Piper At The Gates of Dawn.