To mark the release of PJ Harvey and John Parrish's new collaboration A Man A Woman Walked By, I began writing my Heroes series, a long essay expressing my admiration for certain artists. This is about my ongoing love for PJ Harvey.
No Neuroses, No Psychoses, and No Sadness
There is some agreement on a highlight of Sunday February 22nd’s Oscar broadcast was – the acceptance speech for the Best Original Screenplay award by Dustin Lance Black, the writer behind Milk. A friend of mine knows him, so I came in with the minor biographical knowledge that Black is a gay Mormon, and a writer for Big Love. He stated that he always dreamed of living in a land with equal rights, where he could, “one day get married.” And later, to the gay and lesbian youth of the world, “you’re beautiful, wonderful creatures of value.” Sean Penn went more directly for the Prop. 8 crowd a couple of hours later, discussing anticipating the “great shame which your grandchildren will look at you with” for being opposed to the side of freedom and equality. Grandstanding, sure, but it was hard to disagree with. Black, restrained by comparison, was very moving.
That speech, certainly, is going to make Black an icon in the gay and lesbian community, the sort of role model teenagers can look up to. The gay world doesn’t have many gay male role models, not really. I’m a reasonably informed man, who would I say was a role model for gay men as a teenager now? Rufus Wainwright? Rupert Everett? T.R. Knight? I’m afraid I don’t know of many famous gay men.
Regardless, I wouldn’t have looked up to them anyway. I never identified as gay as a teenager, and I don’t, truly, now. I have, I guess, “evolved” views on the matter, or at least they’re evolved to me. One term I used to identify as was “not exclusively heterosexual.” That one works, I guess, although it doesn’t quite hit the whole picture either. I don’t know what the whole picture is, but our society requires us to be reductive for brevity’s sake. If I tell someone that I’m dating a man, or made out with a man, people make their own assumptions, and unless that leads to a discussion, they will continue those assumptions. That is fine with me.
Black was not speaking to the young Ethan Kutinsky’s of the world, the Ethan Kutinsky’s who were, probably, at their lowest points in 7th or 9th grade – at least, lowest developmentally, speaking of self-esteem. Black was speaking to the teenagers that are more likely to commit suicide, 3-4 times more likely, it seems – of the thousands of suicides per year, up to 30% are attributed to gay youth. Now, I actually believe it’s reductive to say the problem is even that simple, but clearly this is a problem, a major, major problem. Adolescence is difficult, and no one should be at a point to feel their life is worthless. Gay and lesbian and transgendered youth should know they are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value.
People like me, cynical and argumentative, balked somewhere internally at that statement by Black – because I never, truly, thought that I was not. As a teenager, I used to have anxiety about my sweatshirts, about whether the armband was tucked in or showing, about the bottom elastic band, showing or tucked. I worried about the length of my pants and the part of my hair. As a high schooler, I approached the lunch room as a place of total terror. I went home at night feeling I had no friends, that no one understood me. Was I clinically “depressed”? I don’t think so – I was always very functional, did very well in school, never approached criminal behavior (or at least, was never at risk of getting caught), did not do drugs or drink at the time, and did not engage in much risky behavior beyond smoking cigarettes. I was a debater and was encouraged at that. I wrote for myself quite a bit and watched, with discriminate, confused taste, tons of movies and television shows. I was, by all social marks and indicators, completely, 100% normal. When taking those surveys asking about your state of mind, I would certainly mark that I occasionally had trouble sleeping, and often felt depressed. Yet on the truer indicators the “I don’t deserve to be loved” or “I’ll never find anyone that loves me,” I always vigorously disagreed. Whatever I was feeling, I had the foundation to consider it as temporary, and that I deserved to be happy.
I survived, and truly, didn’t even complain much. People liked me, or they didn’t. I’m drastically different now, calmer, wiser, a better friend, someone who believes in himself. But also, I’m exactly the same, occasionally plagues by enough self doubts to keep me up at night, lonely, able honestly to say on occasion that I feel alone and without validation, but that I feel I continue to deserve the opposite. Is that not who I was then? Then, Rupert Everett was around, but I certainly didn’t see him as much more than a sorta-pretty face. In any case, then I wouldn’t have been willing to identify with a gay mainstream personality anyway, and certainly not as a gay person. Who were my heroes then? It’s hard to say. Before my music taste “evolved,” as they say, I read a great Rolling Stone article, written in 1997, about Fiona Apple. I stole my father’s copy of Tidal and listened, especially, to “Never Is A Promise,” a song that did give me quite a bit of strength. I was a huge fan of Tori Amos – then, not now – and watched whatever TV special she did at the time. I really liked Concrete Blonde and Toad The Wet Sprocket, though they were never all that popular. I thought Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy was one of the best albums of all time.
I wouldn’t call any of these people heroes, though, and I’ve grown out of that taste anyway. Then, I would have produced an impressive, culturally-competent list of heroes, but they would have been meant to please. Now, I guess an artistic hero would be someone who shares my view of humanity through their art, but I would also try and make a list to please. David Chase and PJ Harvey come to mind immediately, but there are others, and it’s Harvey that matters most.
I wasn’t coming out as a teenager, except as confused, as lonely, as feeling completely isolated from the world around me. I grew up in a high school that was all Christian and I was a Jew. I was not discriminated against, but I did not fit – I could not join many after school clubs, and I said I didn’t want to anyway, because I was an Atheist. I did not celebrate Christmas with my family – it was just another day, and eventually, I’d start working 12 hour days on Christmas because there was more money to be made that day. I was, simply, not included. I was also a little gay, or at least, I had no confidence with women and didn’t know what was wrong with me (clearly, in retrospect, nothing was). I thought I was ugly, and I was terrible at sports. I could argue very well, and excelled at Forensics. Still, my senior year of high school, I felt too at odds and misunderstood from them – I was not the same bitter, cranky smoker I had started as, and I had aligned myself to a group I no longer identified with. I was the definition of someone who would not be a part of any group that would have me as a member.
No one understood me. Except PJ Harvey. Well, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but that’s a different essay (although, an interesting one – no one else in the world can realize her obligations? No wonder she spawned a cult). Peej. My father as a teenager had Bob Dylan, who I began to love later in life, but Peej had me, for the first time, in 1998. The song was “A Perfect Day, Elise.” At the time, I used to record 120 Minutes on MTV on Sunday nights and play it when I got home from school on our tiny television on Mondays. I knew who Harvey was – she’d had an alternative radio hit in 1995 with “Down By The Water,” and To Bring You My Love had been one of the best reviewed albums of that year (I read the reviews religiously). But this was the first song I really cared about of hers, and I decided to buy the album it came from, Is This Desire?
Well, I suppose I liked it a lot, but that decision was rather predisposed. I knew I liked Harvey. Rolling Stone around this time aired its list of the 100 essential albums of all time since 1950, and had it narrowed down to 20 albums per decade. In the 90’s, they picked Dry from Harvey’s
catalogue. Around the same time, too, Courtney Love discussed how she and Woody Harrelson would argue about what music to play on the set of The People Vs. Larry Flynt – he liked Alanis, she wanted to hear Harvey’s Rid of Me. I thought Love must represent the taste I was supposed to have.I bought Dry after Desire, and my reaction was less than immediately enthusiastic. Still, my determination to have good taste was unstoppable, and I listened to the album until songs started getting stuck in my head. I knew immediately, at least, that I loved “Dress,” which was propulsive and had a terrific melody. I knew I loved “Water,” which was passionate and emotional. I used to go through all my albums then and give the songs letter grades – I had to have the taste, eh? – and those two were immediately “A+”’s, lest I get left behind.
My love for Dry actually did arrive at some point. When you hear “Oh, My Lover” at a time you’re feeling low, the line that sticks out is “Why won’t you just say my name, and it’s alright,” a protest, and a revocation of that protest at once. “Happy and Bleeding” tries a little too hard, I thought, to be pissy and coy about it, but I felt pissy and coy at the same time often at that age. I felt so at odds with my debate team, it was the album I’d wander away to listen to by myself. My music was who it was and didn’t want me to be any different either. If it was pissed off, then I could be pissed off. Even better, we matched, we were in company in our misery.
My love for Dry actually did arrive at some point. When you hear “Oh, My Lover” at a time you’re feeling low, the line that sticks out is “Why won’t you just say my name, and it’s alright,” a protest, and a revocation of that protest at once. “Happy and Bleeding” tries a little too hard, I thought, to be pissy and coy about it, but I felt pissy and coy at the same time often at that age. I felt so at odds with my debate team, it was the album I’d wander away to listen to by myself. My music was who it was and didn’t want me to be any different either. If it was pissed off, then I could be pissed off. Even better, we matched, we were in company in our misery.
This must just be a product of Harvey, who went into music young, in her early 20’s after a formal education as a sculptor and performance artist. Harvey brought performance art with her to music making, turned songs into a type of artistic platform. Her voice could be high, low, melodic, infuriating. She could whisper, she could scream. She could hit notes or destroy them. She could play an instrument or she could show no evidence that that even interested her. Her album covers were statements in and of themselves – the drowning beauty on the cover of To Bring You My Love, the smeared, off-color lips of Dry. Sometime in 2004, I was driving with a friend when the B side “Uh Huh Her” came on my iPod. Harvey once described the song as “Two ferrets in a bag trying to get out” and sang the song in concert with the world’s harshest bright light directly in her face. My friend said, with no humor whatsoever, “This song sucks.” I immediately launched into professor mode: “Well, why does it suck?” I asked. The song is unfriendly, harsh like the lighting, off key, and has a first verse comprised entirely of excruciatingly long pronunciations of the word “rejection.” It was vintage Harvey, enacting the emotions she was trying to chronicle.
But that took me years of loving Harvey, to get to the place where I could get professorial in my defense of her. First, there was tackling Rid Of Me, as I did when I was 17. I’m not sure I’d recommend Rid of Me for a casual 16-year-old. For one, it was very sexual, and I was far form feeling comfortable with my sexuality, let alone comfortable with the feeling of sexual humiliation and desire and ugliness. Sexual ugliness, at least. The feeling of ugliness I was familiar with. I thought I was ugly, with my bowl cut that didn’t change except in length between 6th and 12th grades, and my nose and ears that were always too big for my face until college. “You’re not rid of me” is actually a fairly singable lyric, it turned out, and I felt it, despite the
humiliation and frustration. It was uglier than I was, and I wasn’t friends with people who were uglier than I felt. Maybe I wasn’t so bad. Much as in “Oh My Lover,” the lines of the most desperation kept me returning – “every day I’m hurting,” “I’ll make you lick my injuries.”
“Dry” was the type of emotional rock ballad I’d loved throughout the 90’s – Fiona and Tori and Alanis would be proud to have written it, but none would gather that internal hatred and frustration. Plus, all would be afraid of the sexual connotations of a line like “You leave me dry.” Harvey loved those connotations, and that was the intention, to be sexual and provocative. I didn’t hear those then, instead “you leave me dry” explained a wealth of feeling – exhaustion, humiliation, anger, and sadness. There was “50 Foot Queenie,” which was so feminine and empowered, I didn’t like that I felt its raging guitar licks and screams as the source of an anthem, but I did. I felt excited to hear the song, empowered. Here, late in Rid of Me, after a litany of miseries and inadequacies, was a song about being King of the World, a song of excessive boasting that is raw and furious. I loved it.
I also loved “Legs,” a screechy, maddening song that comes third in the album. Does it have a melody? That’s debatable. It has many shrill shrieks and histrionics. Its lyrics were about a woman who is inconsolable at the death of a new lover because he was “going to be my life – dammit!” Does Harvey even like this histrionic, misguided woman she’s singing as? Certainly, she lets Harvey, the possessed, come out. On the cover of Rid of Me, Harvey’s hair looks like it was dipped in tar as it sprays itself across a tattered, ugly wall. Her face is unattractive and uninterested. She spoke to my deepest humiliation. In that Rolling Stone blurb about Dry as one of the great albums of the 90’s, Lorraine Ali wrote that Harvey “reclaimed every negative stereotype about women that feminists had hoped they erased.” True, and even better, she let us admit those feelings of inadequacy still lingered and haunted, that they are part of us. Rid of Me took that thesis even further. “I’m begging you love can be ecstasy” she sings to a lover in desperation at the end of Rid of Me. It sure wasn’t ecstasy the way she sang about it, it was miserable, it destroyed your life, it made you feel worthless and ashamed. It also let its listener release those feelings, and I was full of those feelings.
Was I a beautiful, wonderful creature of value? I like to think so, and certainly Harvey would have no reason to disagree, but she didn’t tell me that. Harvey told me how miserable she was, and it was the first time I felt truly understood by anyone. I was 17 when I finally bought To Bring You My Love, and after Rid of Me, it was such a relief to hear that liberating anger and humiliation exist in an album that took absolutely no effort to fall in love with. To Bring You My Love begins with a guitar that’s quiet, alone, and suddenly gains in force even as it almost never changes. Harvey’s wail is low, but melodic. “I’ve lain with the devil/ cursed God above/ forsaken heaven/ to bring you my love.” “I was born in the desert” sounded like the ultimate declaration of defiance in the face of conformity. Better, the anger that made me love “50 Foot Queenie” was in full raging force in “Meet Ze Monsta,” a song of liberating, exciting vitriol. “C’Mon Billy” was as emotional as anything Harvey had ever written before, but without the wailing of “Legs.” “Send His Love To Me” was furious in every way, an unceasing acoustic guitar and lyrics that do not back up one inch – “How much have I suffered?/ Dear God I’ve served my time/ My love becomes a prison/ My love my only crime.”
What is this “love” that Harvey has brought with her, dying, across deserts, that she laid with the devil to preserve, that she’s served her time for? I thought love was supposed to make the birds sing and fill your life with hope – is this the same love? Yes and no, it turns out. She is, on the surface, singing of wanting the love of another, of, perhaps, even being heartbroken by the love of another. These are themes we are familiar with in music – being in love, wanting love, losing love. But like Derrida was to Saussure, questioning the foundation of his terms, Harvey’s interpretation of love is an entirely different approach. Love before was “powerful,” but this love threatens like a monsoon to take her to hell, because, after all “Hell ain’t half full.” Love before was something you wanted with all your soul, but never before did you offer the fates an ultimatum: “Send me his love, or send me to my grave.”
Once, when I was older (23 to be exact), I did shrooms and had one of those drug-laden epiphanies. Sometimes you express art that people understand, that people acknowledge is an example of “truth,” and by expressing truth, as the age-old axiom goes, you’ve expressed beauty, because you’ve pierced preconception and established experience. What real art is, I thought, was to go a step beyond that, cast off what you’ve done and say to everyone, “No, you still don’t understand.” What we say will always get in the way of what actual experience is, and that is never more true than when we feel we’ve connected with people. This is a struggle that continues, ongoing. I continue, even absent drugs, to believe this is true, and like Dylan before her, Harvey’s career is an embodiment of this. She captured misery in Rid of Me and it hadn’t at all sounded like the misery she’d supposedly captured in Dry that made her an indie sensation. Then, she was still miserable in To Bring You My Love, but it was also something more – metaphysical, alchemizing, powerful.
By the time I’d worked up chronologically to Is This Desire?, my first Harvey record, I had a completely different opinion of it. Now I thought of it as a short story collection – something that would be even more affirmed later, in college, when I discovered that much of the work seemed to contain references to J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, the most revered of short story collections. Half of the songs had someone’s name in the title – “Catherine,” “My Beautiful Leah,” “Angelene,” “Joy,” and still my beloved “A Perfect Day, Elise.” The rest were in third person. This was a detached Harvey appearing on the cover as if in filmstrips, framed in different images. The final question of the title track, appearing last on the disc, “Is this desire? Enough? Enough? To lift us higher?” Simple, sure, but again, Harvey wants to approach the question from a dozen different directions, male and female, young and old, sane and crazy. Desire leads us to misery, to murder, to drinking, theft, suicide, and regular old unhappiness.
It’s interesting to me that Harvey was to me what Dylan was to my dad, not just because Harvey has modeled so much of her career on Dylan’s – on his ability to cast aside his previous self, to change up, to dodge reporters, and to question the existence of his own meaning. I feel I get her. I didn’t identify with other gay people, or with straight people. I didn’t identify with Jews but I didn’t quite identify with atheists either – they were too certain everyone was wrong. What I identified with was a questioning of the core of every definition, a wonder at meaning itself. Harvey is a hero for those that say what we’ve said about ourselves does not prepare us for what we experience, and often it makes it worse. This is the same theme that Joni Mitchell speaks of in For The Roses, or Tom Waits in Bone Machine, even, to an extent, the Dylan of Highway ’61 Revisited (the title track of which Harvey covered on Rid of Me to jarring effect). Later, Harvey would say that Is This Desire? was her favorite of her old records, but I sort of refuse to believe it – I think it’s just Harvey being difficult, shrugging off what seems to be the most conclusive thing anyone can say about her – that To Bring You My Love was a high few could match, including Harvey, who made other great albums (and in fact, never a bad one), but she demurred such a conclusion. Instead, later, at the end of the decade, she stated she couldn’t listen to To Bring You My Love, stating it simply reminded her of a low in her life to which she could never return – her desperation was on the record to her, and she hears it. That should maybe be the proudest thing for Harvey, her misery was truly captured on record. Some sad people sometimes write sad songs. Harvey wrote songs of sadness.
We converged, PJ Harvey and me, I think, in 2000. She released Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea. I was 18, in the middle of my Freshman year of college, and having epiphanies of my own, left and right, all the time. A friend died and I was miserable. I felt lost in a giant campus of people and thought I was small and insignificant. Stories begins with “Big Exit,” a song where Harvey considers suicide: “Look out ahead/ see danger come/ I want a pistol/ I want a gun.” This is the first song on the record, the song that throws down the gauntlet – solve her ongoing misery or take the big exit herself. But she doesn’t take it. Instead, she pictures throwing a lousy ex off a building with her bad fortune in “Good Fortune.” She thinks that someday she’ll find a calm place of hope in “A Place Called Home.” She draws a line from her
heart to yours in “One Line,” and finally, with laconic ease, admires a quick, “Beautiful Feeling.” Instead of killing herself, she slowly coaxes herself into a reason to live.
Critics seized on her “happiness” right away, but somehow I missed it – or, heard it and didn’t feel it. It took a while for me to get there. I read the lyrics to “Horses In My Dreams” and thought they were a little ham-handed, “like waves, like the sea,” the same sort of contrasting lyrical style echoed in the title of the record, seemed a little meaningless. Also, that “Beautiful Feeling,” the duet with Thom Yorke on “This Mess We’re In” that seemed, truly, not that messy. “This Is Love,” so direct – “I can’t believe life’s so complex/ when I just want to sit here and watch you undress,” she sang. Really?
Really. I’m not sure what clicked in it. I think it was the piano of “Horses In My Dreams” that after a couple of listens stopped being “slow” and became, instead, reflective, like waves and the sea parting to open upon her great epiphany, “I have pulled myself clear.” In the same way, a nice song called “You Said Something” also revealed itself on future listens – peacefully sitting atop a rooftop in Brooklyn (this album is also seized upon as being Dorset-bred Harvey’s “New York” record) and reflecting upon a lover who “said something that was really important.” What did he say? A critic at Rolling Stone seized on this as the “heart and soul of the record” – not what he said, but the fact that Harvey, once so intimate, was now holding back.
It is the heart and soul of the record, in a way, but not because she doesn’t tell us, rather, because it doesn’t matter. The point is the moment, an opportunity to reflect and be happy, to take in the lovely accordion melody that seems to sweep its lovers to heaven. The album revealed itself as beautiful after some listens in the way that Dry and Rid of Me did, but in the opposite direction – they went from being a pleasant listen to dragging, kicking, ultimately successful attempt at happiness and peace. “We’ll float,” Harvey informs her love in the final song, “take life as it comes.” Harvey had learned how to be happy, but had done it on her terms. She made peace with the danger ahead and pushed forward. This was the album of a lifetime, and I don’t mean it’s Harvey’s best (a close second behind To Bring You My Love, if that’s your question), but it’s something you work up to feeling because the feelings take a lifetime to truly believe. In the same way, my misery had given way to an understanding, a belief that happiness could be achieved if you let yourself believe in simple, happy things – that life could be as complex as just wanting to sit and watdch someone undress. The Harvey, wise speaker for the miserable, turned out to be as apt a believer in all that was right with the world.
But that took me years of loving Harvey, to get to the place where I could get professorial in my defense of her. First, there was tackling Rid Of Me, as I did when I was 17. I’m not sure I’d recommend Rid of Me for a casual 16-year-old. For one, it was very sexual, and I was far form feeling comfortable with my sexuality, let alone comfortable with the feeling of sexual humiliation and desire and ugliness. Sexual ugliness, at least. The feeling of ugliness I was familiar with. I thought I was ugly, with my bowl cut that didn’t change except in length between 6th and 12th grades, and my nose and ears that were always too big for my face until college. “You’re not rid of me” is actually a fairly singable lyric, it turned out, and I felt it, despite the
humiliation and frustration. It was uglier than I was, and I wasn’t friends with people who were uglier than I felt. Maybe I wasn’t so bad. Much as in “Oh My Lover,” the lines of the most desperation kept me returning – “every day I’m hurting,” “I’ll make you lick my injuries.”“Dry” was the type of emotional rock ballad I’d loved throughout the 90’s – Fiona and Tori and Alanis would be proud to have written it, but none would gather that internal hatred and frustration. Plus, all would be afraid of the sexual connotations of a line like “You leave me dry.” Harvey loved those connotations, and that was the intention, to be sexual and provocative. I didn’t hear those then, instead “you leave me dry” explained a wealth of feeling – exhaustion, humiliation, anger, and sadness. There was “50 Foot Queenie,” which was so feminine and empowered, I didn’t like that I felt its raging guitar licks and screams as the source of an anthem, but I did. I felt excited to hear the song, empowered. Here, late in Rid of Me, after a litany of miseries and inadequacies, was a song about being King of the World, a song of excessive boasting that is raw and furious. I loved it.
I also loved “Legs,” a screechy, maddening song that comes third in the album. Does it have a melody? That’s debatable. It has many shrill shrieks and histrionics. Its lyrics were about a woman who is inconsolable at the death of a new lover because he was “going to be my life – dammit!” Does Harvey even like this histrionic, misguided woman she’s singing as? Certainly, she lets Harvey, the possessed, come out. On the cover of Rid of Me, Harvey’s hair looks like it was dipped in tar as it sprays itself across a tattered, ugly wall. Her face is unattractive and uninterested. She spoke to my deepest humiliation. In that Rolling Stone blurb about Dry as one of the great albums of the 90’s, Lorraine Ali wrote that Harvey “reclaimed every negative stereotype about women that feminists had hoped they erased.” True, and even better, she let us admit those feelings of inadequacy still lingered and haunted, that they are part of us. Rid of Me took that thesis even further. “I’m begging you love can be ecstasy” she sings to a lover in desperation at the end of Rid of Me. It sure wasn’t ecstasy the way she sang about it, it was miserable, it destroyed your life, it made you feel worthless and ashamed. It also let its listener release those feelings, and I was full of those feelings.
Was I a beautiful, wonderful creature of value? I like to think so, and certainly Harvey would have no reason to disagree, but she didn’t tell me that. Harvey told me how miserable she was, and it was the first time I felt truly understood by anyone. I was 17 when I finally bought To Bring You My Love, and after Rid of Me, it was such a relief to hear that liberating anger and humiliation exist in an album that took absolutely no effort to fall in love with. To Bring You My Love begins with a guitar that’s quiet, alone, and suddenly gains in force even as it almost never changes. Harvey’s wail is low, but melodic. “I’ve lain with the devil/ cursed God above/ forsaken heaven/ to bring you my love.” “I was born in the desert” sounded like the ultimate declaration of defiance in the face of conformity. Better, the anger that made me love “50 Foot Queenie” was in full raging force in “Meet Ze Monsta,” a song of liberating, exciting vitriol. “C’Mon Billy” was as emotional as anything Harvey had ever written before, but without the wailing of “Legs.” “Send His Love To Me” was furious in every way, an unceasing acoustic guitar and lyrics that do not back up one inch – “How much have I suffered?/ Dear God I’ve served my time/ My love becomes a prison/ My love my only crime.”
What is this “love” that Harvey has brought with her, dying, across deserts, that she laid with the devil to preserve, that she’s served her time for? I thought love was supposed to make the birds sing and fill your life with hope – is this the same love? Yes and no, it turns out. She is, on the surface, singing of wanting the love of another, of, perhaps, even being heartbroken by the love of another. These are themes we are familiar with in music – being in love, wanting love, losing love. But like Derrida was to Saussure, questioning the foundation of his terms, Harvey’s interpretation of love is an entirely different approach. Love before was “powerful,” but this love threatens like a monsoon to take her to hell, because, after all “Hell ain’t half full.” Love before was something you wanted with all your soul, but never before did you offer the fates an ultimatum: “Send me his love, or send me to my grave.”
Once, when I was older (23 to be exact), I did shrooms and had one of those drug-laden epiphanies. Sometimes you express art that people understand, that people acknowledge is an example of “truth,” and by expressing truth, as the age-old axiom goes, you’ve expressed beauty, because you’ve pierced preconception and established experience. What real art is, I thought, was to go a step beyond that, cast off what you’ve done and say to everyone, “No, you still don’t understand.” What we say will always get in the way of what actual experience is, and that is never more true than when we feel we’ve connected with people. This is a struggle that continues, ongoing. I continue, even absent drugs, to believe this is true, and like Dylan before her, Harvey’s career is an embodiment of this. She captured misery in Rid of Me and it hadn’t at all sounded like the misery she’d supposedly captured in Dry that made her an indie sensation. Then, she was still miserable in To Bring You My Love, but it was also something more – metaphysical, alchemizing, powerful.
By the time I’d worked up chronologically to Is This Desire?, my first Harvey record, I had a completely different opinion of it. Now I thought of it as a short story collection – something that would be even more affirmed later, in college, when I discovered that much of the work seemed to contain references to J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, the most revered of short story collections. Half of the songs had someone’s name in the title – “Catherine,” “My Beautiful Leah,” “Angelene,” “Joy,” and still my beloved “A Perfect Day, Elise.” The rest were in third person. This was a detached Harvey appearing on the cover as if in filmstrips, framed in different images. The final question of the title track, appearing last on the disc, “Is this desire? Enough? Enough? To lift us higher?” Simple, sure, but again, Harvey wants to approach the question from a dozen different directions, male and female, young and old, sane and crazy. Desire leads us to misery, to murder, to drinking, theft, suicide, and regular old unhappiness.
It’s interesting to me that Harvey was to me what Dylan was to my dad, not just because Harvey has modeled so much of her career on Dylan’s – on his ability to cast aside his previous self, to change up, to dodge reporters, and to question the existence of his own meaning. I feel I get her. I didn’t identify with other gay people, or with straight people. I didn’t identify with Jews but I didn’t quite identify with atheists either – they were too certain everyone was wrong. What I identified with was a questioning of the core of every definition, a wonder at meaning itself. Harvey is a hero for those that say what we’ve said about ourselves does not prepare us for what we experience, and often it makes it worse. This is the same theme that Joni Mitchell speaks of in For The Roses, or Tom Waits in Bone Machine, even, to an extent, the Dylan of Highway ’61 Revisited (the title track of which Harvey covered on Rid of Me to jarring effect). Later, Harvey would say that Is This Desire? was her favorite of her old records, but I sort of refuse to believe it – I think it’s just Harvey being difficult, shrugging off what seems to be the most conclusive thing anyone can say about her – that To Bring You My Love was a high few could match, including Harvey, who made other great albums (and in fact, never a bad one), but she demurred such a conclusion. Instead, later, at the end of the decade, she stated she couldn’t listen to To Bring You My Love, stating it simply reminded her of a low in her life to which she could never return – her desperation was on the record to her, and she hears it. That should maybe be the proudest thing for Harvey, her misery was truly captured on record. Some sad people sometimes write sad songs. Harvey wrote songs of sadness.
We converged, PJ Harvey and me, I think, in 2000. She released Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea. I was 18, in the middle of my Freshman year of college, and having epiphanies of my own, left and right, all the time. A friend died and I was miserable. I felt lost in a giant campus of people and thought I was small and insignificant. Stories begins with “Big Exit,” a song where Harvey considers suicide: “Look out ahead/ see danger come/ I want a pistol/ I want a gun.” This is the first song on the record, the song that throws down the gauntlet – solve her ongoing misery or take the big exit herself. But she doesn’t take it. Instead, she pictures throwing a lousy ex off a building with her bad fortune in “Good Fortune.” She thinks that someday she’ll find a calm place of hope in “A Place Called Home.” She draws a line from her
heart to yours in “One Line,” and finally, with laconic ease, admires a quick, “Beautiful Feeling.” Instead of killing herself, she slowly coaxes herself into a reason to live.Critics seized on her “happiness” right away, but somehow I missed it – or, heard it and didn’t feel it. It took a while for me to get there. I read the lyrics to “Horses In My Dreams” and thought they were a little ham-handed, “like waves, like the sea,” the same sort of contrasting lyrical style echoed in the title of the record, seemed a little meaningless. Also, that “Beautiful Feeling,” the duet with Thom Yorke on “This Mess We’re In” that seemed, truly, not that messy. “This Is Love,” so direct – “I can’t believe life’s so complex/ when I just want to sit here and watch you undress,” she sang. Really?
Really. I’m not sure what clicked in it. I think it was the piano of “Horses In My Dreams” that after a couple of listens stopped being “slow” and became, instead, reflective, like waves and the sea parting to open upon her great epiphany, “I have pulled myself clear.” In the same way, a nice song called “You Said Something” also revealed itself on future listens – peacefully sitting atop a rooftop in Brooklyn (this album is also seized upon as being Dorset-bred Harvey’s “New York” record) and reflecting upon a lover who “said something that was really important.” What did he say? A critic at Rolling Stone seized on this as the “heart and soul of the record” – not what he said, but the fact that Harvey, once so intimate, was now holding back.
It is the heart and soul of the record, in a way, but not because she doesn’t tell us, rather, because it doesn’t matter. The point is the moment, an opportunity to reflect and be happy, to take in the lovely accordion melody that seems to sweep its lovers to heaven. The album revealed itself as beautiful after some listens in the way that Dry and Rid of Me did, but in the opposite direction – they went from being a pleasant listen to dragging, kicking, ultimately successful attempt at happiness and peace. “We’ll float,” Harvey informs her love in the final song, “take life as it comes.” Harvey had learned how to be happy, but had done it on her terms. She made peace with the danger ahead and pushed forward. This was the album of a lifetime, and I don’t mean it’s Harvey’s best (a close second behind To Bring You My Love, if that’s your question), but it’s something you work up to feeling because the feelings take a lifetime to truly believe. In the same way, my misery had given way to an understanding, a belief that happiness could be achieved if you let yourself believe in simple, happy things – that life could be as complex as just wanting to sit and watdch someone undress. The Harvey, wise speaker for the miserable, turned out to be as apt a believer in all that was right with the world.
It’s because we all want to believe, underneath, that things are good, and that they can work out, and that we can be happy. Harvey does too, although sometimes she took a while to get there. We shared the same outlook – our lows were different, hers were metaphysical and all-consuming, and mine were just the normal sadnesses of a teenager, the same sadness that made me identify with the wails in “Legs” or “The Dancer.” Like her, too, I wanted to take life as it came, and to pull myself clear.
I felt that I did. Stories From The City is, in a way, a bookend that Harvey never really moved on from, or perhaps it is simply my love for that record that makes me feel like she’s never moved on. Even in subsequent records, records featuring songs of sadness and misery, she’s never entirely convinced me that her previous epiphanies are ready to be thrown out. In fact, she’s built on them.
I saw Harvey for the first time live in April 2001, opening at Pepsi Center for U2. She described her excitement at the time, saying she’d listened to them since she was a kid, but what an interesting platform for an artist like Harvey, whose best selling record in the US, To Bring You My Love, had only sold 355,000 copies. U2 was touring at the time for All That You Can’t Leave Behind, an album that has sold 12 million copies. I was thrilled to see Harvey before the crowd at the auditorium, but it wasn’t until much later that I’d realized the bravery of her set list – to come in front of an auditorium with just an electric guitar and sing “Rid Of Me,” and then, do a set of her most noticeable songs, only to close with “Horses In My Dreams,” and really, with the words “I have pulled myself clear.” I don’t think I’d be able to ever sing – or scream, for that matter – “Lick my legs, I’m on fire” in front of an audience of any size, but that is Harvey’s singular bravery. She did “Dry” and “Angelene” and “Sheela Na-Gig” and sounded incredible, picking really the highlights of a pretty extraordinary career, although she avoided songs from To Bring You My Love entirely – perhaps this was still part of the period in which she could not hear songs from that record without being reminded of her own sense of misery at the time.
She also performed a song I had not heard – months later, I’d find out it was “This Wicked Tongue,” a song included as a bonus track on Stories From The City’s UK and Japanese releases. This led to me obsessing over Harvey’s endless stream of B-sides and rarities. Harvey, like Dylan and Bruce Springsteen before her, seems to obsess so much over the structure and theme of each record that sometimes her best songs don’t wind up on it. “This Wicked Tongue” actually captures the themes of Stories nicely – and loudly – but I couldn’t possibly imagine a place on the album in which it would fit. Same goes for “Sweeter Than Anything,” from the sessions for Is This Desire?, a beautiful song from the perspective of a woman watching her lover succumb to dementia; a beautiful song that is most certainly not desire, and therefore, not really relevant to the record.
Harvey’s B sides are a thrill to discover, one by one. In a review of Harvey’s 2004 record Uh Huh Her, Time mentioned that Harvey had never made a bad song. That’s sort of easy, in a way – Harvey is such a postmodern artist, tweaking her sound (she described Is This Desire? and To Bring You My Love as full of “dark, unsettling, nauseous-making sounds”) to fit her concept for each record that “good” and “bad” are beside the point. For Uh Huh Her, one iTunes-only interview was labeled, by a quote from Harvey, as “Ugly is a good start.” Harvey might be flattered by calling a song of hers or two as “bad.”
It’s sort of not true though, in all of the annals of Harvey’s B-sides, I find a couple that are, at the very least, not great. “Kick It To The Ground” is so bitter as to be ridiculous (“Look at what I found/ a flower on his grave/ kick it to the ground!”), and “Bows & Arrows,” a B-side from Uh Huh Her, with a full chorus of backing Harveys mimicking the final word of each phrase (Harvey: “Bows and arrows tipped with poison,” Chorus: “Poison! Poison! Poison!”), is sorta obnoxious. There’s “My Own Private Revolution” from Stories, whose lyrics take Harvey’s new-found serenity into the realm of clichéd nothingness (“Fate has always, one might say, driven me, from place to place” or “I have found purity, simplicity inside the face of children,” and there’s its rather plagiaristic title to begin with). There’s “Daddy,” from the Rid of Me days, which is so bizarre as to be impossible to listen to, but at least that is intentionally difficult. The others – none of which are “bad” so much as uninspiring – are proof that even great artists can’t get each idea to work.
The fact that I’ve heard dozens of Harvey outtakes and truly only find 3 that are less than astonishing is pretty extraordinary. The rest are not right on her records, but they do elucidate her view of things pretty nicely. “Maniac” (from the To Bring You My Love sessions) would have made Lorraine Ali’s thesis easier, with its chorus of “I need a man!” “Long Time Coming” grunts its way through To Bring You My Love’s biblical themes. “Harder” is like a 2 minute play on the psychology of sex. “The Northwood” is a thin round that turns into a wail of self loathing. Each of those are vintage Harvey but are wrong for the records. That would be most true for her on Uh Huh Her, when Harvey cut out two of the strongest songs for the record, including the one that bears the record’s title, because, as she said, “They sound too much like PJ Harvey.”
Harvey refuses to repeat herself, which is the core of why I love her so much. Around 2001 and 2002, I finally heard Dance Hall At Louse Point, a collaboration with long-time guitarist John Parish, released in early 1996 and recorded just after To Bring You My Love, was credited, where Harvey was concerned, as by Polly Jean Harvey, removing herself even further from the record. It’s not at all like To Bring You My Love, but in a way, it’s darker, more exciting. Polly Jean does things PJ might have thought distracting on the tightness of her record. She screams the chorus of “City Of No Sun.” She takes the terrified, crazed child-voice of a woman in love with a violent religious lunatic in “Taut.” She quite beautifully assumed the role of a “Civil War Correspondent,” and out-blaséd Peggy Lee in a low-simmer cover of “Is That All There Is?”
I had long ago, by this point, decided what a triumphant artist Harvey was, but it might have been this record, which is so jagged, uneven, and different, that solidified it – because the unvarnished nature of the songs reveal more of her personality. The opening tremulous guitar of “Girl” that segues into the fiery, electrifying blues of “Rope Bridge Crossing.” And “Heela,” one of Harvey’s most virulent, exciting loud numbers. It ends with a quick, jaunty song, “Lost Fun Zone,” and a high-pitched Harvey begging someone to “take me, one more time.” This is Harvey at her most unmistakably miserable, but it’s hard to deny that misery made her something, allowed her to reveal herself. Maybe she feels better now, but I’ve never been so thankful someone felt so low. It proved her misery as something really charming and loveable. Everyone who’s felt so low should be told this once in a while.
Critics seized on the usual Harvey misery during the release of 2004’s Uh Huh Her. A glowing Entertainment Weekly review called the record a “jagged, edgy winner,” but postulated that something terrible must have happened in Harvey’s personal life to cause such a reverse from Stories’s happiness. Rolling Stone even gave the record a lesser review, saying that it was too familiar. The songs on Uh Huh Her are miserable-ish, sometimes, and certainly Harvey intended a “dirtier” sound – described by Harvey as “looking for debased, distressed sounds” – but familiar, I think, is a misreading of the record. “The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth” opens the record with a familiar “debased” loud 4-track guitar, a grind and a single drum, but is it familiar? I don’t think so. “Your lips taste of poison, you’ll be the unhappy one,” she sings, and she may be angry, but she’s also something else – vengeful, scorned, and actually, pissed off at someone else. She seems, actually, quite fine. The second song, “Shame,” has a chorus of “Shame is the shadow of love,” and it doesn’t sound like humiliation – now it sounds like wisdom.
This is an album made by an “adult” Harvey, one who was happy and is scared of sliding backwards. Cautiously, in the slow-burning “The Slow Drug,” she can be heard licking her lips and, in her quietest baritone, singing “Could you be my calling?” In “The Letter,” she sexualizes the writing of a letter, seductively railing “Wet the envelope – lick and lick it.” She is taunted by a familiar song on “Cat On The Wall,” but just begs anyone to “turn up the radio!” These songs are darker, but they’re far from hopeless. I remember an interview she granted at the time – and I wish I remembered from where – in which the interviewer questioned her on her return to “darker” themes. The interviewer recalls her beginning to get angry, but then stopping herself, and saying “Well if that’s what you heard, I can’t argue with it. I also think there are songs like ‘You Come Through’ and ‘The Desperate Kingdom of Love,’ which I think are two of the most hopeful songs I’ve ever written.”
I felt that I did. Stories From The City is, in a way, a bookend that Harvey never really moved on from, or perhaps it is simply my love for that record that makes me feel like she’s never moved on. Even in subsequent records, records featuring songs of sadness and misery, she’s never entirely convinced me that her previous epiphanies are ready to be thrown out. In fact, she’s built on them.
I saw Harvey for the first time live in April 2001, opening at Pepsi Center for U2. She described her excitement at the time, saying she’d listened to them since she was a kid, but what an interesting platform for an artist like Harvey, whose best selling record in the US, To Bring You My Love, had only sold 355,000 copies. U2 was touring at the time for All That You Can’t Leave Behind, an album that has sold 12 million copies. I was thrilled to see Harvey before the crowd at the auditorium, but it wasn’t until much later that I’d realized the bravery of her set list – to come in front of an auditorium with just an electric guitar and sing “Rid Of Me,” and then, do a set of her most noticeable songs, only to close with “Horses In My Dreams,” and really, with the words “I have pulled myself clear.” I don’t think I’d be able to ever sing – or scream, for that matter – “Lick my legs, I’m on fire” in front of an audience of any size, but that is Harvey’s singular bravery. She did “Dry” and “Angelene” and “Sheela Na-Gig” and sounded incredible, picking really the highlights of a pretty extraordinary career, although she avoided songs from To Bring You My Love entirely – perhaps this was still part of the period in which she could not hear songs from that record without being reminded of her own sense of misery at the time.
She also performed a song I had not heard – months later, I’d find out it was “This Wicked Tongue,” a song included as a bonus track on Stories From The City’s UK and Japanese releases. This led to me obsessing over Harvey’s endless stream of B-sides and rarities. Harvey, like Dylan and Bruce Springsteen before her, seems to obsess so much over the structure and theme of each record that sometimes her best songs don’t wind up on it. “This Wicked Tongue” actually captures the themes of Stories nicely – and loudly – but I couldn’t possibly imagine a place on the album in which it would fit. Same goes for “Sweeter Than Anything,” from the sessions for Is This Desire?, a beautiful song from the perspective of a woman watching her lover succumb to dementia; a beautiful song that is most certainly not desire, and therefore, not really relevant to the record.
Harvey’s B sides are a thrill to discover, one by one. In a review of Harvey’s 2004 record Uh Huh Her, Time mentioned that Harvey had never made a bad song. That’s sort of easy, in a way – Harvey is such a postmodern artist, tweaking her sound (she described Is This Desire? and To Bring You My Love as full of “dark, unsettling, nauseous-making sounds”) to fit her concept for each record that “good” and “bad” are beside the point. For Uh Huh Her, one iTunes-only interview was labeled, by a quote from Harvey, as “Ugly is a good start.” Harvey might be flattered by calling a song of hers or two as “bad.”
It’s sort of not true though, in all of the annals of Harvey’s B-sides, I find a couple that are, at the very least, not great. “Kick It To The Ground” is so bitter as to be ridiculous (“Look at what I found/ a flower on his grave/ kick it to the ground!”), and “Bows & Arrows,” a B-side from Uh Huh Her, with a full chorus of backing Harveys mimicking the final word of each phrase (Harvey: “Bows and arrows tipped with poison,” Chorus: “Poison! Poison! Poison!”), is sorta obnoxious. There’s “My Own Private Revolution” from Stories, whose lyrics take Harvey’s new-found serenity into the realm of clichéd nothingness (“Fate has always, one might say, driven me, from place to place” or “I have found purity, simplicity inside the face of children,” and there’s its rather plagiaristic title to begin with). There’s “Daddy,” from the Rid of Me days, which is so bizarre as to be impossible to listen to, but at least that is intentionally difficult. The others – none of which are “bad” so much as uninspiring – are proof that even great artists can’t get each idea to work.
The fact that I’ve heard dozens of Harvey outtakes and truly only find 3 that are less than astonishing is pretty extraordinary. The rest are not right on her records, but they do elucidate her view of things pretty nicely. “Maniac” (from the To Bring You My Love sessions) would have made Lorraine Ali’s thesis easier, with its chorus of “I need a man!” “Long Time Coming” grunts its way through To Bring You My Love’s biblical themes. “Harder” is like a 2 minute play on the psychology of sex. “The Northwood” is a thin round that turns into a wail of self loathing. Each of those are vintage Harvey but are wrong for the records. That would be most true for her on Uh Huh Her, when Harvey cut out two of the strongest songs for the record, including the one that bears the record’s title, because, as she said, “They sound too much like PJ Harvey.”
Harvey refuses to repeat herself, which is the core of why I love her so much. Around 2001 and 2002, I finally heard Dance Hall At Louse Point, a collaboration with long-time guitarist John Parish, released in early 1996 and recorded just after To Bring You My Love, was credited, where Harvey was concerned, as by Polly Jean Harvey, removing herself even further from the record. It’s not at all like To Bring You My Love, but in a way, it’s darker, more exciting. Polly Jean does things PJ might have thought distracting on the tightness of her record. She screams the chorus of “City Of No Sun.” She takes the terrified, crazed child-voice of a woman in love with a violent religious lunatic in “Taut.” She quite beautifully assumed the role of a “Civil War Correspondent,” and out-blaséd Peggy Lee in a low-simmer cover of “Is That All There Is?”
I had long ago, by this point, decided what a triumphant artist Harvey was, but it might have been this record, which is so jagged, uneven, and different, that solidified it – because the unvarnished nature of the songs reveal more of her personality. The opening tremulous guitar of “Girl” that segues into the fiery, electrifying blues of “Rope Bridge Crossing.” And “Heela,” one of Harvey’s most virulent, exciting loud numbers. It ends with a quick, jaunty song, “Lost Fun Zone,” and a high-pitched Harvey begging someone to “take me, one more time.” This is Harvey at her most unmistakably miserable, but it’s hard to deny that misery made her something, allowed her to reveal herself. Maybe she feels better now, but I’ve never been so thankful someone felt so low. It proved her misery as something really charming and loveable. Everyone who’s felt so low should be told this once in a while.
Critics seized on the usual Harvey misery during the release of 2004’s Uh Huh Her. A glowing Entertainment Weekly review called the record a “jagged, edgy winner,” but postulated that something terrible must have happened in Harvey’s personal life to cause such a reverse from Stories’s happiness. Rolling Stone even gave the record a lesser review, saying that it was too familiar. The songs on Uh Huh Her are miserable-ish, sometimes, and certainly Harvey intended a “dirtier” sound – described by Harvey as “looking for debased, distressed sounds” – but familiar, I think, is a misreading of the record. “The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth” opens the record with a familiar “debased” loud 4-track guitar, a grind and a single drum, but is it familiar? I don’t think so. “Your lips taste of poison, you’ll be the unhappy one,” she sings, and she may be angry, but she’s also something else – vengeful, scorned, and actually, pissed off at someone else. She seems, actually, quite fine. The second song, “Shame,” has a chorus of “Shame is the shadow of love,” and it doesn’t sound like humiliation – now it sounds like wisdom.
This is an album made by an “adult” Harvey, one who was happy and is scared of sliding backwards. Cautiously, in the slow-burning “The Slow Drug,” she can be heard licking her lips and, in her quietest baritone, singing “Could you be my calling?” In “The Letter,” she sexualizes the writing of a letter, seductively railing “Wet the envelope – lick and lick it.” She is taunted by a familiar song on “Cat On The Wall,” but just begs anyone to “turn up the radio!” These songs are darker, but they’re far from hopeless. I remember an interview she granted at the time – and I wish I remembered from where – in which the interviewer questioned her on her return to “darker” themes. The interviewer recalls her beginning to get angry, but then stopping herself, and saying “Well if that’s what you heard, I can’t argue with it. I also think there are songs like ‘You Come Through’ and ‘The Desperate Kingdom of Love,’ which I think are two of the most hopeful songs I’ve ever written.”
They are, and they’re right at home on the record. In fact, I think “The Desperate Kingdom of Love,” desperate as it may be, is arguably the most “beautiful” song she’s written. Sung in a soft, high register with a single, strummed acoustic guitar, she sings to a lover that he was “a sickly child” knocked down by the wind, that nothing can help him now, and also, that “there’s another who waits from behind those closed eyes/ I learned from you how to hide.” What she’s singing about is a soft, wise acceptance of the lengths love drove her and her past lovers to, a wisdom that elevates the kingdom from the desperation. Uh Huh Her ends in one of her saddest songs, “The Darker Days of Me and Him,” which is unapologetically raw and upsetting. But it is, also, the purest plea she’s ever made – “I long for a land where no man was ever born. With no neuroses, and no psychoses, and no sadness.”
Life cannot be hope all the time, and sometimes we are elevated, out of that desperate kingdom. Other times we long for another land. This Uh Huh Her was, without a doubt, a revelation by one of our greatest artists.
Harvey’s released another album since then, 2006’s White Chalk, an album I honestly think of as the first “minor” album of Harvey’s career, even though I still felt it was the best album of 2006. Her abilities are still intact, and Harvey, after having taught herself the piano, does conceive a new sound for herself. It seems, at times, like The Others set to music – a lonely, scared girl trapped in a Dorset attic waiting on “The Devil” to “Come here at once.” The high piano keys combine with her highest, most inconsistent vocals in early songs like “Dear Darkness” that are, in a way, a tired revelation, an evocation of childhood fears. Critics sorta liked it, and sorta were over her.
White Chalk revealed itself a little more to me over time, enough to make me like it quite a bit. The title track comes in the center of the album, and is unforgettable – it sings of Harvey (or, whatever persona she’s created for the record) walking the beaches of her Dorset home and imagining the chalk as bones of those who came before her on the land, of scratching her palms to reveal the ghosts underneath. It makes sense that this is the song that connects the “child” songs of the album’s first half with the “adult” songs of the second. If you imagined this as a traditional record with sides, “White Chalk” would end the first side, and “Broken Harp,” with its quiet plea of “Please don’t reproach me/ for how empty my life has become” would pick up its second side with an unspecified amount of time elapsing between them. This is the story of a woman who survived being a child begging for the devil and darkness. It is, in a way, fictional, but it’s also the story of Harvey – a woman who pleaded for darkness and deliverance early in her career, and perhaps surprisingly, found beauty and security later in life. The song that is most unforgettable here follows. It’s called “Silence,” and I hear so much of myself in it – also a survivor from the darkness, also surprised to find security as an adult. “I freed myself from my family/ I freed myself from work/ I freed myself/ I freed myself/ and remained alone.” It climaxes in a beautiful, harmonious chorus of the word “silence,” over and over again.
I can’t begin to tell you the ways in which I identify with this song. These are the words of someone who has gotten exactly what she wanted, but finds, in a way, that it’s worse – it’s made her so self sufficient that it leaves her alone. “Somehow I think you’ll find me there/ that by some miracle you’d be aware,” she sings to no one in particular – someone must know the pain she still suffers from, the human emotions hidden beneath the exterior of a beloved, praised artist, right? “Silence” is the core of White Chalk, and it elevates the record from being as “minor” as it could have been. I also hear the same sort of bittersweet wisdom in “Before Departure,” a simple song of Harvey, quite melodically, thanking her friends, and recognizing her need for them. Like her, I feel that way – alone, with a dark past that’s “done,” and with a silence and revelry that remain.
Harvey said in making this record that she fell in love with the piano, with playing an instrument that you “push.” She also said she found the record “uplifting,” and would listen to it in her living room, whereas with her previous records, she could not even bring herself to listen to it. I think she is not seizing on the record’s positivity – of which I don’t even think it exists, as lovely as it is – but on the lack of personal connection she has with the material. To Bring You My Love and even Uh Huh Her were a from-the-ground-up exorcism of her feelings, they had very much earned her pain. White Chalk is a great piece of work by a great artist, but it is not the same as a Harvey masterpiece – it doesn’t have the sense of saving her from her desperation, a purity of personal expression that makes the other records such gripping, overwhelming experiences.
In a way, I hope Harvey stops for a while, until she feels things are essential again, and it’s because I love her so much, because I never want to have to be disappointed in her. So far, I never have been, though it disappoints me to even think of White Chalk as minor. Critics felt free to give Harvey lower reviews of the record, often in much smaller print space, emphasizing her removal from the world of critical adulation. There was a time it was in vogue to praise Harvey as one of the all-time greats, but time has revealed that was just the regular world of rock critics, playing the game of who-are-we-supposed-to-praise-now. There was a time Harvey would have been the highest ranking female rock artist, such as when, in 2002, Q magazine called Stories the top album ever by a female rock artist, and Rolling Stone included it in the Top 50 of albums by female rock musicians. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly did an issue listing the 100 Greatest “New Classics” from 1983-2008. Now, Cat Power held the #13 spot while Stories was listed – at #97. There was a time when it was clear that those two numbers would be switched.
That’s because I’ve come to realize that the music I fell in love with when my music taste changed as a teenager – the Sonic Youths and Fiona Apples and Harveys – were just the hip music for an indie snob in the mid-90’s, and critics have to update their tastes to stay relevant. The 2008 picks for great artists are different, and those are artists that are more and more forgotten. Still, there is no modern artist like PJ Harvey, and the last ten years of music were not as good as the previous ten. Harvey embodies my idealism of what art should be – it should speak to an experience we all go through, then reject its listeners, because the music still does not expressing what we go through. Her music then comes back and approaches that expression from a different angle. I’ve taken the journey with her shifting personae and expressions over the years, and I’ve found that they echo life more than anyone else I listen to, and because of that, I still think she is one of the greats. I think of her as I do Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, but in a way, by being modern, she is forged on their music and found more to build on – she is better because she is aware of all that came before, and goes further.
Harvey’s released another album since then, 2006’s White Chalk, an album I honestly think of as the first “minor” album of Harvey’s career, even though I still felt it was the best album of 2006. Her abilities are still intact, and Harvey, after having taught herself the piano, does conceive a new sound for herself. It seems, at times, like The Others set to music – a lonely, scared girl trapped in a Dorset attic waiting on “The Devil” to “Come here at once.” The high piano keys combine with her highest, most inconsistent vocals in early songs like “Dear Darkness” that are, in a way, a tired revelation, an evocation of childhood fears. Critics sorta liked it, and sorta were over her.
White Chalk revealed itself a little more to me over time, enough to make me like it quite a bit. The title track comes in the center of the album, and is unforgettable – it sings of Harvey (or, whatever persona she’s created for the record) walking the beaches of her Dorset home and imagining the chalk as bones of those who came before her on the land, of scratching her palms to reveal the ghosts underneath. It makes sense that this is the song that connects the “child” songs of the album’s first half with the “adult” songs of the second. If you imagined this as a traditional record with sides, “White Chalk” would end the first side, and “Broken Harp,” with its quiet plea of “Please don’t reproach me/ for how empty my life has become” would pick up its second side with an unspecified amount of time elapsing between them. This is the story of a woman who survived being a child begging for the devil and darkness. It is, in a way, fictional, but it’s also the story of Harvey – a woman who pleaded for darkness and deliverance early in her career, and perhaps surprisingly, found beauty and security later in life. The song that is most unforgettable here follows. It’s called “Silence,” and I hear so much of myself in it – also a survivor from the darkness, also surprised to find security as an adult. “I freed myself from my family/ I freed myself from work/ I freed myself/ I freed myself/ and remained alone.” It climaxes in a beautiful, harmonious chorus of the word “silence,” over and over again.
I can’t begin to tell you the ways in which I identify with this song. These are the words of someone who has gotten exactly what she wanted, but finds, in a way, that it’s worse – it’s made her so self sufficient that it leaves her alone. “Somehow I think you’ll find me there/ that by some miracle you’d be aware,” she sings to no one in particular – someone must know the pain she still suffers from, the human emotions hidden beneath the exterior of a beloved, praised artist, right? “Silence” is the core of White Chalk, and it elevates the record from being as “minor” as it could have been. I also hear the same sort of bittersweet wisdom in “Before Departure,” a simple song of Harvey, quite melodically, thanking her friends, and recognizing her need for them. Like her, I feel that way – alone, with a dark past that’s “done,” and with a silence and revelry that remain.
Harvey said in making this record that she fell in love with the piano, with playing an instrument that you “push.” She also said she found the record “uplifting,” and would listen to it in her living room, whereas with her previous records, she could not even bring herself to listen to it. I think she is not seizing on the record’s positivity – of which I don’t even think it exists, as lovely as it is – but on the lack of personal connection she has with the material. To Bring You My Love and even Uh Huh Her were a from-the-ground-up exorcism of her feelings, they had very much earned her pain. White Chalk is a great piece of work by a great artist, but it is not the same as a Harvey masterpiece – it doesn’t have the sense of saving her from her desperation, a purity of personal expression that makes the other records such gripping, overwhelming experiences.
In a way, I hope Harvey stops for a while, until she feels things are essential again, and it’s because I love her so much, because I never want to have to be disappointed in her. So far, I never have been, though it disappoints me to even think of White Chalk as minor. Critics felt free to give Harvey lower reviews of the record, often in much smaller print space, emphasizing her removal from the world of critical adulation. There was a time it was in vogue to praise Harvey as one of the all-time greats, but time has revealed that was just the regular world of rock critics, playing the game of who-are-we-supposed-to-praise-now. There was a time Harvey would have been the highest ranking female rock artist, such as when, in 2002, Q magazine called Stories the top album ever by a female rock artist, and Rolling Stone included it in the Top 50 of albums by female rock musicians. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly did an issue listing the 100 Greatest “New Classics” from 1983-2008. Now, Cat Power held the #13 spot while Stories was listed – at #97. There was a time when it was clear that those two numbers would be switched.
That’s because I’ve come to realize that the music I fell in love with when my music taste changed as a teenager – the Sonic Youths and Fiona Apples and Harveys – were just the hip music for an indie snob in the mid-90’s, and critics have to update their tastes to stay relevant. The 2008 picks for great artists are different, and those are artists that are more and more forgotten. Still, there is no modern artist like PJ Harvey, and the last ten years of music were not as good as the previous ten. Harvey embodies my idealism of what art should be – it should speak to an experience we all go through, then reject its listeners, because the music still does not expressing what we go through. Her music then comes back and approaches that expression from a different angle. I’ve taken the journey with her shifting personae and expressions over the years, and I’ve found that they echo life more than anyone else I listen to, and because of that, I still think she is one of the greats. I think of her as I do Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, but in a way, by being modern, she is forged on their music and found more to build on – she is better because she is aware of all that came before, and goes further.
