http://therumpus.net/2013/10/pj-harvey- ... henry-lee/

PJ Harvey Tuesday #1: “Henry Lee”
By Lauren O'Neal

October 1st, 2013

Now that Nick Cave Mondays have drawn to a close, the obvious next step is PJ Harvey Tuesdays. The two were musical collaborators and lovers for a short but memorable time, and both have built extensive careers by reinventing their sound over and over. Both melt down elements of blues and folk and then hammer the alloy into the fiercest, shiniest swords you’ve ever seen. Harvey even continues to work often with Bad Seed and Birthday Party band member Mick Harvey (who, though they share a last name, is not related to her).

And what better way to bridge two series about Nick and Polly Jean than with their (in)famous duet “Henry Lee,” from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads? The able Tony DuShane paid it tribute in Nick Cave Monday #20, but it’s worth a second look from PJ’s perspective.

A song with its roots in eighteenth-century Scotland, “Henry Lee” tells the quintessential love story: Boy meets girl. Boy tells girl he likes another girl better. Girl stabs boy with a penknife and throws his body down a well.

In the video, Cave and Harvey are styled to look exactly like each other, as if they were matched at an elemental level—and in many senses, they were. If Cave wanted to make an album about murder ballads, he couldn’t have picked a better duet partner than Harvey, with her lyrics about drowning children and cutting off lovers’ legs so they can’t walk away. Although “Henry Lee” is a song with centuries of folk history, it sounds like she could have written it herself, especially when she slips that “damn” into the first verse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzmMB8dTwGs

It’s a compelling video on its own—Tony DuShane said it fogged up his glasses it was so steamy—but what makes it downright hair-raising is that Cave and Harvey weren’t yet dating and in fact barely knew each other when they made it. It was filmed in one take without any choreography or planning. Those longing caresses, that air of injured familiarity—that all just…happened.

“So you were beginning the relationship in this three-minute video?” a Guardian interviewer once asked Cave.

“Yeah, exactly,” he replied.

Somehow, without knowing it or meaning to, Cave and Harvey presaged their entire time together in fewer than five minutes in front of a camera. With uncomfortable intensity, as awkward as they are eager, they seem to cling to each other for comfort even as the characters they’re playing discard and murder one another. And all of us at home just stare as the wounds open up on their hearts.

But soul mates who come together under the auspices of a ballad about doomed love can only stay together for as long as it takes one to plug the other with a penknife. Within about a year, the pair had split, an event which inspired much of The Boatman’s Call, Cave’s most anguished and deeply personal album. Several of its songs are directly and obviously about Harvey, including “Black Hair,” “Green Eyes,” “West Country Girl” (Nick Cave Monday #32), and quite possibly “Into My Arms,” which Tony DuShane called “the greatest love song ever written” in Nick Cave Monday #8.

As for Harvey, her personal life remains mostly mysterious, and her lyrics are usually from a character’s point of view, not her own. Her post-Cave-breakup album, Is This Desire?, is melancholy but largely ambivalent on the subject of romance, as you might guess from the title. Don’t worry, though: even if they’re not about our favorite Australian iconoclast, there are plenty of blistering love-gone-wrong laments in Harvey’s oeuvre. More on that in the next PJ Harvey Tuesday.

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Lauren O'Neal is an editorial assistant at the Rumpus and an MFA student at San Francisco State University. Her writing has appeared in publications like Slate, The New Inquiry, and The Hairpin. You can follow her on Twitter at @laureneoneal. More from this author →

thanks for sharing.

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http://therumpus.net/2013/10/pj-harvey-2-rid-of-me/

PJ Harvey Tuesday #2: “Rid of Me”

By Lauren O'Neal

October 15th, 2013

“I very much wanted to write songs that shocked,” PJ Harvey recently told Spin (http://www.spin.com/articles/pj-harvey- ... eve-albini) about her early career. “All I wanted to do was shock with my artwork. When I wrote ‘Rid of Me,’ I shocked myself.”

This would have occurred sometime in 1992–3, when the moniker “PJ Harvey” still denoted a trio of musicians: Rob Ellis, Steve Vaughan, and Polly Jean herself, a mere twenty-three years old. The whole music thing was supposed to be just a bit of fun before Harvey went to art school to study sculpture, but then some of the band’s early singles did unexpectedly well, and she decided she might as well make another album before people “get bored of me.” That album was Rid of Me, and anyone who pressed play on the first and title track knew this woman wasn’t meant to throw clay. She was meant to rock.

It starts quiet and airless, with a single repeated guitar note and minimalist drums that repeat over and over…and over…and over. A few measures in, you expect the lyrics to start. A few measures after that, you expect them again. Nope. It isn’t until the 47-second mark that Harvey’s voice comes in, half whisper, half moan, as if she’s singing through clenched teeth: “Tie yourself to me, no one else / No, you’re not rid of me. / Mm, you’re not rid of me.”

Shivers! Shivers up and down your spine! But there’s so much rage crushed into such a tiny vessel—how can that low little vibrato possibly contain it all? Oh, honey. Just wait until the chorus.

The chorus is the part where I start desperately pawing for the volume knob on my stereo because things just went from murmur to full-on roar. With any other song, I’d be pissed I had to bother with dials, but with “Rid of Me,” Harvey captures the twin engines of muffled despair and murderous rage so flawlessly that it seems perfectly natural when the song explodes into noise.

Steve Albini, who recorded the album at Pachyderm Studios, noted that shift in volume: “…the music this time had big dynamic shifts in it where it would go from quiet and moody into the bombastic—‘bombastic’ is the wrong way to put it—the bigger dynamic sections.” I think bombastic is the perfect way to put it. How better to describe the chorus’s drums like cannons going off and the lyrics repetitive as bullets? Not to mention the end of the song, when the instruments drop out but the bloody-throated lyrics retain all their volume and power: “Lick my legs, I’m on fire / Lick my legs of desire.”

Here’s a video of PJ Harvey performing an even-more-stripped-down-than-usual version of the song on Jay Leno’s show, without the other two members of the band. Afterward, she spends a couple minutes telling Leno about life on the farm in Dorset, England, where she grew up and, at the time, still lived. Fresh off a song about making her lover lick her injuries and then twisting his head off, she brings up the topic of sheep castration as if she has no idea why anyone would find it anything other than utterly normal. Yeah right, Polly. We see that sly little smile when you get into it about the rubber bands.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBtM0g-yZRU

If, by the way, that bit about Steve Albini and Pachyderm Studios sounded familiar, it’s probably because that’s where and with whom Nirvana recorded In Utero. In fact, Rid of Me was one of the albums Albini gave to the band as an example of the lo-fi, live-music sound he envisioned for them. (This four-page letter to them elaborates on his ethos as a producer, if that kind of thing strikes your fancy http://www.nickvivid.com/2013/09/26/ste ... to-nirvana.) Read more about Kurt Cobain as a Polly Jean fanboy in the next edition of PJ Harvey Tuesdays.
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Lauren O'Neal is an editorial assistant at the Rumpus and an MFA student at San Francisco State University. Her writing has appeared in publications like Slate, The New Inquiry, and The Hairpin. You can follow her on Twitter at @laureneoneal.