PJ Harvey, “Shame”
The albums Uh Huh Her and B Sides, to me, are two of my favorite PJ records. I love “Shame” because she’s so defiant in it: “I don’t need no ball and chain.” I also love the song “Who the Fuck” on Uh Huh Her. It’s kind of like, “You’re an asshole. Get out of here.”

To Bring You My Love is my favorite PJ Harvey record, I was definitely obsessed with her at that point. She was doing something with the blues that not a lot of artists that I was interested in were doing, sort of making it contemporary. That record had a very natural sound, but it also had a real style to it. It was produced. I still reference To Bring You My Love when we make records.

I had really come around to Wire and Talking Heads around this time too, and I started to like that kind of abstract lyrical imagery more than literal story telling. It made it easier to write lyrics, because it was easier to hide behind. At that point, when I was writing lyrics it was all about: What can I sing that won’t embarrass me standing up there onstage? And if you could latch onto something that had a cool meaning to it, that was a bonus. But it wasn’t the primary concern. Sometimes that can lead to a lot of really bad lyrics. And a lot of it is about taste: I didn’t know a lot about what Stephen Malkmus was singing about, but it fucking worked.

This is when Spoon’s first album, Telephono, came out, on Matador. In the early ’90s I started noticing that a lot of the records I liked had this Matador logo on the back: Guided by Voices, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Liz Phair. They were the coolest label. To be able to be in the same company as those people was unreal. So, for a brief time, it was amazing—and then the record came out and nobody cared.

“When grapes come in, we have our pH and Brix levels on a whiteboard, but on the far right, we have our playlists. Sometimes I look back at notes and go, ‘We were playing PJ Harvey [last year], let’s put PJ Harvey on again.’ I’m really inspired in the cellar by things that have that darker overtone. So I’ll listen to Low, PJ Harvey, Gillian Welch…because there’s so much space in those songs, I get things done. When I have Metallica or Slayer on, the predominant thing in face is the song, so I don’t work as well with that music playing.”

“I came of age in the ’90s and I was listening to Jeff Buckley, Julianna Hatfield and PJ Harvey, the indie and alt-rock moment. I had my Doc Martens and little baby barrettes and baby-doll dresses. I don’t really remember who was ‘pop’ back then. But I started to listen to a lot of pop music for this movie, and I really have come to appreciate it.”

PJ's another artist like Nina or Bowie, just constantly searching. I'll buy anything she does, as each of her albums has such a strong concept or narrative. This is a record I come back to a lot. It's such intelligent, inquisitive music, with a very strong aesthetic, but it's also very schizophrenic. At one moment, you get a total fuck-you song then her voice changes into this soft, tender, lush thing, and you want to fuck her back! The duet with Thom Yorke ['The Mess We're In'] is one of my favourite things – to have these two voices together – to hear the way they connect. The album still sounds really contemporary too, even though it's nearly 20-years-old. I was watching the video to 'Good Fortune' the other day, and it feels like it was made last week. It has this real Instagram filter feel to it. Polly's always ahead of the game.

Jehnny Beth from Savages says Polly's invitation to open for her in 2016 was the catalyst for the upcoming solo album:

In June, she will release a book of erotic short stories that began as a poetry collection before she made the rare decision to heed a critic. “Polly Jean Harvey told me my poetry was awful,” she said and laughed.