Hell Ain’t Half Full: PJ Harvey’s To Bring You My Love at 30

In October 1962, Sylvia Plath—recently estranged from her husband—packed her kids and cats into her car and drove them down to Cornwall on the southwestern English coast to visit Marvin and Kathy Kane, two friends she (by her own admission in her letters) could not stand. Out of this trip came the poem “Lesbos,” later included in the poetry collection released two years after Plath’s suicide, Ariel. She claimed to have completed the poem in one furious sitting “at about four in the morning—that still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow, before the baby’s cry.” In that suspended space before dawn, she produced a scathing take on everything from the Kanes’ marriage, to their home’s tacky decor, to the life of domesticity she felt both she and Kathy had been backed into, magnifying her own self-loathing and fear and spitting it back out at innocent targets. It’s hyperbolic in its aim to free the writer from herself, to render her own body useless and play God in a realm that she’d be free to lord over.

“You say you can’t stand her, / The bastard’s a girl,” Plath writes in the poem’s first section, recounting Ms. Kanes’ likely-fictionalized reaction to Plath’s daughter’s behavior, before describing her son in more pleasant terms and referencing her own first suicide attempt as a child, “You say I should drown my girl. / She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.” By the passage’s end, she bitterly imagines them both as footloose single women again, inventing an in-between realm where two women at violent odds could still stand shoulder-to-shoulder without all these other useless bodies in the way, in need of feeding and sex and suffering: “I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair. / I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair. / We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, / Me and you.” It’s the one reprieve from the horrors her mind can conjure, as it warns her of the cottage walls closing in.

In a far less desperate writing session during my final semester of college, I penned a one-page short story (the class was focused on “flash fiction”) about a woman who’d been poisoned by radioactive sewage and threw her baby daughter in the East River during the New York blackout of 1977. When pressed for my source of inspiration, I offered Plath’s “Lesbos” and the 1995 PJ Harvey single “Down By the Water.” The continuing education student in my class—a woman in her 60s who lived in Queens and had run her family’s car dealership for double the time I’d been alive—asked me to repeat the second name again, writing out “H-A-R-V-E-Y” in broad cursive letters so she could look it up after class. I’m sure the story was ripped to shreds during peer review, but what I remember now is that the woman never got back to me about what she thought of the song.

When I think about my relationship with the music of Polly Jean Harvey—an artist whom, some days, I would call my favorite living musician—I think about where I see her missing in everything else. Nothing in the world of popular music comes at a premium the way relatability does, certainly not at our current moment. There is worth in “being seen,” in grounding the ephemeral in universal language wrapped up in beautiful sound. Yet, even in her love songs, Harvey struggles to shed her own physical form, blowing herself up into a folk horror figure of centuries past.

The only daughter of amateur music promoters who ran a quarrying business, Harvey grew up castrating the sheep and jumping horses on their Dorset family farm while Rolling Stones sidemen would play for their supper in the main house, gestating in an isolated, idyllic and mundanely brutal world that directly fed her artistic impulses. Her parents’ preferred soundtrack of Bob Dylan and Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, too, is hardly a surprise—leading her to biblical, surreal bastardizations of blues songs a step removed from the real world, swapping out masks of age-old archetypes to tell stories of Heaven, Hell and a purgatory serenaded by the strangest journeymen voices. The fantasies are bloody and concessions are few.

There’s a sense of absurdity baked deep into those artists’ oeuvre as well, where they poke fun at the misshapen form their characters take as they stew in mythology unbound by time. When Harvey takes on a similar form or adopts similar archetypes, she emerges as both God and monster, anima and animus. Artists who are clearly inspired by PJ Harvey often struggle to hold my interest, as they might share her instrumentation or penchant for a listener’s discomfort, but they haven’t yet learned to amplify their own extremes enough to yield results gruesome and gorgeous alike—which is, unfortunately, the whole deal. Anyone can write a diary entry and hit a fuzz pedal. To simply spill your guts is not to take the world and split it into jagged quarters and write our mythology anew.

The album of hers which altered my make-up on a chemical level was her second, Rid of Me. As a teenager, it sounded the way my own desire felt and was able to wrench the disgust I felt about it out of me. It captured the scrape and howl of being a certain type of young girl, but felt like an inside joke that type of girl could be in on as well. There’s an episode of music critic Rob Harvilla’s podcast with The Ringer, 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s, where he describes seeing the video for “Man-Size” for the first time on MTV as a teenager and feeling something close to fear as he watched PJ Harvey scrunch her face up and mug for Maria Mochnacz’s camera, wiping her nose and headbanging until her earring falls out.

I must have also been that age when I first saw that video online, but I only remember a sense of elation rising in my chest as the clip played on, like the immense rush of realizing you might be in love, like the anxious laugh that escapes you when you realize this might be a person you’ll need forever. I’d read interviews from a time where Harvey insisted she was nothing like the child-eating vampire woman everyone assumed she was based on her writing. Though I’m sure she thought that assurance would prompt a sigh of relief from alternative rock guys everywhere, it broke my little black heart into pieces.

After the release of Rid of Me—which Harvey and her bandmates, Rob Ellis and Steve Vaughan, recorded in Cannon Falls, Minnesota with producer Steve Albini—the trio toured the record through the spring and summer of 1993, first playing headlining shows across the UK and North America before opening a string of dates for U2. Mochnacz, who had taken the pictures on the first two PJ Harvey album covers and would do the same for albums to come, followed the band around with a video camera for their gigs on both sides of the Atlantic, capturing backstage antics, opera vocal warm-ups in bathrooms and impromptu photoshoots in hotels.

Over the course of Reeling with PJ Harvey, a concert film of the tour intercut with Mochnacz’s footage, you watch Harvey, who had previously taken the stage bare-faced and dwarfed by her leather jacket, begin to don evening wear, sunglasses and lipstick, hobbling as she tries to run in heels backstage and jokingly posing for the camera as she dresses. At one point, she worries whether she’ll be able to play her guitar with an oversized feather boa wrapped around her. “Maria, what’s happening to me?” she laughs as she pulls out her makeup bag. “Because I enjoy this bit more than playing now! I used to love dressing up.” Her voice morphs into a sinister, cartoonish whisper: “And it’s just like dressing up, but better.” It’s a performance of extroversion, a drag-inspired jaunt with a mode of gender presentation she’s never quite felt fit her and a cabaret act where the star dons a guitar and croons the homicidal blues.

By the end of 1993, “PJ Harvey” was no longer a band, just a woman’s name again, as Ellis and Vaughn made their exit for the time being. In 1994, Harvey made very few public appearances, having moved from London back to her remote hometown, where she reported to have lived a hermetic existence while writing the next album. “It was an isolated house, out in the countryside of the southwest,” she told The Observer the following year, “All it had was views, really. It was very cold, and very old. I could smell all the people who’d lived there. I can always sense things in buildings, but as this one was so old it was particularly noticeable. I was all alone. It was pretty much the worst time of my life. I didn’t see anyone, at all. I went into myself.” Out of the desperation—the monk-like dedication to fasting and expelling whatever the spiritual delirium sends—came PJ Harvey’s most fully realized, grandiose songwriting to date, demanding she paint a broader sonic picture.

The material is the sound of American Black blues singers chasing the devil off their doorstep transposed to the overgrown English countryside, where a translucent woman equipped with nothing but a guitar sees nobody and nobody sees her. Despite the peers she had been grouped with up until that point, the skeletal demos alone have less to do with Riot Grrrl than they do Captain Beefheart stuck in a time machine on his way to meet Robert Johnson at the crossroads. The dilemma is less so “man or woman” and more so absurdity and divinity, a short story chronicling a woman starved for connection in mascara-streaked madness, taking an axe to any part of her life that distracts from her obsession. In their barest forms, they take a Joan Crawford-like heroine role and twist until you can hear the crack of her spine—a monster that crawled across the Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? set when the crew had gone home for the day, wrapped up in a leopard-print rug and oozing toxic goo. On a number of her four-track demos, you hear the tape fuzz up when she howls, ill-equipped to contain the wrath of her vocal.

“What I look for in music and what I want to produce is just… works that are moving and unsettling—an emotional assault,” she said in other press for the forthcoming record. “I don’t want to write a song that just washes straight over my head and makes me feel nothing.” Enter new producer Flood and long-time collaborator John Parish, as well as a carefully selected backing band including Eric Drew Feldman (Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band), Joe Gore (who had previously played with Tom Waits) and Mick Harvey (of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds)—stitching together a Frankenstein’s monster of a session band, combining the work of all these male songwriters who transcend time and place and divinity like Harvey knew she could. The resulting album they recorded together, To Bring You My Love, became the moment she finally, fully placed herself in their lineage.

From the lumbering guitar line of the title track which opens the album, To Bring You My Love is an album dependent on negative space, where sound is either used sparingly or sent to erupt ferociously, kicking with the force of a sandstorm. Towering organs loom over the soundscape like God peering down to lend a watchful eye, and the guitars lend almost a counterpoint voice to each track where they’d previously been used as a blunt force instrument. The bass on “Working For the Man” is flattened into a groove that feels like it’s being blasted from the earth’s core, while the strings on “C’mon Billy” hover at least three feet off the ground. “The Dancer” radiates heat as its flamenco flair is flattened by the sheer breadth of guitars overlapping, while the same instrument is ground down to mimic a chainsaw raised on the outro of “Long Snake Moan.”

Yet, more so than on prior projects, PJ Harvey’s primary focus was her voice, going as far to send Flood out of the room every time she recorded a vocal in order to fully commit to the operatic performance each track demanded without distraction. For all the weight the production pulls, it’s the voice of Polly Jean Harvey as a percussive instrument, a vehicle for pathos and a wrecking ball that makes any of her albums click into place. She grunts and sniffs over “Working For the Man”’s slinky claustrophobia, begs plaintively until a seam rips in her delivery over the mourning missive of “Teclo,” howls the line “In my dreaming, you’ll be drowning” on “Long Snake Moan” with such intensity that you would believe her call is being projected at you from every direction—like the sexual encounter described is interchangeable with any miraculous act of faith. Her vocal is a country-mile wide and the height of any cliff clinging to the isle’s southernmost coast.

That focus on her vocals continued into the album’s tour, eschewing her guitar on stage to focus on wielding her voice and emoting to the increasingly larger audiences. The drag of the last tour was also ramped up to extreme, as she opted to don big tinfoil lashes, a long ponytail of hair extensions, skimpy vinyl dresses and tailored suits, red satin eveningwear with fishnets, a half-zipped pink catsuit, a temporary heart tattoo over her breast. Journalist Robert Hilburn told his readers to “imagine Rita Hayworth as made up by Ed Wood,” though Harvey herself called her new look “Joan Crawford on acid.” She truly “performed” femininity as she had never dared to before and would never try to again. Under the stage lights, eyeliner would occasionally start running down her face as her lashes hung by a thread, all leaving a watery trail through the caked-on powder. Every time I watch footage of her on this tour, I’m convinced I’ve never seen anyone so beautiful or wanted to look like anyone so much. She smiles a bright red, lipsticked smile, more devious than it is inviting, and I swear I can hear my heart sing.

It’s grotesquerie—equal parts Rolling Thunder Revue-era Dylan in white face as it is pantomime theater with a commedia dell’arte troupe. She painted herself as a ghost contained within a woman, Madonna-whore complex Exhibit A who cleaned out Trash and Vaudeville before she sped out of town. If she plays both the divine ruler and the devil incarnate in your headphones, then on stage, she played the sex worker parading the lamplit avenue, the woman driven mad by an adoration which cannot be returned. It was both a wink at her audience and deadly serious. Suspension of disbelief is required in any theatrical performance.

To interpret To Bring You My Love as a conceptual work, even without the accompanying visuals, is a worthwhile game to play with the album. The running order, whether intentional or not, tends to group these thematic concerns together: The title track presents an initial character which might shift or be replaced as the record continues, but who presents the overarching premise of having “lain with the devil, cursed God above, forsaken heaven” in order to gain the affection of an unknown man or force. On the following tracks, he might be evil incarnate, a john being picked up by our narrator, the father of a child by a woman he’s abandoned and a man named Teclo whose death carries enough gravitas to kill again—like the weight of a woman’s devotion can crush her in mourning—or all of these things at once.

These archetypes PJ Harvey wears as a mask sing of their all-consuming desire, which might be read as damsels in distress on the surface. Yet, it’s almost like she takes the traditional story of a hero’s journey and guts it of his own trials out in the world, his triumphant return, and writes it all around the woman he’s left waiting—included as a motivating force and retreating to the wings when any act of nobility needs to occur. Harvey’s impulse, of course, is not to cast her as the hero in a man’s place, but as someone much more complicated and, arguably, more interesting. She’s a woman who gazes into the abyss and cries with lipsticked simile affixed, “Yeah, it’s coming / Out of this world / Yeah, I’m lucky / Lucky girl,” over shattering, apocalyptic drums. She lets out grunts from the back of her throat at the end of “Working For the Man” and it sounds like she’s swallowing the earth whole.

She’s the “Mh-hmm” which opens “Long Snake Moan” before an avalanche of sound blows your speakers out, and she’s the wild woman yelling the blues at its close, flailing her limbs with abandon, just as much as she begs for Jesus’ help after she’s even-handedly drowned her daughter in “Down By the Water.” In its accompanying music video, a mountain of hair piled atop Harvey’s head almost drowns her in the swimming pool once she’s taken the dive herself and she dances in a circle with a wicked smile when back on land. You get the feeling that she’s not quite calling out for an apparition of Gods’ son in holy robes—this is more a spiritual exercise than it is a truly religious one—but demanding action of biblical proportions to fall upon her.

All tenderness is cut from the scene the second the focus turns away from her obsession. Compare the muted, cock-eyed delivery of “You think you’ll come ov-er? I think I’m a mother,” her shifty eyes seeking a doctor to either confirm her suspicions or eliminate the problem as soon as she can, to the ferocity of the woman roaming the desert once more during the rabid verses of “Send His Love to Me,” where she demands her passion not be ignored: “How long must I suffer? / Dear God, I’ve served my time / This love becomes my torture / This love, my only crime.” By the time “The Dancer” closes the album, her murder ballads are gone and buried, and the only tears falling from this character’s eyes come fast “with joy at the depth of my love.” In many ways, it’s a classic fable of starving for salvation: Why should these miracles not happen to me, out here and isolated from all human connection? Have I not suffered enough?

As much as I adore music journalism and have often mourned for a time the art form held more cultural weight, writers (especially men) have loved the phrase “most vulnerable work yet”—as in, “This album by this artist who always writes about these same personal themes has just released their most vulnerable work yet.” What’s shocking now, reading these contemporary profiles of PJ Harvey, is how these writers throw “most vulnerable work yet” at To Bring You My Love, an album really not directly about Harvey at all—only transferring her feelings within a given environment to a much more grandiose, gaudy setting. As she told SPIN while promoting Uh Huh Her in 2005, “Some critics have taken my writing so literally to the point that they’ll listen to ‘Down by the Water’ and believe I have actually given birth to a child and drowned her.”

I probably don’t have to point out the gendered implications of these interpretations. Male critics didn’t have to be told that Bob Dylan didn’t actually live the stories he tells on “Isis” or “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” because it’s the subconscious assumption that women artists can only write autobiographically, have no scope or imagination to contribute to pop music’s weirdo storytelling tradition. I think PJ Harvey understands our culture’s collective urge to see themselves in the work they love, but more than that, she understands those of us with the disgusting urge to see more, to cast ourselves in terrifying, divine shadows on the wall. It’s more complex than simply examining our world’s seedy underbelly. It’s tearing that darkness out of ourselves and treating it as worthy of hagiography, worthy of love. It’s my 16-year-old self seeing PJ Harvey thrash on a screen and knowing that her music and I were meant to be.

Harvey takes herself out of herself—drowns her girl, meets us in air, holds her magnifying glass up to her madness—and paints herself as something superhuman, writing in broad penstrokes to understand how we, as people, never learn our lesson through the centuries, keep living these same histories and dramatizing our times as a coping mechanism. Isn’t that the reason anyone creates, to attempt to make sense of the absurdities we’ve been handed? At our best, we can create something from which we emerge as neither woman nor man, God nor devil, and write a world in which we can deserve everything and receive it. These bodies are useless, but this seems the best way to use them while we’re trapped within them.

This past fall, I waited in line for two hours to get my ideal spot to see PJ Harvey perform for the first time, earning a place a row behind the barrier from which I did not move for several more hours. After performing her most recent album, I Inside the Old Year Dying in full, Harvey pivoted to a thoughtfully compiled set of tracks from throughout her shockingly consistent career, closing the main set with “Down By the Water” and “To Bring You My Love.” I finally had a sense of what people mean when they say they “leave their body” when she performed the latter track, watching this woman I’ve loved for so long, whose work I’ve performed for an audience of zero in every bedroom that’s been mine—just needing to move as she moves to express the desperation, the vengeance won—and felt nothing short of devotion. Yet, it’s difficult to say that insular, emotional experience can top the one that preceded it, where a room packed to the gills gleefully yelled, “Come back here, man,” like we were joining in on the chorus of a gospel hymn. At one point, she ran across the stage and threw her arms up at each balcony to get us to yell along with her, as if willing us to compress our own theatrical folk horrors into every shout, to ward the rot at our core and let the madness tower over us, if only for the night.

In another one of the creative writing workshops I had to take in my final semester of college, my professor asked us about our favorite poets. I threw out a few names once my turn came around—Frank O’Hara, June Jordan, “…and I’ve always liked Sylvia Plath, I guess,” I added, lowering my head as if to say, I know you all probably could have guessed that. My professor pursed his lips and asked if I’d ever heard Anne Sexton read her own work before, to which I replied that I hadn’t. “I’m sure you’ve read the work, but I think you’ll prefer hearing it in her own voice,” he said, perhaps hearing the parallels between our shared, clipped East Coast consonants—sounding like God herself, demanding repentance for all wrongdoing from the stage—as opposed to Plath’s regal, transatlantic drawl. “She terrified everyone, was extremely theatrical. I think you’ll find a lot to love in it,” he continued in a measured tone, implying that maybe I’d see myself in it without saying it out loud.

I’d done all that years before, too, watching interviews of MTV hosts attempting to pull anything out of PJ Harvey, who sits on a couch in leather pants and a leopard print tank top, or a black blazer, retreating before she has to pull God out of herself on their studio stage. “There are songs that I write that I wouldn’t show or play,” she tells one interviewer. “What are they like?” he asks, and a mischievous, cartoonish look passes across her face for a second. “Oh, they’re horrible,” she jokes, slowly slipping into her approximation of the voice of a grizzled, old American man—maybe in the backwater towns of the Delta, maybe leaving a rabid woman to rot at home. “They’re full of murder and blood.” Her face returns to its laconic half-smile, and something cracks within me that opens me up, urges me to lean forward. I want to carve her incantation into my arm—H-A-R-V-E-Y—like a spell to summon the same magic forward, to make myself taller than the highest rocks in Cornwall, imagine myself a country-mile wide.

Read: “Shapeshifting with PJ Harvey”

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.