PJ Harvey: Looking Back on The Artist’s Career After Her Release of B-Sides, Demos, & Rarities
Graphics by Maggie Harvey.
Just this past month, PJ Harvey released a 59 track box set collecting music from her entire three-decade career. B-Sides, Demos, & Rarities. The release is available in 6xLP, 3xCD, and digital. The box set features previously unreleased songs, alternate versions of pre-existing songs, and other material that has been unavailable physically or through streaming. The box set was mastered by Jason Mitchell in collaboration with John Parish, who worked as a producer on several PJ Harvey albums.
There’s no one way to describe Polly Jean Harvey’s work.
Whether it’s the harsh, punchy, gut-wrenching ballads of Dry and Rid of Me — or the more mellow and eclectic works that we see in her later career, PJ Harvey has an extraordinarily large and dynamic discography.
Her music is all about gender, sexuality, and art; and in the late 20th century, it ripped apart what rock’n’roll was about.
Her recent box set includes several of her essential tracks and shows her versatility as an artist. I’ll be talking about some of what’s on the release in relation to Harvey’s impactful career.
Tracks 1-12
The opening track on PJ Harvey’s new release is “Dry”, which is included on Harvey’s Rid of Me album, but was originally written for her debut Dry.
Dry deals with the rife, disappointment, and violence of young womanhood.
PJ Harvey explores these themes with aggressive guitar and quiet-loud dynamics over blues and sexually charged vocabulary. She plays different female archetypes to tell a story of a woman’s subjugation and vengeance, from the opening track “Oh my lover” that deals women’s constant compromise; and then later on to the almost whimsical sounding “Happy and Bleeding” where her character loses her virginity, turning into a rotten peach, and is later cast away in the following track “Sheela-Na-Gig.”
These themes are still common in her following album Rid of Me, which has demos included on the first five tracks of Harvey’s new box set release. The loud-quiet dynamics (thanks to help from Pixies producer Steve Albini) and blues rhythm are still a strong theme throughout this album. At the time of Rid of Me’s release, Seattle grunge was at its peak and as Ann Powers of NPR mentioned on the Bandsplain podcast, “everyone was a boy.”
Gender wasn’t really seen as a big deal; grunge sort of created this world of androgyny; and PJ Harvey came into that world and instead decided to run all around the spectrum of gender.
Harvey pulls out a multitude of characters in Rid of Me, performing tracks live either mostly dressed in black with her hair slicked back, or dressing so feminine that it looks like a costume, wearing bold makeup and a cocktail dress. The songs on Rid Of Me are performances of gender, rejecting expectations of being in a box of masculinity or femininity. This is explored even further in her following album To Bring You My Love, which has its B-sides on tracks six through 12 on the new release.
Tracks 18-25
After Harvey’s third release, she began to separate from her previous guttural and guitar-focused sound. Her new release includes some demos and B-sides from Is this Desire, which contains some trip hop influences. Harvey also released a collaboration with John Parish called Dance Hall at Louise Point, and despite the stellar vocals, the album turned some fans away. She then released the award winning Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, which also struck some as too different from her earlier works.
Tracks 40-42
It’s not until we get to her 2004 release Uh Huh Her where we get a more recognizable return to Harvey’s early days. Tracks 40 through 42 on her new release contain some demos from this album, which was recorded over a span of two years. The guitar focused album has the recognizable distorted, rough, and earthy tone. Even the liner notes on the album read "Too normal? Too PJH?".
Tracks 44-45
In her following release, White Chalk, which has some B-sides included in her new release, Harvey seems to reinvent herself once again. This time we hear a piano focused album; we also, in my opinion, hear even more impressive vocals, which continue to improve in her following releases.
Tracks 46-47
In Harvey’s 2011 release, Let England Shake (B-sides on track 46 and 47), although not as in your face, she holds true to her vivid imagery. She incorporates elements of English folk and tells historical stories of war in England.
When looking at PJ Harvey’s career and constantly changing sound, one thing that’s constant is that she never falls into expectations. And as seen in this new release, her discography tells stories from a multitude of voices — and if you want to understand them you need to listen to them all.
TRACK LIST
01 Dry (Demo)
02 Man-Size (Demo)
03 Missed (Demo)
04 Highway ’61 Revisited (Demo)
05 Me-Jane (Demo)
06 Daddy
07 Lying in the Sun
08 Somebody’s Down, Somebody’s Name
09 Darling Be There
10 Maniac
11 One Time Too Many
12 Harder
13 Naked Cousin (Demo) (On Crow: City of Angels Soundtrack)
14 Losing Ground (Peel sessions)
15 Who Will Love Me Now
16 Why D’ya Go to Cleveland (Unreleased, produced by harvey and parish)
17 Instrumental #1
18 The Northwood
19 The Bay
20 Sweeter Than Anything
21 Instrumental #3
22 The Faster I Breathe the Further I Go (4-Track Version) (Book of Life Soundtrack)
23 Nina in Ecstasy 2
24 Rebecca
25 Instrumental #2
26 This Wicked Tongue (Stories from the city, Stories from the Sea)
27 Memphis (Jeff Buckley tribute)
28 30
29 66 Promises
30 As Close as This
31 My Own Private Revolution
32 Kick It to the Ground (4-Track Demo)
33 The Falling (2004)
34 The Phone Song (2004)
35 Bows & Arrows (2004)
36 Angel (2004)
37 Stone (2004)
38 97° (2004)
39 Dance (2004)
40 Cat on the Wall (Demo)
41 You Come Through (Demo)
42 Uh Huh Her (Demo)
43 Evol (Demo) (Performed on Please Leave Quietly tour)
44 Wait
45 Heaven (recorded in ‘98 and released as a B-side to the single “The Piano” off of White Chalk Album)
46 Liverpool Tide
47 The Big Guns Called Me Back Again
48 The Nightingale
49 Shaker Aamer (political track about British detainee in Guantanamo)
50 Guilty (Demo) (non album single 2016; recorded during Hope Six Demolition Project)
51 I’ll Be Waiting (Demo from A Dog Called Money)
52 Homo Sappy Blues
53 The Age of the Dollar (Demo)
54 The Camp (released in 2017, written with Egyption recording artist Ramy Essam to raise money for displaced children in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon)
55 An Acre of Land (cover 2018)
56 The Crowded Cell (From “The Virtues” Television Series)
57 The Sandman (Demo)
58 The Moth (Demo for All About Eve soundtrack 2019)
59 Red Right Hand (cover for Peaky Blinders soundtrack)