Annie Zaleski dissects PJ Harvey in the raw, and finds some gems and new fragility within. PJ is always different, but this is different even for PJ.
Words and curation by Annie Zaleski, cover by Lina Moon
For PJ Harvey, 1993 was a pivotal year. In May, the vocalist/guitarist released her second album, Rid of Me. Produced by Steve Albini and recorded with a full band that included drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan, the effort became her UK breakthrough, reaching No. 3 on the charts on the strength of "Man-Size" and the throttling top 40 hit "50ft Queenie."
Later in the year, Harvey also effectively closed the book on this trio version of PJ Harvey by releasing 4-Track Demos, which included the rough sketches for Rid of Me and six additional unheard songs. Hearing these songs stripped down to lo-fi, minimalist arrangements was a revelation: Harvey's raw vocals and guitar textures were already primal and instinctual, and these rougher versions only amplified her fury and aggression. "Snake" in particular was bruising, as the song was marked with a distorted, inhuman moan conveying inchoate rage.
Decades after 4-Track Demos, Harvey is digging into her archives yet again. Over the last few years, she's issued the demos for a string of solo studio albums, starting with her 1992 debut, Dry, and jumping forward to the stretch of albums between 1995's To Bring You My Love through 2007's White Chalk.
That dozen-year span also reflected a time of great change for Harvey. In the U.S., she became a familiar MTV and alternative radio presence thanks to To Bring You My Love's "Down By the Water" and "C'mon Billy." She also experienced additional brushes with mainstream success with 2000's brasher Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, which featured a duet with Thom Yorke and led to her opening a U2 arena tour. In between, however, Harvey embraced introspection, experimenting with somber moods (1999's heartbroken Is This Desire?) and delicate instrumentation (the piano-driven White Chalk).
These demos themselves trace Harvey's evolution as an artist: Her Dry-era takes are rougher and rawer, while the demos for later albums, such as 2004's Uh Huh Her and 2007's White Chalk, are increasingly expansive and fleshed out. But across the board, it's a marvel to witness how vividly Harvey envisioned the overarching frameworks of her solo albums, even from the very start.
The defiant framework for "Sheela-Na-Gig" is intact, even if the song is still finding its propulsive core, while the frayed riffs of "Happy and Bleeding" have a sharper sting. Many songs on Is This Desire?—including and especially the distorted rhythmic throb "My Beautiful Leah"—hewed especially close to the demos. Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea is also particularly intact: The demo of "You Said Something" is close to the final version, while the album's brash, electrified vibe is already in place, waiting to be amplified and polished in the production stage.
However, taken as a whole, these demo collections often represent an alternate-universe PJ Harvey career. As might be expected, that's partly because these early takes often aren't just voice-and-acoustic guitar sketches. Harvey often used electric guitar. Drum machines add industrial heft to To Bring You My Love's grinding "Long Snake Moan" and "Meet Ze Monsta," while Uh Huh Her's "The Darker Days of Me & Him" is full of elaborate musical layers.
The result is many demos boast completely different emotional contours. Take Dry's "Oh My Lover," which features a protagonist trying to woo someone away from a partner. On record, the song is a churning, grimy dirge that howls with heartbreak and despair. When Harvey wails, "Why don't you just say my name?," she knows the titular lover won't answer or acknowledge her existence. The acoustic demo, however, is brisker and more optimistic. Her vocals are doubled, giving buoyancy to the phrase "It's all right," and her reading of the lyric, "Why don't you just say my name?" is hopeful. There's still a chance of reconciliation, that her long-shot wish could come true.
"A Perfect Day Elise" is stormy rather than ethereal, still finding its way out of the gloom. "This Mess We're In," the piercing Yorke duet on Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, is also quite different as a demo. The song is brooding and far more minimal, like a simmering electric-folk song. Harvey also takes both vocal parts, rendering the song a conversation with herself, which adds nuance and depth to the lyrical angst. In contrast, while To Bring You My Love's "The Dancer" is an organ-heavy funereal dirge on the record, the demo version is an entirely different mood: Handclaps and percussion collide with Harvey's lilting shrieks, conjuring a sizzling night out on the dancefloor.
Perhaps the most transformative demos come from one of her most polarizing albums, White Chalk. The collection was a marked detour for Harvey: She taught herself piano and dipped into a higher vocal range, meaning the album came across as fragile, and as delicate as fine china. The demos for this album are richer and more immediate: Each individual vocal and instrumental part is clear and confident, throwing piano-heavy songs such as "Dear Darkness" and "When Under Ether" into brilliant relief. In fact, the White Chalk demos make a good case that the album might have been better had it been released in this form.
Since White Chalk, Harvey has continued to follow a winding career path. Both 2011's Let England Shake and 2016's The Hope Six Demolition Project reflected a more sophisticated musical approach, while touching on the intersection of personal responsibility and social and political issues. Just as the release of 4-Track Demos cleared the way for Harvey to transition from full-band to solo work, these demos feel like the close of her previous chapter, so she can once again begin anew on a fresh creative page.
Annie Zaleski is an American music journalist and author. Zaleski wrote a book in the 33⅓ series about the Duran Duran album Rio which was published in May 2021. Lina Moon’s artwork can be found via her Instagram.