This Mess We’re In

My favorite PJ Harvey album thus far (and also the first one that I purchased, though I had heard about her for years), Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (2000) is drawn from a six-month sojourn in New York City in 1999.  I had been thinking that the album was her response to 9/11; it was actually released before that horrific date, but there is a sense of impending doom on many of these songs, particularly on “One Line” and her duet with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, “This Mess We’re In”.  

(January 2014)