PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey Compiles B-Sides, Demos and Rarities For November Release
PJ Harvey has rounded up 59 tracks for the compilation B-Sides, Demos and Rarities, which will be released Nov. 4 via UMe/Island as a six-LP, three-CD or digital boxed set. 14 of the selections are either previously unreleased or featured here in previously unreleased versions. Among them are demos of “Dry” and “Missed,” which are out today, as well as the 1995 B-side “Somebody’s Down, Somebody’s Name,” which is now available digitally for the first time. The collection can be pre-ordered here. Longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish supervised the mastering and vinyl cutting for the project, which also features previously unseen photography. This is the final release in a long-running reissue campaign of the Polly Jean Harvey-led group’s full catalog. Harvey hasn’t released a new studio a...
PJ Harvey Covers Leonard Cohen for Bad Sisters Soundtrack
PJ Harvey and composer Tim Phillips have teamed for a cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Who by Fire” for the original soundtrack album for the Apple TV+ series Bad Sisters, the first two episodes of which are now streaming. The soundtrack, due in October, features additional score music from Harvey and Phillips, details of which are still under wraps. Bad Sisters star/executive producer Sharon Horgan reached out to Harvey personally to participate in the project, a “darkly comedic murder mystery” rolling out weekly through Oct. 14. [embedded content][embedded content] “I thought of the words of ‘Who by Fire’ soon after the series was picked up and thought how perfect it would be,” Horgan says. “Pretty soon after that, I thought of Polly’s voice singing those words and asked Apple if we could make ...
The 90 Greatest Albums of the ’90s
This article originally appeared in the September 1999 issue of SPIN. “You must be high.” We heard that a lot during the time we spent preparing this issue. Which is understandable. Pronouncing the 90 greatest albums of the ’90s is a somewhat presumptuous thing to do. When you’re measuring the music this decade is offering to history—the sounds we partied with, copulated to, fought about, and wept over—everyone has an opinion. That ours should be more valid than yours is debatable. But hey—it’s our magazine. What, then, you ask, constitutes “greatest”? Don’t even start. Suffice it to say that, after much heated discussion and countless veiled insults, it came down to the factors of both remarkable artistry and cultural shock value. Sometimes a record’s knock-you-off-your-Skechers impa...
Really the Blues: Our 1993 PJ Harvey Feature
This article originally appeared in the August 1993 issue of SPIN. Polly Harvey is standing in the rain, in the middle of a generic English small-town shopping street. The 23-year-old singer is wearing a plush fake leopard-skin coat, her usual Olive Oyl bun let loose into barely restrained curly waves. She is bone-tired, fed up with interviews and photo sessions, sick of being the latest fixation in the music press’s neurotic search for new blood. Although she leads me to a local tea house, Harvey looks like she’d rather be getting a tetanus shot. I’m deeply flattered. Harvey and her band, PJ Harvey, released one of the most talked-about debuts of last year, Dry, and have just issued the ballyhooed follow-up, Rid of Me. Critics have wet themselves over her striking image and her...
To Live and Die in L.A.: Our 1996 Red Hot Chili Peppers Cover Story
This article originally appeared in the April 1996 issue of SPIN. “Los Angeles is my favorite city in the world!” declares super foxy Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Dave Navarro, offering as proof of his conviction the city’s name tattooed on the back of his neck. “I would never live anywhere else.” Navarro, drummer Chad Smith, and I are wedged into Newsroom, a trendy Beverly Hills restaurant/coffee house/media mill where omnipresent TV monitors serve up the latest from the E! network with your rice-milk cappuccinos. “But I feel like the bad is taking over,” says Smith, an unadulterated rock dude and Detroit native who, Navarro says, wrote the book on that city’s infamous evening of arson known as Devil’s Night. “I wouldn’t want my kids growing up here,” admits Smith, who at age 33 s...
The 50 Best Alt-Rock Love Songs
Not all love songs are romantic. Not all love songs are even happy. It all depends on your definition of the term. For every “My Girl” or “Your Song,” there’s at least one track with a nuanced take on the darker, more complicated sides of love — the drama of a long-term relationship, the fear of losing a partner, the void left in love’s wake. Many of those songs fall under the admittedly broad umbrella of “alt-rock.” So to mark Valentine’s Day, we decided to gather 50 of our favorite “love songs” in the genre — both conventional and otherwise. Throughout this list, you’ll find lines about blooming romance and marital bliss. You’ll also find nods to drug addiction and car crashes. There’s something for everyone. – Ryan Reed 50. that dog. – “I’m Gonna See You” You take the good, you tak...
PJ Harvey Shares ‘This Mess We’re In’ Demo, Announces Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea Reissue
PJ Harvey shared an unreleased demo of “This Mess We’re In” from the upcoming vinyl reissue of her Stories From The City, Stories From the Sea album, which originally released in 2000. The LP, along with a collection of unreleased demos, Stories From The City, Stories From the Sea – Demos, arrives on CD, vinyl and digital, Feb. 26 via UMe/Island. The demos for every track written Stories from the City… will comprise the new release as will the restoration of the videos for singles “A Place Called Home,” “Good Fortune” and “This Is Love.” The original album version of “This Mess We’re In” features Radiohead’s Thom Yorke on backing vocals; the demo version is Harvey without his accompaniment. When Stories From The City, Stories From the Sea originally ...
The 50 Best Songs of the Year 2000
The year 2000 looms large in pop culture history: the Y2k non-scare, the Seinfeld “Newmannium” episode, the “In the Year 2000″ sketch from Conan O’Brien’s original late-night show, the Hulu series PEN15. And just like, say, the grunge-defined 1991, the year immediately conjures specific sounds: gleaming teen-pop, earnest radio rock, the Neptunes and Timbaland. There’s never a bad time to revisit this music. But in the middle of a pandemic, with America on the verge of collapse, it feels extra comforting — a blast of nostalgia for a time when you could safely exit your home, visit your local mall’s Sam Goody and buy Mystikal’s “Shake Ya Ass” CD single. For this list, our only criteria was that the songs appear on albums or soundtracks released in 2000. Here we go. 50. Papa Roach, “Last Reso...
The 25 Best Soundtrack Albums of the 1990s
In the 1980s, music and film collided for cross-promotional blockbusters both transcendent (Purple Rain) and transcendently cheesy (Footloose). In the ‘90s, soundtracks continued to sell in the millions, capturing cultural moments like the Seattle grunge of Singles or the Britpop and electronica of Trainspotting. Auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson reached deep into their record collections to set the mood while movies like Above the Rim and Menace II Society pioneered the concept of soundtracks as hip-hop mixtapes. A great soundtrack can propel an unsuccessful single, like Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose,” to the top of the charts, or revive a decades-old hit, like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It can also push a cult singer-songwriter like Elliott Smith or Aimee Mann to an Oscar perf...
Listen to PJ Harvey’s Demo of ‘Down By the Water’
The latest release in PJ Harvey’s ongoing reissue series is a big one — and it comes with an early treat. To Bring You My Love is coming in September (and turned 25 in February), and like the previous releases, there will be a demo version of the record to go along with the standard reissue. With the announcement of the release, Harvey shared the demo version of “Down By the Water,” which is debatably one of her signature songs. Harvey will be releasing and reissuing albums from her catalog for the rest of 2020. To Bring You My Love arrives on Sept. 11. Listen to the demo version of “Down By the Water” below. [embedded content] You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back p...
PJ Harvey to Reissue ‘Rid of Me,’ ‘4-Track Demos’ on Vinyl
PJ Harvey will continue her vinyl reissue campaign with Rid of Me and 4-Track Demos, out on Aug. 21 via UMe/Island. The Steve Albini-produced Rid of Me, Harvey’s acclaimed second LP, will appear on vinyl for the first time since the record’s 1993 release. 4-Track Demos, originally released five months later, collects her demo home recordings from the previous two years — including eight songs that wound up on Rid of Me and six additional tracks. Both albums will be available on 1-LP, 180-gram black vinyl with download cards, full-color outer sleeves and printed inner sleeves. Both are available to pre-order. The releases will follow the first two installments of Harvey’s full-catalog reissue series: Dry, her debut studio album from 1992, and Dry – Demos, both set for release on July 2...
The 10 Best Punk and Alternative Bob Dylan Covers
Bob Dylan is one of the most widely covered artists in popular music – hit versions of his songs by the Byrds and Peter, Paul and Mary helped make him famous, and Dylan covers by Jimi Hendrix and Guns N’ Roses permanently remain in rock radio rotation. And even artists from the punk and alternative scenes that tend to have less reverence for ‘60s nostalgia been drawn to the Dylan songbook, often giving his compositions dramatically different arrangements. With Dylan’s first collection of new songs in eight years, Rough and Rowdy Ways, out now, here’s a look back at 10 Dylan songs that were memorably reimagined by punk, post-punk, indie, alternative, avant jazz and industrial artists. 10. My Chemical Romance – “Desolation Row” “Desolation Row,” the mighty 11-minute closer from 1965’s Highwa...
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