To Bring You My Love

I remember specifically the first time I heard To Bring You My Love twenty-five years ago. I was visiting an ex-roommate’s new apartment. We had spent years building a friendship based on comic books and music, something that has never changed. We were hanging out in his room. He had just picked up the CD and knew I would want to hear it.

It wasn’t the first time I had heard PJ Harvey, of course. When we lived together he had purchased all three of her prior albums, and I had seen the few videos that MTV played on 120 Minutes. While I liked Dry and Rid of Me neither had really captured me as a fan at that time. But something about To Bring You My Love resonated immediately. The sound grabbed my ear in a way her previous efforts had not. I probably couldn’t have told you that day that this would become one of my desert island albums, but I knew I was instantly in love.

I don’t have the language to describe it in musical terms, and I realize that so much of what I love about it is personal and subjective. The word that comes to mind for much of the album is resonant. Polly’s voice is deep and echoing, vulnerable and powerful at the same time. The rhythms that underlie this album, on guitar as well as the drums, feel disjointed to me with emphasis in unusual places. I want to say syncopated, but my musician friends may disagree. The bass notes rumble with distortion, reverberating in the chest like a broken heart.

But for me it is not just the sonic qualities that make the album special. Through her lyrics and imagery PJ creates a mythic landscape worthy of Faulkner and O’Connor, gothic and rural in texture. Depending on the song Polly embodies the wronged woman, or maybe an angel working for God, or maybe a woman imbued with magic who you believe has her voodoo working. There is mourning: for lost relationships, lost children, and a loss of faith. She begins the album by telling us she has laid with the devil and by the end you not only believe her, you realize it’s the devil who is in trouble. There is righteous power in her voice, a feminine power, that of the goddess. When she says ‟I think I’m a mother,” I hear her stating not a biological fact (though that is certainly implied), but invoking the Mother who is the matrix of creativity, as well as destruction.

On that first listen at my friend’s apartment I remember saying to him, ‟I think she’s been listening to a lot of Nick Cave.” That wasn’t meant as a criticism or complaint. In addition to there being a sonic resemblance Cave, at that point in his career, had spent a lot of time creating music in a similar narrative world. For whatever reasons, this is a world that speaks to me. Some of it is, no doubt, just the movies and books I’ve been exposed to. Some of it is having grown up in a northern Appalachian home with our own folk tales of love and murder and angels and devils. It’s a world I feel in my bones.

Not long after this PJ and Nick recorded a duet version of the classic folk tune Henry Lee as part of his Murder Ballads album (the internet tells me Henry Lee, like many traditional ballads, has many different versions, and is based on a tune called Young Hunting). In the video PJ and Nick are dressed in matching black suits, emphasizing their shared traits. The video fairly sizzles with sexual tension and not long after they engaged in a brief love affair in real life. Nick managed to get a lot of songs out of it for his next album, The Boatman’s Call (well worth your time to listen to), while Polly, like with most things in her personal life, simply never talked about it.

This was also a period where PJ was experimenting with her stage persona. During Dry and Rid of Me she typically performed wearing basic black jeans and leather jackets, with her hair pulled back severely and very little makeup. To Bring You My Love was kind of her Glam period, in dress if not in content. On the album cover and in the video for Down By the Water she has big hair and bright red lipstick that matches her shimmery ballgown. In concert she would sometimes wear gold catsuits, or a bright pink bodysuit and gaudy fake eyelashes. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a sucker for stage costumes, as my love of Bowie and Alice Cooper and Adam Ant, among many others, attest to. The live clips from this era are some of my favorites of hers.

From Hooligan Magazine

I’m sorry to say I didn’t get to see PJ on that tour. If my research is correct she has only ever played the Pittsburgh area twice in her thirty year career: once supporting Live at Star Lake (or whatever it was being called at the time), and once supporting U2 at Mellon Arena. I have seen her several times since then in Washington DC. My first time was for her next album, Is This Desire?, at the 9:30 Club. I saw her twice when she was touring for Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, shows which bookended her jaunt with U2. The first of these ranks among my top concert experiences ever. In late 2000 PJ knew she was going to be touring with U2. She wanted to break in a new live band. Rather than mount a major solo tour she played a few, small, and relatively unannounced shows at small venues. I was on a PJ mailing list at the time and found out about a show at the Black Cat in DC, and somehow manged to score tickets. The Black Cat, while having a history of some pretty amazing shows, is essentially a small bar. I stood about three feet from the stage and about five feet from PJ. She brought me, and everyone else in the room, her love that night.

The next time I saw her was about ten months later with the same band at the 9:30 Club the night before 9/11. I remember reading a statement from her at the time that she had been awakened in her hotel room by what turned out to be a plane crashing into the Pentagon.

A trait PJ shares with some of my other favorite artists, most notably David Bowie and Nick Cave, is her willingness to experiment and never stand still with her music. Her career has been a constant change of sound, ideas, and presentation. This keeps an artist from getting stale, but also runs the risk of losing fans if they veer too far from made you love them in the first place. While I am still interested in PJ’s career, and will no doubt own whatever she releases next on the day it comes out, I do fully admit I have not been a big fan of her last few albums. She hasn’t done anything to just drive me away, but her output has not spoken to me in the same way as in the past. I’m a different person now, and so is she. The next album may be my favorite thing ever. Or not. I’ll still be there with her in some capacity.

While I have not been as enamored of her later work she has recently been giving new life to some of her old. This summer saw the release of the Demo versions of her first album, Dry. These were recorded by Polly on a 4-track recorder in her home studio, I believe before she had a recording contract. They are sparse, and bring a new experience to these seminal and formative songs. This not the first time we have heard her demos. My memory tells me that she was, ultimately, not happy with the production of her second album Rid of Me and not long after its release she also released and album entitled simply 4-Track Demos, featuring her own recordings of most of the album (plus a couple of extras that didn’t make the cut.

This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of To Bring You My Love, and a couple of weeks ago she released the demo version. What struck me most upon listening to it was just how fully formed it was in this early raw version. For many of the tracks, most of them actually, the differences between this and the official release are incredibly subtle. I can tell these are different vocal tracks, but mainly because this is one of the albums I’ve listened to most in my life. The guitars and drums are nearly identical. The biggest difference is on the final song of the album, The Dancer. On the demo version the guitar has a Spanish Flamenco tone and rhythm, which was replaced by a more droning, quickly strummed electric guitar. What was weird when I heard this though was that I had to actually go back and check to make sure I wasn’t imagining this. The Flamenco guitar was indeed not present on the version I was familiar with, but somehow it had been implied by the rest of the song to such a degree that I imagined hearing it, so uch so that the Demo version, while different, still sounded like something my brain already knew. Now, by this point of her career Polly had access to better equipment and had more studio experience than with demos for Dry, and that probably accounts for a lot of the fidelity of this project, but I think a lot of it was simply the strength of her vision of what this album was meant to be from very early on.

In some ways I’m disappointed with the Demos version. I was expecting something more raw, or something in a more formative state. It’s so close to the studio album that only someone really, really familiar with it can really hear the differences. I guess I am that person, and digging through the subtleties of this has been rewarding, just in a different way than what I expected. It is insight into the process of one of my favorite artists, and taking it along with the demo versions of PJ’s first two albums it’s fascinating to see how quickly she grew, as a songwriter and musician as well as in confidence and skill.

To Bring You My Love was a critical success, if not a giant financial one. At the end of that year it was celebrated as the ‟Best Album of the Year” by the majority of the music press. I remember seeing PJ on many music magazine covers (remember those?).  MTV, who I’m sure played the video for Down by the Water at least twice nominated it for ‟Best Female Video” at their annual awards show. But that was the year of Alanis Morrisette and Jagged Little Pill and no one else stood a chance to get that little astronaut statue.

Twenty-five years later it's still an album that is lodged in my heart and brain. Like all of the music we claim as our own, the music that defines portions of our lives, my thoughts and feelings about it are wrapped up in things beyond the songs. It became a part of the soundtrack of my life at that, simply because I played it so much. It still reminds me of specific people and places and events. Playing now involves a little bit of time travel to a special time.

Thanks, Polly.

To Bring You My Love on Spotify

The Girls Who Be Kings*

This past Friday I was pleasantly reminded of a lot of my listening habits of the 90s. It can be difficult to remember where your head was at any given moment in your life, or why the music that spoke to you did so. I came into the 90s riding a wave of alternative music, listening to The Pixies, and The Replacements, and Nick Cave, and bunch of other stuff I had discovered in the late 80s. For the most part I ignored the Grunge movement. I could hear their influences in the stuff I had already been listening to and while I didn’t exactly hate Grunge none it spoke to me very much either. I liked Nirvana, but didn’t own their albums until many years later, partly due to everyone I knew already having a copy. I didn’t have to work very hard to be able to hear it.

I did discover a lot of music though. I went through a brief Alt-Country phase, though my tastes there tended toward the weird extremes of the genre. Most of these have long fallen by the wayside for me since then. I continued to follow the careers of many of the 80s artists I was into. Lloyd Cole and the Jazz Butcher continued to release new material though it seemed less and less people cared (not that many did in the first place, I guess). I tried out a lot of bands that I first saw on MTV’s 120 Minutes. I went to a few big festivals and saw a lot of bands I would never have gone to see if they played solo.

One of these festivals I went to, twice, was Lilith Fair. There seemed to be an explosion of new female vocalists/singer-songwriters at the time and I was drawn to a lot of them. I saw Dar Williams live several times. I picked up albums by Tori Amos and Bjork. I did a phone interview with Jewel when she was eighteen years old, about six months before she broke huge. Listening to women rock stars was nothing completely new for me. I owned a lot of Fleetwood Mac, and Blondie, and The Runaways, and The Eurythmics, and Missing Persons, among others. But in the 90s, like what I said about Alt-Country, my tastes in women vocalists tended toward the weird end of things.

One of them was Christina Martinez and her band, Boss Hog. Christina is married to Jon Spencer of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Jon plays guitar and shares vocals with Christina in Boss Hog, but it is definitely her band. I wrote about them twice for local newsweeklies in the 90s and saw them once at the now-defunct Grafitti (Cibo Mato was the opening act). They only released two very short full albums and a handful of EPs, so their output was pretty small. Whatever, I listened to them a lot.

This features Jon Spencer more than most of their songs.

After almost two decades of nothing, this spring Boss Hog released a new album and went on tour. I went to see them at Cattivo, a small local venue here in Pittsburgh last Friday. The lineup includes both Martinez and Spencer, as well as Hollis Queens and Jens Jurgenson, their original drummer and bassist. Mickey Finn, who was not with them originally, rounded out the band on keyboards. It was a much more intimate show than when I saw them before. Spencer himself was working the merchandise table and was very accessible. The other band members hung out in the crowd watching the opening acts (including my friends in The Homisides from down Charleroi way).

Their performance was remarkable. First of all, it was obvious that they were really having fun up there. The love and enthusiasm for what they were doing brought everyone into the show. Christina left the stage to sing from the midst of the crowd. At one point she leaned on my shoulder and sang directly into my face, about six inches away. Queens and Jurgenson were tight and powerful, a thundering rhythm section. I don’t play drums, and as much as I listen to music I admit it is the piece of bands I notice least, at least overtly. Drums underlie all of the parts I’m paying more attention to. I recognize this as a lack on my part, but other than a great drum solo I find myself not paying much attention to drummers. Hollis Queens was the exception. She was simply fierce on drums and it was difficult to take my eyes off of her. She also adds vocals to one of my favorite Boss Hog songs, Whiteout. The show ended with the song Texas, possibly my favorite Boss Hog track.

A little naughty...

Boss Hog never really completely fell out of my listening rotation, like a lot of artists have. But, since Friday I’ve listened to all of their albums (the new one is great!) and EPs, and watched a lot of YouTube videos, reclaiming my fandom. This has reminded me of a few other women vocalists/performers I was into at the same time, all but one of which are relatively unknown. While I can’t describe exactly what it is, I can hear some kind of similarity among them, a reason I got into all of them. In every case their vocals feel earthier to me, more grounded. Many of the women singers of that era tended toward the more ethereal in their vocalizations. It’s not that I don’t like that, but it seems I’m drawn to something more visceral. In every case the music veers away from mostly traditional rock songs or ballads as well, though there are exceptions. Slower, but driving, if that’s a thing. Spaces in the music for the ear to rest, but underpinned with heavy bass and drums. More than a little distortion. There is a sparseness, but lots of emotion.

In my novel This Creature Fair I write about a rock star named Morrigan Blue. She and the band I create for her are the archetype for this type of sound. I can hear it in my head even if I can never completely describe it.

I’m not summing it up very well. Let me give you my examples.

I saw the video for Dragon Lady by the Geraldine Fibbers on 120 Minutes and was immediately a fan. I bought the album without having heard another song and it was a desert island album for me for years (it might still be). They fell into the weirder end of the Alt-Country thing I mentioned. In the first article I wrote about them for In Pittsburgh Newsweekly I described them as the offspring of Hank Williams and Sonic Youth. I still think that’s a pretty good descriptor. Carla Bozelich has a deep, raspy voice that just oozes emotion for me. I did a phone interview with her that formed the basis of a major article I had published in No Depression Magazine, the national music mag for Alt-Country (there was some editing of what I wrote that Carla wasn’t happy about, but we talked it through). I saw them once in Pittsburgh and twice in Washington DC. By that time guitarist Nels Cline, who is currently in Wilco, had joined the band.

As much as I love this I understand how they're an acquired taste. My friend Lee nearly jumped out of our car into the desert at 90 miles an hour when I put this on.

Before the Geraldine Fibbers, Carla had been with Ethyl Meatplow, who you might know about from the song Devil’s Johnson which was featured in an episode of Beavis and Butthead. Since then she has been involved in a number of projects, both solo and as part of other bands, including a song-for-song cover of Willie Nelson’s Redheaded Stranger album, which Willie gave his blessing to by joining her on a couple of tracks. While I still love her voice she has moved into realms of experimental music that has left me behind.

At that same time I discovered Congo Norvell. Kid Congo Powers is a guitarist who has one of the best alternative resumes in music, having played with the Gun Club, the Cramps, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Kid is a very idiosyncratic guitarist who, by his own admission, never really learned to play guitar the ‟right” way. He uses lots of alternative tunings and is much more interested in finding interesting sounds to make with his guitar than in traditional playing. To my ears his instincts are good. Vocalist Sally Norvell has a voice that simply makes me melt. I called it a ‟mix of honey and sand” when I wrote about them.

I had been given the go-ahead to write an article or do an interview by my editor at Kulture Deluxe magazine, a short-lived and long defunct national music mag I wrote for a long time ago. I had tracked down their agent to ask for an interview, but in the meantime I went to see them in DC and was lucky enough to meet them after the show. When I inquired about setting something up Sally wrote her home number on a napkin and told me to call anytime. I did and they were fantastic. They sent me an advance copy of their new album, The Dope, The Lies, The Vaseline, which was never officially released. I’m among a very small population of people who own a copy of this. This ended up being the biggest feature article I ever had published.

I can’t really say that Sally and I are friends in any way other than the Facebook kind, but we stayed in touch over the years. When she released her solo album Choking Victim I was probably one of the few music journalists lining up to review it.

The last of these 90s female performers I want to talk about is the most well-known. PJ Harvey is well into her third decade as a respected musician. 120 Minutes was my first introduction to her through the video for Dry. I heard her first three albums through a friend of mine who was much more into her at the time than I was. But then she released To Bring You My Love and I fell in love. This still ranks as one of my all time favorite albums, just hitting me in the sweet spot of right time, right place in my life. After that I become a completist for her music, tracking down obscure b-sides and unreleased tracks and bootleg live shows... there are a lot of them. Part of what I have loved about PJ is that she has continued to grow and change as an artist, every album moving in a new direction. I fully admit that I have not been as into her recent work as I once was. I think she’s still doing important work and following her specific muse, but it doesn’t speak to me in the same way. Still, she is an artist that I will always be interested to see where she goes next.

Unlike the others, I’ve never met PJ, though I have seen her live many times. Two of those shows stand out. In December of 2000 she was breaking in a new band in anticipation of being the opening act for U2. She played a small number of unannounced secret shows that I was lucky enough to hear about and get tickets to. I saw her at the Black Cat in DC, the same venue where I had seen the Geraldine Fibbers and Congo Norvell. The Black Cat is essentially a small bar and I stood about three feet from her during the performance. Even then she was a big enough star that this kind of intimate show was a once in a lifetime opportunity. The next fall, after the U2 tour, I saw her headlining again with the same band at the 9:30 Club. This show stands out because of the date. It was 9/10/2001. The next morning, while I was driving out of DC, the World Trade Centers fell and the Pentagon was hit by a plane.

Unfortunately I didn't see the To Bring You My Love tour in 1995.

This is what passed for PJ's Glam period.

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I can hear the similarities in these performers, at least in my world of aural pleasure. I can understand why they all appealed to me in some of the same ways. I’m sure there are others who fall in this category but I haven’t discovered a lot of them that speak to me in the same way. I’m sure some of that is simply where I am in life as well. Not too many years ago I got into The Kills, fully aware that they were hitting me in the same place as the bands I’ve just talked about. There is an overall sound to the band I like and vocalist Alison Mossheart fits squarely in the realm I’ve been discussing. I really like the work she has done with Jack White in The Dead Weather as well.

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I’m not sure of the purpose of this, other than finally gathering all of these together in one place. Hopefully some of you will explore these artists and discover something you love. In the meantime, I’m enjoying a nostalgic indulgence.

*The title is taken from a Congo Norvell song.

We Float

Conversation with my roommate while at a wedding at Heinz Chapel:

Me: ‟So, what do you think would happen if I just went up there and hovered over the Nave like fifteen feet up?”

Him: ‟It would probably really disrupt the wedding.”

Me: ‟See, that’s why I don’t do things like that. People are so skittish.”

Yeah, my brain doesn’t always work the way others do.

But this exchange brought up a memory of a dream. It wasn’t a dream of flying, not in the traditional sense. More a dream of hovering.

It was in the early 90s and I was living in the Bloomfield section of Pittsburgh. In the dream (and I kind of think it was a series of dreams with the same basic premise), I was able to levitate about a foot off the ground by flexing my feet back and forth. Somehow, if I continued this very specific motion I was able to propel myself forward, like walking, but I was hovering. I have pretty vivid memories of floating out of my apartment and crossing the Millvale Street bridge spanning the valley of the busway. So vivid that they feel like something that actually happened instead of a hazy dream image.

That’s the thing with this memory... it feels so real that at times it seems like something that actually happened. Okay, I know it didn’t so don’t dial 911 to get me help. But it feels that way, like somehow it is something I could still do, but I’ve forgotten the first part, the launch. If I could somehow remember how to do that I could flex my feet back and forth and hover around the city.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams states, ‟There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. Its knack lies in learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss... Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties.”

I’ve lost the knack of hovering.

Maybe it was astral projection. I’ve read enough comics to have been exposed to the concept from a very early age. Dr. Strange was doing it through magic and Professor X through psychic powers throughout my childhood.

Art by Dan Adkins

From X-Men # 117 by Chris Claremont and John Byrne

I’ve encountered the idea through a lot of reading about psychic phenomena and magic to know that a lot of people would say that is what I experienced.

I’m not saying that’s what happened. As much as I want to live in world of magic I’m enough of a cynic to not jump headfirst into that metaphysical pool. It’s as easy to drown there as it is to swim. So I dangle my feet, dip my toes in, and watch from afar. I can’t speak for the experiences of others, nor do I have the arrogance to deny their definitions. I hate to put any of my own experiences in a tightly defined box with lots of labels.

But the memory persists, more so than a lot of more obviously real experiences.

In classic dream analysis the experience of flying is usually interpreted as a positive thing. It is a symbol of freedom, of rising above one’s circumstances and seeing things from a new perspective.

I can see this in my life at that time. I had walked away from a good job (a really horrible ‟good” job), and my career in psychology and was living as a temp, making my first forays into the world of freelance art and writing. Other than some financial worries it was a really good time in my life. I was involved in a remarkable relationship. I was actively engaged with a group of people who would become my life-long closest friends. I was finding my power as a writer and an artist. I felt for the first time that I was on my true path and not one based on simply having a career. I was living in a dump and eating ramen noodles and ending up with twelve dollars in my bank account at the end of the month.

To quote Henry Miller, ‟I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”

So why think of this today at a wedding? Hmmm...

I’m still pretty happy overall. I have more responsibilities now than I did then, certainly. A lot more security as well, though I don’t want to take that too much for granted. I have matured and been somewhat successful with my writing and art, though that is a never ending work in progress. There are times I’m too busy and do feel too much gravity. I have my own litany of ‟stuff I need to accomplish” that can get in the way of freedom (however you wish to define that term).

Maybe the metaphor of hovering needs to be looked at. None of us ever have the ability to fly completely unfettered. That implies leaving everything behind, no ties to the earth at all. It’s important to fly, but so is the the need to remain grounded. We do have responsibilities here, to ourselves and others. There’s a difference between being grounded and being chained. Gravity is hard to overcome and Sisyphus’ stone won’t get to the top of the hill all by itself. But maybe we occasionally need to stop and think about what we are really responsible for and look at what may be holding us down.

There is a concept in Taoism called Wu Wei (Chinese, literally “non-doing”). It means ‟natural action, or in other words, action that does not involve struggle or excessive effort. Wu Wei is the cultivation of a mental state in which our actions are quite effortlessly in alignment with the flow of life.”

We all need to rise up once in awhile, see things from a new perspective, put our head in the clouds, stop fighting and just float.

Quote from Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

Here’s PJ Harvey’s take on the topic.