The five most romantic PJ Harvey songs
British musician PJ Harvey has always expressed a decisive knack for writing visceral lyrics communicating raw sensuality, love, longing, femininity, and suffering. Whether she’s singing about romantic love or reflecting on war and conflict, she routinely strings words together that flow like pure poetry.
Harvey has explored love in various forms over the years. On her 1992 debut album, Dry, Harvey communicated a sense of desperation and pain, such as on the record’s opening number, “Oh My Lover,” where she sings, “You can love her/ And you can love me at the same time” and “Give me your troubles/ I’ll keep them with mine.”
Other times, Harvey has depicted much more pure and idyllic states of love and romance, but time and again, she has circled back to the intense and often ugly emotions wrapped up in romance. Take ‘Shame’ for example, from Uh Huh Her, in which she tells us “Shame is the shadow of love.”
For this list, we’ve picked five of Harvey’s most perfect love songs, with some tapping into this raw and unrestrained view of love that Harvey often unleashes, and others are considerably more wholesome and tender. So, from ‘Black Hearted Love’ to ‘One Line’, here are five of Harvey’s most romantic tracks.
The five most romantic PJ Harvey songs:
‘This is Love’
On ‘This Is Love’, perhaps Harvey’s best-known song on this list, she talks of the simple fact of needing someone so much that the complexities of the world fade away. “Does it have to be a life full of dread?/ Wanna chase you ’round the table, wanna touch your head,” she sings, harking back to a childlike experience of love, untethered from what’s going on in the world.
This microcosm that Harvey envisions living in with her lover embodies that feeling of ‘us against the world’ that can come with intense romantic relationships. “This is love, this is love that I’m feeling,” she repeats, and while she’s aware that she has to face the real world, her lover makes her feel like nothing matters but each other.
‘The Letter’
Harvey’s incredible lyricism is one of the greatest aspects of her music, and on ‘The Letter’ from Uh Huh Her, her fine attention to detail creates an evocative world of erotic letter-writing. “Can’t you see in my handwriting/ The curve of my ‘g’, the longing?” she asks, before adding, “Take the cap off your pen/ And wet the envelope, lick and lick it.”
While you might argue that ‘The Letter’ is more erotic than strictly romantic, the fact that Harvey is ready to use an outdated medium of communication to create a form of intimacy with her lover suggests that both are true. “It turns me on to imagine/ Your blue eyes on my words,” she sings, eventually ending the song with the simple yet romantic lines “I want you/ Oh, it’s you.”
‘Black Hearted Love’
Appearing on the collaborative album A Woman a Man Walked By made with John Parish, ‘Black Hearted Love’ is a terrific guitar-led track that communicates intense love, with Harvey using imagery that conveys a sense of creeping and yearning. She opens with “I think I saw you in the shadows/ I move in closer beneath your windows/ Who would suspect me of this rapture?”
Yet, as the song continues and Harvey asserts her feelings for her subject, she uses beautifully poetic words like “When you call out my name in rapture/ I volunteer my soul for murder/ I wish this moment here forever.” Defiant, passionate, and perhaps a little obsessive, the song is a sprawling number with a fantastic vocal performance from Harvey.
‘To Bring You My Love’
Taken from the album of the same name, ‘To Bring You My Love’ is one of Harvey’s most raw and visceral performances, communicating an utterly devastating kind of love associated with deep desperation. While it might be a more one-sided or unhealthy depiction of love, Harvey perfectly conveys how it feels to love someone so much that you’re willing to do anything, even lay with “the Devil”.
She tells the subject, “And I’ve travelled over/ Dry earth and floods/ Hell and high water/ To bring you my love.” Her voice is powerful and animalistic here, creating an uneasy atmosphere of dread, as if she’s wondering if all of that was really worth it in the long run.
‘One Line’
On Harvey’s fifth album, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, the singer focused on a more positive approach to love in comparison to her previous record, Is This Desire?, which was made in the wake of a breakup. With New York as her backdrop, Harvey seems to have experienced a new lease of life, resulting in gorgeous songs like ‘One Line’.
With lines like “Do you remember the first kiss?/ Star shooting across the sky/ To come to such a place as this/ You never left my mind,” Harvey communicates a pure kind of love. “And I draw a line/ To your heart today/ To your heart from mine/ A line to keep us safe,” she adds, creating a gorgeous image of connection and security.
