The five musicians PJ Harvey said shaped her career the most: “That’s always remained in me”
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what binds PJ Harvey’s eclectic body of work as her own.
Each album, ever since her 1992 Dry debut, has always eagerly leapt into a creative unknown to avoid stale artistic dead ends and provide an ample chance to learn with each record. Alternative rock, brittle folk, gothic surrealist, or grunge-lite songsmith, Harvey always casts an eye on the next beckoning venture. Indeed, she even works closely with old pal and photographer Maria Mochnacz to ensure her aesthetic matches her stylistic jumps.
Music takes on a fiercer presence when growing up in the country. Raised in England’s rural Dorset area, the quaint village life and limited peripheries must have elevated Harvey’s record collection to highly prized windows into new worlds far removed from her sleepy agricultural surroundings.
It’s easy to imagine, too, the inner drive being forged there and then, looking beyond the horizon at the big personal or creative mountain needing to be surmounted.
“I was brought up listening to [John Lee] Hooker, to Howlin’ Wolf, to Robert Johnson and a lot of [Jimi] Hendrix and [Captain] Beefheart,” Harvey revealed to Rolling Stone in 1995. “So I was exposed to all these very compassionate musicians at a very young age, and that’s always remained in me and seems to surface more as I get older and have more experience myself. I think the way we are as we get older is a result of what we knew when we were children. More and more so, I see that. Those early learning years shape your whole life and your whole person, your being, the personality you become.”
“Compassionate” is an interesting term. It’s easy to see a vibrant humanism in Hendrix’s classic work, and perhaps Howlin’ Wolf’s blue-collar Chicago blues touched on empathy in his own calloused way. But Hooker and Johnson’s raw blues songbook doesn’t immediately strike as radiating tenderness, and Captain Beefheart’s jumbled-up abstractions are too cryptically inscrutable to glean any consoling warmth amid his junkyard vaudeville.
Yet, it’s a quality that Harvey can spot beyond the obvious, a skill that’s elevated her own work with a raw tether to the human condition in her own unique way.
“I am a very sensitive and emotional person, and I have the capacity to feel things, and if I can put those feelings and emotions into music, that seems like a very worthwhile thing to do,” Harvey concluded. “I am kind of aware of other people as well. I don’t know if compassion is the right word, but – I feel like I’m blowing my own trumpet – I do get very upset by other things as well and am trying to use that in my music.”
A sharper attune to other people’s emotional states is perhaps what drew Harvey to her five formative artists. Other than just the soundtrack she grew up with, her innate empathy antenna was able to sense a deeper pain and spiritual chaos than can be picked up from even longtime fans paying less emotional attention.
The five musicians PJ Harvey said shaped her career the most:
- John Lee Hooker
- Jimi Hendrix
- Captain Beefheart
- Howlin’ Wolf
- Robert Johnson
