The four artists PJ Harvey admired most: “Interested in the same thing”
PJ Harvey is known for bringing her prolific songbook to life with personas that reflect each album’s core themes. Her reasoning? To never make the same thing twice.
“Probably my biggest fear is that I might start churning out the same kind of records and not realise that that’s what I’m doing,” she admitted to Pitchfork. In conversation alongside her longtime collaborator John Parish, Harvey expanded on where her knack for consistent reinvention comes from.
When asked whether or not this was a quality held in artists that she admired growing up, Harvey agrees, expounding on her relentless urge to constantly learn and evolve as a child and later, as an art school student. “It was very natural for it to move into music, and it continues to be that way,” Harvey says of her creativity.
Adding, “If I feel I’m learning something new, that excites me more than anything. It excites me much more than just writing a song – I know I can write because I’ve done it before and it’s like second nature to me, I”m not interested in that.”
For an artist with such bounds of talent as Harvey possesses, change is not only inevitable, but necessary in order to fully realise her music and vision. “I’ve always admired artists I felt were interested in the same thing, in change,” she asserts, naming Björk as a pillar of this. Similarly to Harvey, who, for all of her various incarnations, remains largely rooted in alternative rock, stylistically, Björk honed her niche in experimental dance and electronic music, championing her club kid roots in her music.
Still, Björk can be easily just as unrecognisable, both literally and sonically transforming not just her sound, but also her looks, as they are suited to fit every one of her projects’ insular worlds. “I can’t say that every one of her records really moved me,” Harvey notes of the Icelandic singer, “But every one of her records seems to be an entire plunge into the unknown, and that really excites me.”
In a similar vein, Harvey names David Bowie and Prince as being two artists who “in the early years,” as she specifies, she admired for their ceaseless creativity. Bowie’s influence is seen in Harvey’s theatrical To Bring You My Love era in 1995, when she traded her previous semi-uniform of Dr Martens combat boots and all-black outfits for ballgowns and catsuits, painting her face in vibrant makeup. On stage, she sang into a microphone similar to that of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust-era flashlight microphone.
Of Prince, Harvey told Rolling Stone, “He’s always going in different ways and doesn’t care what’s best for him in commercial terms now.” Then just 26 years old, it’s easy to see where Harvey would find admiration in an artist like Prince, who, over time, continued to prioritise evolving his artistry over all else.
Another primary figure for Harvey is Tom Waits, particularly his “first two or three albums, extremely different,” she said to Pitchfork, “And I hope I can maintain that with my own work because often you might see it in some people and then they seem to lose that capacity after a while.”
Surely, Waits has never lost his drive towards discovering something new in his work. Part of Waits’ charm is his inability to be defined under one genre or sound. Where all of his work is united by his unforgettable voice, no project is the same as the last, making him one of the most continually fascinating musicians of his time.
Harvey also shared her love for Waits’ work to Rolling Stone, stating, “Someone like Tom Waits, who isn’t as successful, but he doesn’t care and is not interested in making money. He explores all different avenues, like writing film music, acting, doing music for theatre.”
“That’s what I’m interested in as well,” Harvey concludes, “Just making the most of your time here on planet Earth, seeing how many different ways you can push yourself and explore.”
