The gothic book that inspired PJ Harvey’s ‘To Bring You My Love’
English musician PJ Harvey helped to define the 1990s with her unabashed approach to expression, moving through genres with her distinctive voice and raw lyricism. From the abrasive Rid of Me to the folk-heavy Let England Shake, Harvey’s oeuvre is a varied one, yet she never compromises.
Reflecting on her career so far, Harvey once told Rolling Stone, “When I’m working on a new record, the most important thing is to not repeat myself, that’s always my aim: to try and cover new ground and really to challenge myself. Because I’m in this for learning.”
With that, according to Savages’ Jehnny Beth, “She is always looking for new ways to express herself. It’s very brave. There’s an honesty of the soul there, and of the voice. For a musician like me, she’s a true example.”
Harvey’s career began in the late 1980s when she joined the band Automatic Dlamini. After a few years with the band, Harvey formed her eponymous trio, whom she worked with for several years before becoming a solo artist. Through the following decades, Harvey released seminal records like Is This Desire? and Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, the latter of which won the Mercury Prize.
Alongside her music, Harvey has engaged in multiple other creative ventures, including sculpture and acting. However, the most unsurprising is her writing pursuits. Widely praised for her lyrical skills, Harvey is no stranger to spilling her thoughts onto paper. Thus, it was only fitting for her to release a poetry book, The Hollow of The Hand, which she made in collaboration with photographer Seamus Murphy.
The pair travelled across various countries, including America and Afghanistan, to create the book. However, in 2022, Harvey released a book-length poem, Orlam, demonstrating her literary abilities even further.
Over the years, Harvey has cited numerous poets, writers and musicians as significant influences on her writing, whether that be her poetry or her lyrics. She has previously named writers like T.S Eliot, Ted Hughes, James Joyce and W.B Yeats as some of her primary inspirations. Moreover, she loves Bob Dylan, going as far as to call him “beyond music“.
However, there’s one important book that she thanks for inspiring her songwriting, particularly while she worked on her 1995 album, To Bring Me Your Love. Harvey is a tremendous fan of Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, a novel frequently referenced by many great musicians; even American singer Weyes Blood lifted her name from the 1952 novel’s title.
A work of southern gothic literature, Wise Blood explores a crisis of faith, although it took many years to find critical acclaim. For Harvey, the book proved vital in shaping her writing skills. She once Tweeted a photo of her reading the book in the 1990s, captioning it: “A photo of me taken at the time I was writing To Bring You My Love, lying beside Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, my notepad and my headphones. This book was a huge influence on my writing as I began to explore story-telling through song.”
O’Connor’s influence is certainly clear, as Harvey employed tonnes of religious imagery in To Bring You My Love, a central theme in the novel.
