The one album PJ Harvey wanted to walk out of: “A lot of emotional work”
Wearing your heart on your sleeve can be a draining way of going about your craft, and when you’re an artist like PJ Harvey, who has constantly dived into emotionally raw topics over the years, you can understand how it might take its toll on your mental wellbeing.
Over the course of her first few albums, the Dorset-born songwriter poured everything into her songwriting, with records such as Dry, Rid of Me, and To Bring You My Love all covering deeply personal subject matters and delivering them in such a painfully honest manner.
Of course, these are all exceptional records, and they progressively took her towards the limelight, where she would flourish as an artist and become renowned as one of the UK’s finest songwriting talents of the 1990s. However, on the flipside, there’s a proper emotional heft to each of these releases that not only forces the listener to sink into these worlds, but does so for the songwriter as well.
When you’re making such emotionally challenging music, there comes a time when you have to look a little more inward and recognise that even though writing songs in this vein is what has helped you to gain notoriety, you’ve got to look after yourself and ensure that you’re not going to dig yourself a hole that you can’t escape from.
When it came to writing her fourth album, Is This Desire?, she was feeling the full effects of her deeply emotive songwriting and found it considerably harder to cope with the pressure of working in this manner, and so something had to change in her approach in order for it to be manageable for her in the long run.
Speaking in an interview, which was included on a bonus disc on the CD release of the album upon its release in 1998, she explained that the writing and recording process almost drove her to her limit, and that certain sacrifices had to be made in order for the album to come to fruition.
“I was doing a lot of emotional work,” she explained, before stating that she chose to put a pin in the record for a period in order to focus on herself. “I just wanted to stop, and start looking at my life as Polly, rather than my life as a songwriter.”
By mid-1998, she returned to the studio to complete what would end up being another marvel of a record, but unlike her previous work, very little of the album ended up being personal, and instead took more inspiration from the works of classic poets, which she then used as a mirror to her own experiences rather than delving into her own personal matters directly.
Of course, she’s ended up weighing in on even heavier subjects since on albums such as Let England Shake, but there’s an argument to be made that on Is This Desire?, she managed to avoid plummeting into the depths of despair and tapped into another, lesser-seen side of her artistic brilliance.
