‘This Mess We’re In’ and the story of PJ Harvey’s greatest lyric
Everything was different before the Twin Towers came crashing down.
Life in New York was unkempt, unruly, less defined by insidious terror, which still had dark edges but were tucked away, harder to find, and from that rose one of the last great artists to capture this soon-gone feeling as PJ Harvey.
The singer-songwriter captures a brooding, horny darkness on her 2000 album, Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, which is split across London and New York, with Harvey intending to use the project to be more direct than her previous work, to erase obscurity and say what she felt in the words that she felt it. The themes running through the blood of her work meant that she knew she needed a man on board, to work as a textural and symbolic foil to her meditations on yearning, complex urban romance, and solitude.
In comes the album’s seventh track, ‘This Mess We’re In’, and though it was never released as a single, it has become one of the most well-regarded tracks, no doubt down to the inclusion of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. “I wrote this song with his voice in mind,” Harvey once shared with an interviewer, “Hoping he’d say, ‘Yes, I’ll sing it’, and that he’d find something in the lyrics. He said yes almost straight away.” Yorke’s vocal addition is haunting, refined, and emotive, sure, but beyond his feature, the song is a feat of lyrical and atmospheric genius.
Proving its ingenuity to you through usual measures won’t do: I can’t take a single line and serve it up as evidence of greatness in usual hermeneutic fashion. Sure, the closing refrain, “The city sun sets over me”, is a sultry seance in sibilance, and the “love-making, on-screen, impossible dream” chimes with a poetic hypnotism, but the real lyrical feat here is the wider story, the sum of the parts which comes together to offer more than words usually can: to offer up an image so evocative it may as well be real.
Essentially, we are served a scene from a Lynne Ramsay movie, where two lovers stare, wordlessly, at one another, contemplating their doomed love with an air of saucy, stylish suffering, and Yorke, with lyrical intensity never quite exercised in the world of Radiohead, brazenly delivers one of his spell-binding lines, straight from Harvey’s notebook: “Night and day, I dream of making love to you now, baby”. The gall she must have had to ask him to do that.
The city is its own character, emerging from the back-and-forth lyrical contortions, and from the get-go, Yorke tells us we are there with them: “Can you hear them? The helicopters? I’m in New York,” he relates, as a grandiose, higher than the skyscrapes perspective warps the natural lamentations on love into something more expansive.
Given that pre-9/11 New York is so central to the project and the tonal world of this lyrical masterclass, what happened after its release is almost too befuddling to believe. Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea was such a commercial success that it won the Mercury Music Prize in 2001, the award given to the Dorset-born star on September 11th, 2001.
By chance, Harvey was in Washington, DC, that fateful day and even witnessed the terrorist attack on the Pentagon from her hotel room. This odd coincidence ties the rhetorical lavishings of the city in ‘This Mess We’re In’, the apocalyptic beat of the album, and Harvey’s connection to the city together. As such, the track is something of a time capsule for pre-9/11 New York, and a marker of the dawn of the new century, soundtracked by cinematic art-rock; the sound of history being captured.
