What is PJ Harvey’s greatest-ever cover song?
Almost everything you would ever need to know about PJ Harvey can be found in her first single, ‘Dress’.
“It’s hard to walk in the dress, it’s not easy,” Harvey sings. “I’m swinging over like a heavy-loaded fruit tree.” In one single song, she captured everything good and bad about being a woman, tackling external pressures, expectations, and all the things that can only be endured by women, and women only.
But beneath the despair, there’s hope, too (“Dreamy dreamy music make it be alright”). And that’s the quintessential core of much of Harvey’s offering – maybe not always explicitly, or even restricted to the excellence of something as powerfully provocative as the entirety of Dry. But it’s there in its connection to atmospheres, to nature, and how her imagery often coasts the delicate line between the harsh realities of womanhood and visceral, almost rural imagery.
Perhaps that explains why, therefore, the countryside is where Harvey feels the most calm. And why, even still, she still likes the chaos of the city, as though the dichotomy of the two is where she finds the most balance. As she once explained to The New Yorker, “I feel a lot calmer when I’m in the countryside. The space and being able to see the horizons, it quite literally lifts a weight off of you – there’s not the density and high buildings and no air. But I also love the busyness of a city, all of the interaction with lots of other people in small spaces. I like having both.”
When you look at it like that, these opposing forces between light reverie and purposeful aggression are what make her version of Bob Dylan’s classic, ‘Highway ‘61 Revisited’, her best. Central to her 1993 classic, Rid of Me, ‘Highway ‘61 Revisited’ begins with distorted sounds before exploding into something slightly more commanding, giving Dylan’s hit a biting edge that brings her distinctive flavour of rage and resignation soaring to the surface.
While other versions come close, like her emotionally charged rendition of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, and how she adjusted the core complexity of the song by giving it her familiar hope-tinged spin to reflect the spirit of Bad Sisters, ‘Highway ‘61 Revisited’ lifts the quintessential delicacy of Dylan’s original and everything it meant to him and obscures it with a punkish energy. This proved not only her prowess for inverting entire compositional masterpieces but her ability to do it well – like only a true innovator could.
But this level of brutality was never new to begin with. Harvey might have taken on a challenge too big for even the most well-established of players when she decided to cover Dylan, but where her ability to channel rage and disillusionment into her work flows, her true magic makes itself known. Dylan once said the song always felt like “it was in my blood”, and one listen to Harvey’s version makes it hard not to imagine it’s the same situation for her.
And though it seems a stretch to compare the two, it’s the same fervour she established right back in the beginning with ‘Dress’. Although a different subject entirely, there’s the lingering interplay between soft and calm, rage and resignation, undercut by a commanding essence that makes you listen, even if it’s not the kind of turmoil you immediately identify with – even if it only simply feels like something important, without being explicit as to why.
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