I’m v excited about the PJ Harvey Tiny Desk concert out today. 🎵

PJ Harvey is one of my favorite musicians because she is a weirdo and an artist in the same vein as a Kate Bush, or even a Bob Dylan, who concentrates on mythology, atmosphere, artistry and sense of place. For a lot of my life, my fav album was “Rid of Me.” It was present in a lot of formative moments as a kid and still resonates for me as an adult, despite some of its flourishes not aging well. As an adult, “Let England Shake” genuinely moved me. She draws on music and poetry traditions to explore what it means for England to be an empire, sitting atop a throne of bones and bloodshed. It’s ambitious and dark and sounds incredible, in part thanks to her use of the autoharp (yes, seriously).

She’s also among the artists who made a hard left in my musical interests as a kid, when she and John Parish released “Dance Hall at Louse Point.” This album was called career suicide when it came out because it is so atonal and avant garde. As an album, listening from beginning to end, it’s delightfully sinister. It could be a sister or a cousin album to Nick Cave’s “Murder Ballads.”