Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
Encyclopedia
Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea is the fifth studio album by English singer-songwriter PJ Harvey
, released 23 October 2000 on Island Records
. Recorded during March to April 2000, the album contains themes of love that are tied into Harvey's affection for New York City
. It became the second major commercial success of her recording career, following her successful breakthrough To Bring You My Love
(1995). Upon its release, the album received general acclaim from most music critics and earned Harvey several accolades, including the 2001 Mercury Prize. It spent 17 weeks on the UK Albums Chart
, and was certified Gold. It has been cited by several music writers as her best work.
in March–April 2000. The record was co-produced by Head, Rob Ellis and Harvey, and mixed by Victor Van Vugt
at the Fallout Shelter
. The album featured a duet with Radiohead
frontman Thom Yorke
on the track "This Mess We're In", as well as backing vocals and keyboards from Yorke on the songs "One Line" and "Beautiful Feeling".
"This Mess We're In" was featured in the series finale of Queer as Folk, in the final love scene shared between the two main characters. The song was subsequently included on the series' fifth soundtrack.
Harvey told Q
in 2001, "I wanted everything to sound as beautiful as possible. Having experimented with some dreadful sounds on Is This Desire?
and To Bring You My Love
- where I was really looking for dark, unsettling, nauseous-making sounds - Stories From The City... was the reaction. I thought, No, I want absolute beauty. I want this album to sing and fly and be full of reverb and lush layers of melody. I want it to be my beautiful, sumptuous, lovely piece of work." She did, however, concede jokingly that it was only "pop according to PJ Harvey, which is probably as un-pop as you can get according to most people's standards."
but charted for 17 weeks over a period of about 18 months. The album debuted at number 42 on the U.S. Billboard 200
chart. As of 2009, according to Billboard
, Stories has sold 299,000 copies in the US.
The album received general acclaim from most music critic
s. Robert Christgau
was all over it praising it as "the best album of her career" in Rolling Stone
and giving it his highest rating in his Consumer Guide column in The Village Voice
writing of the album's significance: "[i]f Nirvana
and Robert Johnson
are rock's essence for you, so's To Bring You My Love
. But if you believe the Beatles
and George Clinton
had more to say in the end, this could be the first PJ album you adore as well as admire." Others were equally laudatory. NME
hailed it "a magnificent, life-affirming opus".
A minority of critics, however, were almost negative in their criticism rating it as only average. Pitchfork viewed the album as lacking in distinction saying "the sheen gets slicker and her music gets duller". And Slant Magazine
criticized the album's New York focus as "its flaw is in its all-too-obvious intention".
nominations as Best British Female Artist for two years running, as well as two Grammy Award
nominations for Best Rock Album and Best Female Rock Performance for the single "This Is Love". For the album, Harvey was nominated for the 2001 Mercury Prize
for the third time (her previous nominations were for Rid of Me
and To Bring You My Love
). The award ceremony was held on September 11, 2001. Harvey was in Washington, D.C.
on that day and witnessed the events at the Pentagon from her hotel room window. She was announced as the winner and accepted her award by phone, saying "It has been a very surreal day. All I can say is thank you very much, I am absolutely stunned." The win made Harvey the first female solo artist to receive the Mercury Prize in the awards history. The album was ranked number eight on Rolling Stone
s list of The 50 Essential "Women In Rock" Albums. In 2002, Q
magazine named "Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea" the Greatest Album of All-Time by a Female Artist. In 2006, the album was chosen by Time
as one of the 100 best albums of all time. In 2009, Pitchfork named the album the 124th Top Album of the 2000s. In 2009, NME
also placed the album inside their Top 100 Greatest Albums Of The Decade, at number 6
PJ Harvey
Polly Jean Harvey is an English musician, singer-songwriter, composer and occasional artist. Primarily known as a vocalist and guitarist, she is also proficient with a wide range of instruments including piano, organ, bass, saxophone, and most recently, the autoharp.Harvey began her career in...
, released 23 October 2000 on Island Records
Island Records
Island Records is a record label that was founded by Chris Blackwell in Jamaica. It was based in the United Kingdom for many years and is now owned by Universal Music Group...
. Recorded during March to April 2000, the album contains themes of love that are tied into Harvey's affection for New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. It became the second major commercial success of her recording career, following her successful breakthrough To Bring You My Love
To Bring You My Love
To Bring You My Love is the third studio album by British musician and singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. It was released by Island Records in February 1995. Recorded after the break-up of the PJ Harvey trio it stands as her first proper solo album...
(1995). Upon its release, the album received general acclaim from most music critics and earned Harvey several accolades, including the 2001 Mercury Prize. It spent 17 weeks on the UK Albums Chart
UK Albums Chart
The UK Albums Chart is a list of albums ranked by physical and digital sales in the United Kingdom. It is compiled every week by The Official Charts Company and broadcast on a Sunday on BBC Radio 1 , and published in Music Week magazine and on the OCC website .To qualify for the UK albums chart...
, and was certified Gold. It has been cited by several music writers as her best work.
Background
Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea was recorded at the Great Linford Manor in Milton KeynesMilton Keynes
Milton Keynes , sometimes abbreviated MK, is a large town in Buckinghamshire, in the south east of England, about north-west of London. It is the administrative centre of the Borough of Milton Keynes...
in March–April 2000. The record was co-produced by Head, Rob Ellis and Harvey, and mixed by Victor Van Vugt
Victor Van Vugt
Victor Van Vugt is an award-winning music producer, mixer and engineer. An Australian based in New York, he has had a long association with the careers of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Beth Orton. He has also worked with the likes of P.J...
at the Fallout Shelter
Fallout shelter
A fallout shelter is an enclosed space specially designed to protect occupants from radioactive debris or fallout resulting from a nuclear explosion. Many such shelters were constructed as civil defense measures during the Cold War....
. The album featured a duet with Radiohead
Radiohead
Radiohead are an English rock band from Abingdon, Oxfordshire, formed in 1985. The band consists of Thom Yorke , Jonny Greenwood , Ed O'Brien , Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway .Radiohead released their debut single "Creep" in 1992...
frontman Thom Yorke
Thom Yorke
Thomas "Thom" Edward Yorke is an English musician who is the lead vocalist and principal songwriter for Radiohead. He mainly plays guitar and piano, but he has also played drums and bass guitar...
on the track "This Mess We're In", as well as backing vocals and keyboards from Yorke on the songs "One Line" and "Beautiful Feeling".
"This Mess We're In" was featured in the series finale of Queer as Folk, in the final love scene shared between the two main characters. The song was subsequently included on the series' fifth soundtrack.
Harvey told Q
Q (magazine)
Q is a popular music magazine published monthly in the United Kingdom.Founders Mark Ellen and David Hepworth were dismayed by the music press of the time, which they felt was ignoring a generation of older music buyers who were buying CDs — then still a new technology...
in 2001, "I wanted everything to sound as beautiful as possible. Having experimented with some dreadful sounds on Is This Desire?
Is This Desire?
Is This Desire? is a 1998 album by British singer-songwriter PJ Harvey.Recorded on and off in Dorset and London between April 1997 and April 1998, it was co-produced by Flood, Head and Harvey herself, and featured instrumental contributions from Rob Ellis, John Parish, Mick Harvey, Eric Drew...
and To Bring You My Love
To Bring You My Love
To Bring You My Love is the third studio album by British musician and singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. It was released by Island Records in February 1995. Recorded after the break-up of the PJ Harvey trio it stands as her first proper solo album...
- where I was really looking for dark, unsettling, nauseous-making sounds - Stories From The City... was the reaction. I thought, No, I want absolute beauty. I want this album to sing and fly and be full of reverb and lush layers of melody. I want it to be my beautiful, sumptuous, lovely piece of work." She did, however, concede jokingly that it was only "pop according to PJ Harvey, which is probably as un-pop as you can get according to most people's standards."
Reception
Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea sold slightly over one million copies worldwide. It peaked at a modest #23 in the UK Albums ChartUK Albums Chart
The UK Albums Chart is a list of albums ranked by physical and digital sales in the United Kingdom. It is compiled every week by The Official Charts Company and broadcast on a Sunday on BBC Radio 1 , and published in Music Week magazine and on the OCC website .To qualify for the UK albums chart...
but charted for 17 weeks over a period of about 18 months. The album debuted at number 42 on the U.S. Billboard 200
Billboard 200
The Billboard 200 is a ranking of the 200 highest-selling music albums and EPs in the United States, published weekly by Billboard magazine. It is frequently used to convey the popularity of an artist or groups of artists...
chart. As of 2009, according to Billboard
Billboard (magazine)
Billboard is a weekly American magazine devoted to the music industry, and is one of the oldest trade magazines in the world. It maintains several internationally recognized music charts that track the most popular songs and albums in various categories on a weekly basis...
, Stories has sold 299,000 copies in the US.
The album received general acclaim from most music critic
Music criticism
See also Music journalism for reporting on classical and popular music in the media.The Oxford Companion to Music defines music criticism as 'the intellectual activity of formulating judgments on the value and degree of excellence of individual works of music, or whole groups or genres'. In this...
s. Robert Christgau
Robert Christgau
Robert Christgau is an American essayist, music journalist, and self-proclaimed "Dean of American Rock Critics".One of the earliest professional rock critics, Christgau is known for his terse capsule reviews, published since 1969 in his Consumer Guide columns...
was all over it praising it as "the best album of her career" in Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
and giving it his highest rating in his Consumer Guide column in The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
writing of the album's significance: "[i]f Nirvana
Nirvana (band)
Nirvana was an American rock band that was formed by singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic in Aberdeen, Washington in 1987...
and Robert Johnson
Robert Johnson
Robert Leroy Johnson was an American blues singer and musician. His landmark recordings from 1936–37 display a combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that have influenced later generations of musicians. Johnson's shadowy, poorly documented life and death at age 27 have given...
are rock's essence for you, so's To Bring You My Love
To Bring You My Love
To Bring You My Love is the third studio album by British musician and singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. It was released by Island Records in February 1995. Recorded after the break-up of the PJ Harvey trio it stands as her first proper solo album...
. But if you believe the Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
and George Clinton
George Clinton (musician)
George Clinton is an American singer, songwriter, bandleader, and music producer and the principal architect of P-Funk. He was the mastermind of the bands Parliament and Funkadelic during the 1970s and early 1980s, and launched a solo career in 1981. He has been cited as one of the foremost...
had more to say in the end, this could be the first PJ album you adore as well as admire." Others were equally laudatory. NME
NME
The New Musical Express is a popular music publication in the United Kingdom, published weekly since March 1952. It started as a music newspaper, and gradually moved toward a magazine format during the 1980s, changing from newsprint in 1998. It was the first British paper to include a singles...
hailed it "a magnificent, life-affirming opus".
A minority of critics, however, were almost negative in their criticism rating it as only average. Pitchfork viewed the album as lacking in distinction saying "the sheen gets slicker and her music gets duller". And Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine is an online publication that features reviews of movies, music, TV, DVDs, theater, and video games, as well as interviews with actors, directors, and musicians. The site covers various film festivals like the New York Film Festival.- History :...
criticized the album's New York focus as "its flaw is in its all-too-obvious intention".
Accolades
The album earned Harvey BRIT AwardBrit Awards
The Brit Awards are the British Phonographic Industry's annual pop music awards. The name was originally a shortened form of "British", "Britain" or "Britannia", but subsequently became a backronym for British Record Industry Trust...
nominations as Best British Female Artist for two years running, as well as two Grammy Award
Grammy Award
A Grammy Award — or Grammy — is an accolade by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry...
nominations for Best Rock Album and Best Female Rock Performance for the single "This Is Love". For the album, Harvey was nominated for the 2001 Mercury Prize
Mercury Prize
The Mercury Prize, formerly called the Mercury Music Prize and currently known as the Barclaycard Mercury Prize for sponsorship reasons, is an annual music prize awarded for the best album from the United Kingdom and Ireland. It was established by the British Phonographic Industry and British...
for the third time (her previous nominations were for Rid of Me
Rid of Me
Rid of Me is the second studio album by British musician PJ Harvey. It was released by Island Records in May 1993, approximately one year after the release of her critically acclaimed debut album Dry...
and To Bring You My Love
To Bring You My Love
To Bring You My Love is the third studio album by British musician and singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. It was released by Island Records in February 1995. Recorded after the break-up of the PJ Harvey trio it stands as her first proper solo album...
). The award ceremony was held on September 11, 2001. Harvey was in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
on that day and witnessed the events at the Pentagon from her hotel room window. She was announced as the winner and accepted her award by phone, saying "It has been a very surreal day. All I can say is thank you very much, I am absolutely stunned." The win made Harvey the first female solo artist to receive the Mercury Prize in the awards history. The album was ranked number eight on Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
s list of The 50 Essential "Women In Rock" Albums. In 2002, Q
Q (magazine)
Q is a popular music magazine published monthly in the United Kingdom.Founders Mark Ellen and David Hepworth were dismayed by the music press of the time, which they felt was ignoring a generation of older music buyers who were buying CDs — then still a new technology...
magazine named "Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea" the Greatest Album of All-Time by a Female Artist. In 2006, the album was chosen by Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
as one of the 100 best albums of all time. In 2009, Pitchfork named the album the 124th Top Album of the 2000s. In 2009, NME
NME
The New Musical Express is a popular music publication in the United Kingdom, published weekly since March 1952. It started as a music newspaper, and gradually moved toward a magazine format during the 1980s, changing from newsprint in 1998. It was the first British paper to include a singles...
also placed the album inside their Top 100 Greatest Albums Of The Decade, at number 6
Track listing
All lyrics and music by PJ Harvey.- "Big Exit" - 3:51
- "Good Fortune" - 3:20
- "A Place Called Home" - 3:43
- "One Line" - 3:14
- "Beautiful Feeling" - 4:00
- "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore" - 4:01
- "This Mess We're In" (featuring Thom YorkeThom YorkeThomas "Thom" Edward Yorke is an English musician who is the lead vocalist and principal songwriter for Radiohead. He mainly plays guitar and piano, but he has also played drums and bass guitar...
) - 3:57 - "You Said Something" - 3:19
- "Kamikaze" - 2:24
- "This Is Love" - 3:48
- "Horses in My Dreams" - 5:38
- "We Float" - 6:07
- "This Wicked Tongue" - 3:42 (UK & Japan bonus track)
Singles and promo videos
- "Good Fortune"
- "A Place Called Home"
- "This Is Love"/"You Said Something" (two versions)
- "You Said Something"
Personnel
- PJ HarveyPJ HarveyPolly Jean Harvey is an English musician, singer-songwriter, composer and occasional artist. Primarily known as a vocalist and guitarist, she is also proficient with a wide range of instruments including piano, organ, bass, saxophone, and most recently, the autoharp.Harvey began her career in...
: vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards, djembe, maracas, producer, engineer - Rob Ellis: drums, piano, synthesizer, keyboards, harpsichord, tambourine, electric piano, background vocals, producer
- Mick HarveyMick HarveyMichael John Harvey , is an Australian rock musician, composer, arranger and record producer. He is best known for his long-time collaboration with the singer and songwriter Nick Cave...
: organ, bass, drums, percussion, harmonium, keyboards, background vocals, producer - Thom YorkeThom YorkeThomas "Thom" Edward Yorke is an English musician who is the lead vocalist and principal songwriter for Radiohead. He mainly plays guitar and piano, but he has also played drums and bass guitar...
: vocals, keyboards - Head: engineer, mixing
- Victor Van VugtVictor Van VugtVictor Van Vugt is an award-winning music producer, mixer and engineer. An Australian based in New York, he has had a long association with the careers of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Beth Orton. He has also worked with the likes of P.J...
: mixing - Howie Weinberg: mastering
- Rob Crane: design
- Maria Mochnacz: design, photography
External links
- Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea at DiscogsDiscogsDiscogs, short for discographies, is a website and database of information about audio recordings, including commercial releases, promotional releases, and bootleg or off-label releases. The Discogs servers, currently hosted under the domain name discogs.com, are owned by Zink Media, Inc., and are...