Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

''Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea'' is the fifth studio album by English
alternative rock Alternative rock, or alt-rock, is a category of rock music that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1970s and became widely popular in the 1990s. "Alternative" refers to the genre's distinction from Popular culture, mainstre ...
musician
PJ Harvey Polly Jean Harvey (born 9 October 1969) is an English singer, songwriter, and musician. Primarily known as a vocalist and guitarist, she is also proficient with a wide range of instruments. Harvey began her career in 1988 when she joined loca ...
, released on 24 October 2000 by
Island Records Island Records is a multinational record label owned by Universal Music Group. It was founded in 1959 by Chris Blackwell, Graeme Goodall, and Leslie Kong in Jamaica, and was eventually sold to PolyGram in 1989. Island and A&M Records, anoth ...
. Recorded during March to April 2000, it contains themes of love that are tied into Harvey's affection for
New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
. The album 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 acclaim from most music critics and earned Harvey several accolades, including the 2001 Mercury Prize. It spent 17 weeks on the
UK Albums Chart The Official Albums Chart is a list of albums ranked by physical and digital sales and (from March 2015) audio streaming in the United Kingdom. It was published for the first time on 22 July 1956 and is compiled every week by the Official Charts C ...
, and was certified Platinum in the UK and Australia. It is generally regarded as one of her best works.


Background and music

In 1998, while shooting a film as an actress for
Hal Hartley Hal Hartley (born November 3, 1959) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and composer who became a key figure in the American independent film movement of the 1980s and '90s. He is best known for his films '' The Unbelievable T ...
in New York, she felt inspired by the city and wrote several songs. Some of them ended up on the record. In 1999, she chose to live there for nine months. However, she insisted in interviews it was not "my New York album". Songs were also written while she was in
London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
or at home in
Dorset Dorset ( ; archaically: Dorsetshire , ) is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the unitary authority areas of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole and Dorset (unitary authority), Dors ...
. ''Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea'' was then recorded at the
Great Linford Manor Linford Manor, also known as Great Linford Manor, is a seventeenth-century mansion or manor house converted into a recording studio complex in Great Linford, a district in Milton Keynes, England. It is now owned by Pete Winkelman who is chairman ...
in
Milton Keynes Milton Keynes ( ) is a city and the largest settlement in Buckinghamshire, England, about north-west of London. At the 2021 Census, the population of its urban area was over . The River Great Ouse forms its northern boundary; a tributary ...
in March–April 2000. The record was co-produced by
Mick Harvey Michael John Harvey (born 29 August 1958) is an Australian musician, singer-songwriter, composer, arranger and record producer. A multi-instrumentalist, he is best known for his long-term collaborations with Nick Cave, with whom he formed The ...
, Rob Ellis and Harvey, and mixed by
Victor Van Vugt Victor Van Vugt is a 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. Harvey, Depeche Mo ...
at the
Fallout Shelter A fallout shelter is an enclosed space specially designated 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. During ...
. The album featured a duet with
Radiohead Radiohead are an English rock band formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1985. The band consists of Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar, piano, keyboards); brothers Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar, keyboards, other instruments) and Colin Greenwood (bass) ...
frontman
Thom Yorke Thomas Edward Yorke (born 7 October 1968) is an English musician and the main vocalist and songwriter of the rock band Radiohead. A multi-instrumentalist, he mainly plays guitar and keyboards and is noted for his falsetto. He has been describe ...
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". She had met Yorke in 1992 and they had stayed in contact. She said: "I'd long been interested in the idea of somebody else singing a whole song on a record of mine, to have a very different dimension brought in by somebody else's voice. It adds so much dynamic within the record to have this other character coming in". She wanted the record to be more direct: "It's very different musically to the first couple of albums. It's very melodic, and it's much rounder and fuller. The earlier albums were very
black and white Black-and-white (B&W or B/W) images combine black and white in a continuous spectrum, producing a range of shades of grey. Media The history of various visual media began with black and white, and as technology improved, altered to color. ...
in some sense, very extreme. Melodically, this is much more sophisticated than those records. It kind of feels like a combination of every album I've made so far rolled into one." The songs were also a musical departure from her previous dark material. Harvey told '' Q'' 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 the fourth studio album by English musician PJ Harvey, released on 28 September 1998 on Island Records. It was re-released on vinyl LP in late January 2021. A separate demo compilation of tracks from the album titled ''I ...
'' 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." ''
Pitchfork A pitchfork (also a hay fork) is an agricultural tool with a long handle and two to five tines used to lift and pitch or throw loose material, such as hay, straw, manure, or leaves. The term is also applied colloquially, but inaccurately, to th ...
'' compared her voice on the lead single " Good Fortune" to that of Chrissie Hynde, while the ''
Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
'' observed: "Her singing often recalls
Patti Smith Patricia Lee Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter and author who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album '' Horses''. Called the "punk poe ...
and
Siouxsie Sioux Susan Janet Ballion (born 27 May 1957), known professionally as Siouxsie Sioux, is an English singer, songwriter, musician and record producer. She was the lead singer of the rock band Siouxsie and the Banshees (1976–1996). They released 11 ...
, artists who, like Harvey, project a sexuality derived from--yet never bound by--
rock Rock most often refers to: * Rock (geology), a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals or mineraloids * Rock music, a genre of popular music Rock or Rocks may also refer to: Places United Kingdom * Rock, Caerphilly, a location in Wales ...
's male sensibilities."


Release and commercial performance

The album was released on 24 October 2000, and promoted with a video for the lead single "Good Fortune", shot at night in streets of New York. It reached number 23 on the
UK Albums Chart The Official Albums Chart is a list of albums ranked by physical and digital sales and (from March 2015) audio streaming in the United Kingdom. It was published for the first time on 22 July 1956 and is compiled every week by the Official Charts C ...
. The album was certified Platinum in the UK, with sales over 300,000 copies. The album debuted at number 42 on the US ''Billboard'' 200 chart. As of 2003, it has sold 357,000 copies in United States according to
Nielsen SoundScan Luminate (formerly Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen Music Products, and MRC Data) is a provider of music sales data. Established by Mike Fine and Mike Shalett in 1991, data is collected weekly and made available every Sunday (for albums sales) and eve ...
. It has also been certified Gold in France, and has sold 1 million copies worldwide. The album was
reissued In the music industry, a reissue (also re-release, repackage or re-edition) is the release of an album or single which has been released at least once before, sometimes with alterations or additions. Reasons for reissue New audio formats Rec ...
on vinyl in February 2021 as part of a comprehensive reissue campaign of Harvey's back catalogue. A collection of unreleased
demos Demos may refer to: Computing * DEMOS, a Soviet Unix-like operating system * DEMOS (ISP), the first internet service provider in the USSR * Demos Commander, an Orthodox File Manager for Unix-like systems * plural for Demo (computer programming) ...
, titled ''Stories From The City, Stories From the Sea – Demos'', was also released.


Critical reception

''Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea'' received critical acclaim from music critics. At
Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...
, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an
average In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7, ...
score of 88, based on 25 reviews. ''
NME ''New Musical Express'' (''NME'') is a British music, film, gaming, and culture website and brand. Founded as a newspaper in 1952, with the publication being referred to as a 'rock inkie', the NME would become a magazine that ended up as a f ...
'' hailed it as "a magnificent, life-affirming opus" by Harvey.
Robert Christgau Robert Thomas Christgau ( ; born April 18, 1942) is an American music journalist and essayist. Among the most well-known and influential music critics, he began his career in the late 1960s as one of the earliest professional rock critics and ...
called it "the best album of her career" in his review for ''
Rolling Stone ''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first kno ...
''. Posted 26 October 2000. Also archived at Other critics rated it as only average. Spencer Owen of ''
Pitchfork A pitchfork (also a hay fork) is an agricultural tool with a long handle and two to five tines used to lift and pitch or throw loose material, such as hay, straw, manure, or leaves. The term is also applied colloquially, but inaccurately, to th ...
'' viewed the album as lacking in distinction, saying "the sheen gets slicker and her music gets duller". The publication later, however, ranked it at number 124 in their "The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s" list in 2009. In 2021, they included it in their "Rescored" list, saying that they wished could change their original score of 5.4 to an 8.4.


Accolades

The album earned Harvey
Brit Award The BRIT Awards (often simply called the BRITs) are the British Phonographic Industry's annual popular music awards. The name was originally a shortened form of "British", "Britain", or "Britannia" (in the early days the awards were sponsored ...
nominations as Best British Female Artist for two years running, as well as two
Grammy Award The Grammy Awards (stylized as GRAMMY), or simply known as the Grammys, are awards presented by the Recording Academy of the United States to recognize "outstanding" achievements in the music industry. They are regarded by many as the most pres ...
nominations for
Best Rock Album The Grammy Award for Best Rock Album is an award presented at the Grammy Awards, a ceremony that was established in 1958 and originally called the Gramophone Awards, to recording artists for quality albums in the rock music genre. Honors in sev ...
and Best Female Rock Performance for the single " This Is Love". For the album, Harvey was nominated for the 2001
Mercury Prize The Mercury Prize, formerly called the Mercury Music Prize, is an annual music prize awarded for the best album released in the United Kingdom by a British or Irish act. It was created by Jon Webster and Robert Chandler in association with the B ...
for the third time (her previous nominations were for ''
Rid of Me ''Rid of Me'' is the second studio album by English singer-songwriter and 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''. It marked a ...
'' and ''To Bring You My Love''). The award ceremony was held on 11 September 2001. Harvey was in
Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
on that day and witnessed the terrorist attacks on
the Pentagon The Pentagon is the headquarters building of the United States Department of Defense. It was constructed on an accelerated schedule during World War II. As a symbol of the U.S. military, the phrase ''The Pentagon'' is often used as a metony ...
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 award's history. The album was ranked number eight on ''Rolling Stone''s list of the 50 Essential "
Women in Rock Women in rock describes the role of women singers, instrumentalists, record producers and other music professionals in rock music and popular music and the many subgenres and hybrid genres that have emerged from these genres. Women have a high p ...
" 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 Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...
'' 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 ''New Musical Express'' (''NME'') is a British music, film, gaming, and culture website and brand. Founded as a newspaper in 1952, with the publication being referred to as a 'rock inkie', the NME would become a magazine that ended up as a f ...
'' also placed the album inside their Top 100 Greatest Albums of the Decade, at number six. The album was also included in the book ''
1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die ''1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die'' is a musical reference book first published in 2005 by Universe Publishing. Part of the ''1001 Before You Die'' series, it compiles writings and information on albums chosen by a panel of music critics ...
''. ''Rolling Stone'' named it the thirty-fifth best album of the decade. In 2019, the album was ranked 19th on ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
''s 100 Best Albums of the 21st Century list. In the updated version of ''Rolling Stone''s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, it was ranked at number 431, then in the 2020 update, it was moved up to number 313.


Track listing


Singles and promo videos

* " Good Fortune" * "A Place Called Home" * " This Is Love"/"You Said Something" * "You Said Something"


Personnel

All personnel credits adapted from the album's liner notes. Musicians *
PJ Harvey Polly Jean Harvey (born 9 October 1969) is an English singer, songwriter, and musician. Primarily known as a vocalist and guitarist, she is also proficient with a wide range of instruments. Harvey began her career in 1988 when she joined loca ...
– vocals, guitar , bass , keyboards , piano ,
djembe A djembe or jembe ( ; from Maninka language, Malinke ''jembe'' , N'Ko script, N'Ko: ) is a rope-tuned skin-covered goblet drum played with bare hands, originally from West Africa. According to the Bambara people in Mali, the name of the djembe ...
, maracas ,
e-bow The EBow, short for electronic bow or energy bow, is an electronic device used for playing string instruments, most often the electric guitar. It is manufactured by Heet Sound Products, of Los Angeles, California. It was invented by Greg Heet i ...
, producer,
engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the l ...
* Rob Ellis – drums , piano , tambourine , synthesizer , keyboards , bells ,
harpsichord A harpsichord ( it, clavicembalo; french: clavecin; german: Cembalo; es, clavecín; pt, cravo; nl, klavecimbel; pl, klawesyn) is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. This activates a row of levers that turn a trigger mechanism ...
, electric piano , vibraphone , background vocals , producer *
Mick Harvey Michael John Harvey (born 29 August 1958) is an Australian musician, singer-songwriter, composer, arranger and record producer. A multi-instrumentalist, he is best known for his long-term collaborations with Nick Cave, with whom he formed The ...
organ , bass , drums , percussion , harmonium , keyboards , accordion , background vocals , producer Guest musicians *
Thom Yorke Thomas Edward Yorke (born 7 October 1968) is an English musician and the main vocalist and songwriter of the rock band Radiohead. A multi-instrumentalist, he mainly plays guitar and keyboards and is noted for his falsetto. He has been describe ...
– vocals , keyboards Production *
Victor Van Vugt Victor Van Vugt is a 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. Harvey, Depeche Mo ...
– engineer, mixing *Head – engineer, mixing *
Howie Weinberg Howie Weinberg is an American audio mastering engineer with over 2,257 mastering credits, three TEC Awards, 21 Grammy Awards, two Juno Awards, and one Mercury Prize. Career Weinberg mastered Herbie Hancock's 1983 album ''Future Shock''. Other m ...
mastering Design * Rob Crane – design *
Maria Mochnacz Maria Mochnacz is a British photographer and music video director, best known for her collaborations with PJ Harvey. Life Mochnacz holds a degree in fine arts. She also attended a photography course in Weston-super-Mare. Notably, she does n ...
– design, photography


Charts


Weekly charts


Year-end charts


Singles


Certifications


References


External links

*
Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
' at
Discogs Discogs (short for discographies) is a database of information about audio recordings, including commercial releases, promotional releases, and bootleg or off-label releases. While the site was originally created with a goal of becoming the la ...
{{Authority control 2000 albums PJ Harvey albums Mercury Prize-winning albums Island Records albums