Twelve-Track Demosby PJ Harveywith additions by Sean Barrett |
music sean at nothings dot org |
For many years I'd been interested in the idea of taking some sort of really spare "professional" album, e.g. Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, and trying to add more tracks to it to turn it into a "full band" backing, just to see what the end result would sound like. Would the combined music sound more like "professionally recorded music" than my own music does once you swapped in a serious vocalist? Or would some magic production sheen still be missing? (It turns out: the latter, mostly.)
The PJ Harvey album 4-Track Demos contains the original demos she recorded for the songs which appeared on the album Rid of Me. I'm a big fan of her first album, Dry, but hadn't heard good things about Rid of Me, and didn't care as much for her later albums where she gave up the guitar and just became a dramatic diva. Not having heard Rid of Me, this seemed the perfect chance; I would give 4-Track Demos additional backing tracks, trying for a similar feel to Dry.
The recordings below, made in 2000, represent the product of this Frankenstein experiment. In the interest of truth and revelation, these recordings include every track of things I stuck in to see how it would come out, including some elements that I think fit poorly or are just dumb (particularly the backing vocals on a couple of songs).
After recording these, I went and listened to Rid of Me, and then I went and made one change: I rerecorded the chorus drums for Rub Til It Bleeds to use the same drum pattern and a similar sound as the version on Rid of Me, because the one I'd used seemed pretty lame (and the one on Rid of Me seemed pretty effective). The verse drums and the chorus fills are still my own devising, though.
Maybe just because I heard it first, I much prefer the 4-Track Demos versions of the songs that are also on Rid of Me; and as a result, it might not be surprising that I prefer my versions over the Rid of Me versions as well. I wouldn't expect other people to react the same way, though--in fact I wouldn't be surprised at the equivalent reaction in the other direction. Instead, you might find more interesting the songs which were not on Rid of Me at all: songs 1, 2, 3, and 5. (I could never find anything good to do with 5, and so it's got a lot of junk piled up.)
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