“Down by the Water” by PJ Harvey

"Down by the Water" led off To Bring You My Love, PJ Harvey's third studio album, in 1995, and it's a murder ballad dressed in velvet. Harvey wrote it alone and produced it with Flood and John Parish, and the sound is a sharp swerve away from the raw indie rock and punk blues of her early records: a synthesized organ, a string section and a slow, swampy crawl instead of a guitar thrash.

The song tells of a woman drowning her own daughter, and it borrows from "Salty Dog Blues", the old American folk tune, to do it. Harvey plays the organ and sings as if she's leaning right into your ear, Parish handles drums and percussion, Joe Gore's guitar lurks at the edges, and Sian Bell, Jocelyn Pook, Jules Singleton and Sonia Slany fill out the strings in an arrangement by Pete Thomas. Flood mixed it, and it's all menace and hush.

Critics loved it, and it charted in Canada, Ireland, Britain and the US. In America it was her mainstream breakthrough: MTV and college radio played it constantly, and it reached number 2 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart, the highest any single of hers has climbed in America.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.