4-Track Demos

by

PJ Harvey

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4-Track Demos is a 1993 (see 1993 in music) album by British singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. It consists of 8 demos of songs from her previous album, Rid of Me, along with 6 demos of some unreleased tracks which never made it to being recorded with the three-piece PJ Harvey line-up. According to interviews with Harvey, all fourteen of these songs were written and demoed at her home between mid 1991 and autumn 1992.

Some PJ Harvey fans preferred this version to the finished album, which tended to bury some of her vocal range and sonic experimentations under its noisy, in-your-face dynamics. For a side project, 4-Track Demos received remarkably high praise: Entertainment Weekly called it "a chillingly intimate peek into the fierce musical ethic of an independent and compelling voice", Melody Maker hailed it as "viciously aggressive music with no numbing narcotic qualities", while Rolling Stone said in its four-star review that "its depth, range and conceptual completeness make you wonder why Harvey even bothered with such conventions as a band or a producer in the first place".

Harvey explained the reason for releasing this record to Filter magazine in a 2004 interview: "4-Track Demos... was partly encouraged by Steve Albini [producer of Rid of Me]. He loved the demos for that album so much he thought they should be out there and I tended to agree with him. It seemed like showing another side of what I do and introducing new songs that I hadn't recorded on a record. It was a lovely thing to do and it felt like the right time because my three-piece band had fallen apart and I was kind of in limbo before deciding where I was gonna be going again. So, it was just like a small interjection piece of me before I knew where I was going to be next."

As of 2005, (according to AskBillboard) "4-Track Demos" has sold 120,000 copies in the US.

In 1994, Island Records gave away the original Yamaha MT 2X 4-track recorder PJ used to record 4-Track Demos as a promotion in issue 67 of Alternative Press magazine. The winner was announced the weekend of March 19, 1994 on JBTV as seen on FOX NET and CHANNEL AMERICA. The winner, Thomas Wells of Vinton, Virginia, was picked out of over 500 entries. In conjunction with being announced on TV, Thomas' name and photo were published in the April 1994 extra edition (number 71) issue of AP Wiretapping Newsletter.