PJ Harvey / Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea / 2000
This Is Love
urgent, hungry, self-interrogating
A blunt, riff-driven declaration of desire that keeps colliding with the speaker's own disbelief at how simple and overwhelming lust can feel against a backdrop of general suffering. PJ Harvey strips love down to appetite and repetition, letting the title phrase become both a mantra and an admission that this feeling may not be love as commonly understood, just something urgent and consuming.
desire versus complexity secrecy and shame repetition as devotion the body against the world's suffering obsession
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses a lover directly, oscillating between plain-spoken lust and philosophical bewilderment; the voice is confident in its wanting but uncertain about what to call it, which makes it feel candid rather than fully reliable.
What happens
The song doesn't develop a plot so much as circle a single fixation: the speaker keeps returning to physical want, interrupting herself with disbelief that existence is otherwise so heavy, then retreating into declaring the feeling as love. Midway, the relationship is revealed to be hidden, a secret rather than a public romance, and by the end the speaker asks the lover to simply show up and hold the emotional walls together.
How it's built
Built on a simple verse/chorus loop with almost no bridge or resolution -- verses introduce a new physical or philosophical fragment, and the chorus hammers the title phrase until it becomes incantatory rather than descriptive. The lack of a clear release or key change mirrors the lyric's refusal to resolve whether this feeling is love or something more compulsive.
Section by section
Opening verse
“life's so complex”
The speaker frames desire as a refuge from an overwhelming, undefined difficulty in living, setting up the song's central tension between simple want and complicated existence.
First chorus
The title phrase arrives almost too quickly, functioning less as a conclusion than as a placeholder the speaker uses to name a feeling she hasn't fully examined.
Second verse
Images of playful chasing and touching introduce a lighter, almost childlike physicality, contrasting with the darker language of dread that surrounds it.
Suffering verse
“axis turns on suffering”
The most explicitly philosophical line in the song sets personal pleasure against a cosmic or global claim about pain, with the taste of the lover offered as a kind of counterweight or denial.
Secret verse
“my dirty little secret”
The relationship is revealed as hidden and shameful even as it's desired, complicating the earlier romantic claims with an undertone of guilt or social transgression.
Closing verse
The request for the lover's presence to hold back collapsing walls shifts the tone from erotic hunger to something closer to dependency, suggesting the love described may be as much about self-preservation as passion.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated disbelief clauses opening several verses create a rhetorical stutter, as if the speaker keeps trying and failing to reconcile bodily want with the world's difficulty.
- synecdoche
- Physical details like undressing, tasting, and touching stand in for the whole of the relationship, keeping the song's emotional content almost entirely somatic.
- refrain as incantation
- The title phrase's constant reappearance flattens it from a statement into a chant, suggesting the speaker is convincing herself as much as declaring anything to the listener.
- juxtaposition
- Global or existential language about suffering and complexity sits next to small domestic images, deliberately shrinking the philosophical against the physical.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as an interrogation of desire's simplicity in the face of larger despair -- the speaker uses physical want as an anchor against something like depression or existential dread, and the insistent repetition of the title phrase is less a confident declaration than a kind of self-persuasion. An alternative reading takes the title at face value: a joyful, unapologetic anthem to erotic love that uses philosophical asides only to heighten the contrast, with the secrecy read as playful rather than fraught. The text supports both, though the language of headaches, dread, and walls tumbling in tilts toward the darker reading.
Context
Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea marked a shift toward more direct, rock-oriented songwriting for Harvey, often exploring urban romance and desire with less abstraction than her earlier records. I don't have confirmed biographical details tying this specific song to events in Harvey's life, so any reading connecting it directly to a real relationship would be speculative.
Listen for
- how the chorus's repetition intensifies rather than resolves the melodic tension
- the shift in tone between playful verses and the heavier suffering verse
- the way the vocal delivery seems to insist on the title phrase as if convincing herself
- the contrast between domestic, physical imagery and abstract claims about the nature of the world
About PJ Harvey
Polly Jean Harvey is an English singer and songwriter. Primarily known as a vocalist and guitarist, she is also proficient with a wide range of instruments.
b. 1969 / England
Full biography and catalogue