Rid of Me - Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics

Musically, Rid of Me is more raw than what Harvey had written for Dry. On her first album, she experimented with two-guitar harmonies ("Happy and Bleeding") and acoustic guitar ("Plants and Rags"). The songs on Rid of Me, however, are played mostly with one electric guitar, and heavy distortion is used on many of the tracks. She also used vocal distortion on "Hook" and "Yuri-G". Most of the songs are played using just guitar, drums, and bass. Only four songs on the album use additional instruments (strings are used on "Man-Size Sextet", "Legs", and "Yuri-G", and organ is used on "Hook"). She was still drawing heavy influences from American blues music, especially Howlin' Wolf, who she was particularly interested in at the time. Stylistically the record was a natural progression from the heavily guitar-driven punk-blues of her debut, though it also embraced both the noisy elementary dynamics of the Pixies (she claimed their Albini-produced 1988 debut Surfer Rosa as one of her favourite albums), and 1960s-1970s blues-based rock acts such as Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Structurally, Harvey continued to complicate her songwriting by utilizing "strangely skewed time signatures and twisty song structures" resulting in songs that "tilt toward performance art".

The vocals were also handled differently on Rid of Me. Harvey began to increasingly experiment with what her voice could do, and on several songs she pushed her voice to a higher register. This higher voice can be heard on the bridge of "50 ft. Queenie" as well as in "Man-Size" and "Me-Jane." Ellis also altered the delivery of his background vocals. His vocals on Dry were sung in his normal voice (most notably on the song "Joe"), but for Rid of Me he sang in a high-pitched, almost hysterical-sounding falsetto.

The albums lyrics have been widely interpreted as being feminist in nature. Harvey, however, repeatedly denied a feminist agenda in her songwriting, stating "I don’t even think of myself as being female half the time. When I’m writing songs I never write with gender in mind. I write about people’s relationships to each other. I’m fascinated with things that might be considered repulsive or embarrassing. I like feeling unsettled, unsure." Some of the lyrics were inspired by her personal experiences. The title track, for instance, was admittedly influenced by one of Harvey’s relationships coming to an end. When told by an interviewer that "Rid of Me" sounded psychotic, she replied that she wrote the song "at my illest" and added "I was almost psychotic" at the time. But, she made it clear that not all of the lyrics were to be read autobiographically, saying "I would have to be 40 and very worn out to have lived through everything I write about".

The album also includes a cover of the Bob Dylan song "Highway 61 Revisited". Harvey's mother and father, both Dylan fans, suggested she record the track.