Track Listing

1. Black Hearted Love - PJ Harvey, John Parish, Carla Azar, Eric Drew Feldman, Giovanni Ferrario, Flood, Catherine Marks, Andrew Savours, Ali Chant, John Dent
2. Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen
3. Leaving California
4. The Chair
5. April - PJ Harvey, John Parish, Flood, Catherine Marks, Andrew Savours, Carla Azar, Eric Drew Feldman, Giovanni Ferrario, Ali Chant, John Dent
6. A Woman A Man Walked By / The Crow Knows Where All The Little Children Go
7. The Soldier
8. Pig Will Not
9. Passionless, Pointless
10. Cracks In The Canvas

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2285 in Music
• Released on: 2009-03-30
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 38 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Polly Jean Harvey and John Parish have been collaborating for two decades now, making A Woman A Man Walked By the latest in a long series of intriguing records. Billed as a follow-up to 1996’s similarly credited Dance Hall at Louse Point, this excellent set fits naturally alongside their previous works. This time though Parish wrote all, and played most of the music, while Harvey took vocals and lyrics. And though Parish’s own solo offerings have tended towards contemporary classicism, this set displays veers from blues-rock to the bleakest of folk music. The opening track "Black Hearted Love", built around an irresistible loping guitar riff, could easily fit on one of Josh Homme’s Desert Sessions while "Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen" evokes an unexpectedly sinister English pastoral scene. The delightfully gloomy "April" marries a leaden drumbeat to a stately organ line, "Pig Will Not" clatters in the best Beefheartian tradition, while the title track, a Tourettic bluesy rant, slips into a chaotic instrumental obtusely titled "The Crow Knows Where All The Little Children Go". The sound of a Gold Rush-era piano player looms throughout, especially effective on the broken folk ballad "Leaving California". Deliberately unshowy and continually unpredictable, A Woman A Man Walked By is another fine Harvey and Parish album. --Steve Jelbert

CD Description
A Woman A Man Walked By is a new collaboration from PJ Harvey and John Parish, the follow up to Harvey and Parish’s previous collaboration Dance Hall at Louse Point (1996). An accomplished producer and composer, John Parish has recorded numerous soundtracks and has worked with artists including Eels and Giant Sand, and co-produced To Bring You My Love (1995) and also PJ Harvey’s most recent release White Chalk (2007). Features the single "Black Hearted Love".

Customer Reviews

Fantastic Career Striding Album
A Woman A Man Walked By is fantastic. You have the guitar stompers "Blacked Hearted Love", the frenzied "16,15,14" and "The Chair", the piano laden ethereal tracks "The Soldier" and "Leaving California" and the achingly beautiful "April" and "Passionless Pointless". Each song takes from a section of PJ's career while maintaining a new identity (grungy banjo!). For those waiting for screaming madness I highly recommend "Pig Will Not" and the title track for maximum impact but there's no poor track on the album. Well done PJ and John.

ETHEREAL WITH FIRE.
'Dance hall at Louse point' is perhaps one of my favourite albums of Polly's! It's a dark-horse album which the fans may have overlooked, so in the light of this, i was really excited to learn of a new album with John Parish called 'A Woman a Man Walked By'!
Polly has racked up so many albums with so many feelings and emotions that i was interested to see which route I would be taken this time!
With John Parish providing the music Polly has written some of her best and most expressive lyrics to date, combine this with her many personas which she adopts on practically every track and you have an amazing album!
Polly's albums have always been musical alchemy for me, give each song time and it becomes precious to you! This album needs a few listens, with the listener in different moods, to really come alive!
All of Polly's work has a door which you have to really push against for it to open, but once inside the room is beautiful, vicious, angry, delicate and ethereal.
This album is yet another great work from Polly & John and will sit well with "most" fans who want some grit back after the dream world of 'White Chalk'.
Recommended, in fact essential.

You gotta love her, haven't you? Polly delivers the goods again.
Polly inexplicably oozes cool. Everything about her is enigmatic; her French seductress cover-art, her effortless New York coolness, her erudite English charm, her ever-shifting chameleonic nature. She is a phantom, a ghost, a mystery; a global citizen, an international star, a guiding lone luminary.
But, hang on a minute: who the hell is John Parish? He doesn't sound all that rock'n'roll, does he? How has he shared the spotlight with everyone's fantasy bandmate? Sure, we accepted Thom Yorke getting to duet with her, and even understood how Josh Homme could get in on the action as a bit of rough appealing to her darker, more punk side, but John Parish? Who is he?

Well, aside from his own band, and production and collaboration with Goldfrapp, Eels, Tracy Chapman, Sparklehorse and Portishead's Adrian Utley, those with longer memories may remember PJ and his' 1996 collaboration, Dance Hall At Louse Point. Those who read liner notes and take a great interest in the world of Ms Harvey will find his dabs all over the mixing desks, guitars, drumsticks and keys of PJ's To Bring You My Love, Is This Desire?, and White Chalk.

You see John has been behind the scenes at Camp Harvey for a long time, producing, providing accompaniment, writing, or simply lending a critical ear. It's for exactly this reason that PJ Harvey & John Parish's second full collaboration isn't the sudden departure some feared - though it still bears the ironically familiar skin-shedding transformation from each record to the next - it sounds just like a PJ Harvey record: unadulterated, unalloyed, unchanged.

It is, however, one of the most raw, bilious explorations of PJ's riot grrl side, her spitting, "That woman man / I want his f*%kin' a*s!" with the same venomous, guttural drawl of Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, on title track `A Woman A Man Walks By'. Indeed, there is a little of the acoustic based, quiet reflection of last year's White Chalk here, but this time it's all punk-abandon, and anarchic black-humour, recalling PJ's very earliest days.
This is some of Polly's most challenging and exploratory work, shifting as it does in pace, tone and style throughout the album: in `Pig Will Not', they seemingly turn the omnipresent rock chaos down to the mere background murmur of a record-player on mute and play an old upright school piano over the song's outro, cutting it dead long before its eventual end - like a sneering, post-rock tribute to Layla. This is a recurrent theme: the restless ADHD of genius unable to focus on one thing, bored too quickly. Far from marring this record though, it makes it one of PJ's most beguiling in years: a collection of dark, witty, and unfettered creativity, anchored by `Black Hearted Love', the record's most straightforward, classic rock track, which acts as a frame-of-reference and a `52-bunker' safe-place for them both as they run-riot in the Hall Of Fame's gardens, not caring to play nice and step inside. John Parish's influence over these recordings is a far cry from a diluted side-project, more a snapshot of PJ playful, and guided by a friend who brings out the very best of her.

J Capeling