To Bring You My Love - Reception

Reception

As her second full-length release on a major label, To Bring You My Love received a heavy promotional push from Island Records. Extensive MTV rotation and college radio airplay for the first single "Down by the Water" — with its eccentric, eye-catching Maria Mochnacz-directed music video of Harvey drowning in an emerald pond while wearing an extravagant wig, heavy make-up and a slinky red satin evening gown — gave Harvey her biggest radio hit to date, reaching #2 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart. The album itself debuted at #40 on the Billboard chart and #12 in her native UK, and went on to sell roughly one million copies. The moderate commercial breakthrough of To Bring You My Love certainly had nothing to do with any scaling-down of her trademark lyrical intensity: the infanticide fable "Down by the Water" — whose whispered coda of "Little fish big fish swimming in the water/Come back here, man, gimme my daughter" references the old Leadbelly blues standard "Salty Dog" — ostensibly deals with a mother drowning her child.

"I certainly am very surprised at how this record has been received. And it's not something that I set out to do. I can't guarantee what I write next will be as appealing to people. It probably won't be."

The critical response was overwhelmingly positive — Rolling Stone praised the record as "astonishing" in its four-star review, People claimed that "Harvey's raw, dense music rivals that of Bob Dylan himself for sheer gut-wrenching melodrama" and Hot Press raved, "this is a creation of oceanic beauty, depth and mystery in which all of the themes previously explored in fragments by Harvey are united in a rich and complex whole".

Harvey and her new five-piece live band supported the album with a 10-month worldwide tour that included a three-month stint opening for the band Live in the US, and a now-legendary performance at the UK's Glastonbury Festival wearing a shocking pink catsuit and black Wonderbra.

Harvey told Filter in 2004, "To Bring You My Love was my first real venture into production and to use an incredible producer like Flood, who painted an atmosphere over my songs that I hadn't heard before, I was working with new musicians — it was all very, very exciting. And very, very draining. That was a difficult time in my life, as was the time of Is This Desire?"

In 2005, Diplo sampled "Down By The Water" for a remix of the Mike Jones single "Still Tippin'" and then again the following year on Plastic Little's indie rap track "Now I Hollar."