Throughout the 885 Greatest Songs Of The 2st Century countdown, we’ll take you on deeper dives into select songs that pop up each day.

It’s a cold late autumn day in the year 2000, back when autumn used to get cold enough that heavy coats were a necessity. People are darting from classes to cars, cars to work, work to home, only to start it over and do it again tomorrow. Some are flush with new love, some are desperately alone; some are both, and they duck into dive bars to address that spectrum of feeling. Or maybe they attend shows at low-rent art spaces, or huddle at gigs in decaying venues, relics of the previous century. In America, the country should have a president elect, but does not — the Bush v Gore Supreme Court decision is still several weeks away in early December — and there’s an unsettled feeling in the air, though not nearly as unsettled as it’ll be in a year’s time, after the September 11th attacks.

This is the world that PJ Harvey’s masterwork Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea entered into, this is the world it reflects. Slip the Discman out of your pocket, pop in your earbuds, press play, and you’re immersed in impressions of desire, regret, and metropolitan life at the dawn of the century. New York City is the setting of many songs, but Harvey was explicit and and insistent about Stories not being a “New York album.” It’s just as much a London album, a San Diego album, and an album about her hometown, the coastal England village of Dorset (as all her work is, to some degree); it’s about the push-pull of urban bustle and bucolic tranquility.

Notably, it’s a bright and vivacious album, a striking contrast to the gnarly, haunting, and expressive catharsis of Harvey’s back-catalog, especially Is This Desire? and Rid Of Me. It’s right there in the album covers, even; high-contrast, grainy black and white imagery versus the lush, shimmering tones in full technicolor seen on Stories. It’s a poppy work (for PJ) and centers around love with warmth and determination, while also not flinching from love’s messy side. Appropriately, no song does that better than “This Mess We’re In,” a collaboration with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.

The song’s sensual lyrics on surface seem to present abstract vignettes of a romantic liaison — maybe with an ex-lover, maybe with a one-night stand. “We sit in silence, you look me in the eye directly,” Yorke moans, later very directly spelling out the endgame. “Night and day / I dream of making love to you.” This is not a love song about long-term commitment, it’s about right now and likely never again, and it’s about finding the beauty in a fleeting connection before the next daylight breaks and the chapter turns.

Yorke being such a big part of the song and album is unique in itself. In 2000, he was an artist riding high on one commercially successful album (OK Computer) and one commercially baffling album that was critically successful (Kid A), and as those ripples radiated into the world, he spent the autumn of 2000 popping into “featured artist” territory – he also appeared on “I’ve Seen It All” with Bjork, a cut from her Selmasongs EP and her film Dancer In the Dark, and is a collaborator on two other songs on Stories. Harvey said she wrote song with Yorke’s voice in mind, hoping he’d find some connection to the lyrics, and he did. She told the LA Times that she liked the idea of playing a supporting role on her own record:

“I first met Thom in 1992, I think. And we stayed in contact. We’ve exchanged letters. And he’s somebody whose voice I have loved and felt very moved by for a long time. I’d long been interested in the idea of somebody else singing a whole song on a record of mine, to have a very different dimension brought in by somebody else’s voice. It adds so much dynamic within the record to have this other character coming in. I get tired of my own voice. It’s nice to hear somebody else’s.”

Between fervent minor chord guitar strums, an icily minimal hi-hat snare rhythm, and two beautiful voices intertwining in and around one another, the song is simple in its presentation, but packs a punch. It’s gorgeous, it’s sexy, it’s elegant, it’s sad…and it’s also perhaps metaphysical. On the surface, “This Mess We’re In” is about the impermanent experience of love and desire. But what if, as American Songwriter suggests, the object of desire not a person, but a city — New York, maybe, or the proverbial everycity. I yearn to be here. I can’t stay. Nothing will stay the same. It didn’t. But together we had this breathtaking moment.

Jonathan Wilson: “Desert Raven” (World Cafe Version)