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Since 1992, when she released “Dry,” her début album, PJ Harvey has made complex music that channels a primal, earthly energy. For me, her work has always conjured images of the natural world, a certain rawness and danger: a prehistoric volcano rupturing, or a big cat darting elegantly across a plain. Earlier this month, Harvey released “I Inside the Old Year Dying,” her tenth album, and her first since 2016. It’s based loosely on “Orlam,” Harvey’s second book of poetry, which was published in 2022 and written in the heavy, captivating vernacular of Dorset, the coastal county in southwest England where Harvey was brought up. Both the poems and the album lyrics require some footnotes for a lay reader to untangle, but Harvey’s sense of rhythm and scene are so exquisite that it hardly feels like work at all. “Orlam” tells the fantastical story of a year in the life of Ira-Abel, a nine-year-old girl who seeks solace in flora, fauna, and otherworldly spirits as she struggles to discover who she is and what her life is for. “I Inside the Old Year Dying” is a companion piece, in a sense—its lyrics were lifted from the poems, modified, and set to music (the album was co-produced, with Harvey, by her longtime collaborators John Parish and Flood)—but the feeling it evokes of discovery, of vulnerability, of inching closer to something divine is the same. Harvey has a deep and instinctive understanding of folklore, how it can both enchant and instruct us, and “I Inside the Old Year Dying” feels both ancient and brand new, like the very best kind of fairy tale.
Harvey, who is fifty-three, is still the only artist to win the U.K.’s prestigious Mercury Prize twice, first in 2001 and then a decade later. It’s hard for me to think of a contemporary artist who has even dared to emulate her; much like fellow-visionaries Björk and Kate Bush, Harvey is a category of one. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.
We first spoke sixteen years ago. When I was preparing for today, I looked up that old interview and read it with one hand clamped over my mouth, which, if I’m being totally honest, is how I read most of my old writing. I was nervous to meet you, but you were lovely, articulate, and generous. You’ve spent the past couple years revisiting your own older work, releasing demos and B-sides and rarities from various eras of your career. What does that sort of personal excavation feel like for you?
I find it really enjoyable. It wasn’t something I consciously planned to do. My previous albums had gone out of print on vinyl, and so we had to remaster and recut. Because we were already going to the trouble, I got the idea to present more of the demos. It was a pleasurable thing to really hear myself searching for different voices, different ways of approaching different subjects.
The demos felt like a document of the searching you were doing at the time.
You can hear the exploration. I can hear myself trying to find the right voice to sing things with. And I can hear all the little glitches, all the little mistakes.
Where are you calling from today?
I’m at Dorset at the moment. I’ve got a flat on the southwest coast in Dorset, and I’ve got a flat in London. I live between the two places.
Do you feel as though you’re a different version of yourself in the country and in the city?
I feel a lot calmer when I’m in the countryside. The space and being able to see the horizons, it quite literally lifts a weight off of you—there’s not the density and high buildings and no air. But I also love the busyness of a city, all of the interaction with lots of other people in small spaces. I like having both.
I wanted to ask you about the new album’s relationship to “Orlam,” the book of poetry you released last year.
I wasn’t intending to make an album out of the poetry book. I usually have a melodic idea and a chord progression, and then I just form nonsensical words to play with the melody. I often pull at poems, just to see if they sing. My head was so engrossed in the writing of “Orlam” that it felt natural for me to sing my way through it. As I’ve become more involved in learning the craft of poetry, it’s become difficult for me to see music or drawing or poetry as different categories. They often bleed into each other. So, I’ve stopped trying to separate them. If something naturally evolves into a song or a drawing or a poem, I just let it. That’s not to say that I think of those different art forms as interchangeable—I don’t. But I do think that sometimes they can work alongside each other.
This makes me think of the conversation around Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. It got everyone asking, Is what he does literature? Where’s the membrane between song and prose and poetry? How does the meaning of language change, if at all, when you begin to add rhythm and melody?
The music—the rhythm, the melody—brings its own emotional qualities. Poetry doesn’t need music. All of its music is contained in print on the page. And lyrics really do need music. Lyrics can be a very simple brushstroke of a sentence, and the music will expand it and add great resonance and meaning. There are very few artists that can do both music and poetry really well. Robert Burns was one of the few that could write brilliant songs and brilliant poems. In order for some of these poems to become songs, the lyrics had to be greatly simplified, because the music is doing so much. You don’t need a lot of dense language in a song. It’s quite off-putting, I find, to have too much dense language in a song—unless you’re a master, like Bob Dylan.
When a song contains just a few words, I often find there’s a dissociative, almost mantra-like thing that happens for me. Language becomes only sound. The words aren’t narrative, but there is still meaning. I don’t know—
I think you are exactly right. Very often I’m not quite sure what a singer’s saying; I’ll pull out words and sing them wrong. But the way I sing them means something to me. And I think that’s the most beautiful thing that I could hope for as a songwriter—that somehow my song makes its way into someone else’s life, and they make it their own. They might hear it completely differently from how it was recorded. But that’s just how it should be: the listener hears what they need to hear.
“Orlam” is about a young girl named Ira-Abel, who is coming of age, experiencing and metabolizing trauma, trying to navigate her identity. There are also a lot of references, both oblique and direct, to childhood on the album, beginning with the first single, “A Child’s Question, August.” The video for that song features photographs of you when you were quite young. Can you tell me a little bit about how and where you grew up, and if there are any parallels to Ira’s journey?
Well, as you know, I took great care in the book to make it clear that it’s not an autobiographical work. Every artist draws on elements of their own lives. We can; we have to. But you add to that your scope of imagination. That’s huge. Readers and listeners often want to picture the creator as the narrator in an autobiographical way. I think most artists know that it’s a real mixture of imagination and dreamscape. It’s just beyond our own comprehension, really. I think you have to be open to receiving information that feels like it comes from somewhere else entirely. I often think of the imaginations we have as children—how we can create anything from nothing. You can create a palace out of a cardboard box and some sand. All the work I make has those two things: elements of experience, married with the vastness of the imagination. This book is very much that. “Lamb’s eyeballs that grow large and live in trees.”
It feels so cliché to talk about, but children have such a vast capacity for wonder and enchantment and joy. It can be extraordinary to witness.
I think children are also the most brilliant artists, don’t you? There’s nothing more perfect than a child’s drawings. In order to create work, I often have to try and reach back to that open-mindedness, I suppose, and the naïveté that children have. Things pour out of them in such a natural way. I keep trying to get closer to that.
I wanted to ask you about the lyric “Love me tender / Tender love” on “A Child’s Question, August,” and about all of the Elvis references both on the album and in the book: peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” a ghost character named Wyman-Elvis.
Each character has two names, and each name carries meaning. “Wyman” means “warrior” in Old English, and “Elvis” means “old” or “wise.” In the book, he is representative of a Christ figure—a bearer of the Word, and someone who was giving a message and a direction to our heroine. I see him as a sort of embodiment of love, and the intensity of first love. It was interesting to me that there was also a link in some ways to the previous couple of albums, “Let England Shake” and “The Hope Six Demolition Project,” which were so involved with war and soldiers. The phrase “love me tender,” of course, links back to Elvis [Presley], and to the film “Love Me Tender,” where Elvis plays a soldier.
We call Elvis the King; he lives at Graceland.
Yeah, exactly. There are so many layers there. I think his voice is otherworldly. It has a soulfulness that I find very, very moving. And his beauty, his exquisite beauty. That voice, that beauty, it feels like such a gift to the world. He’ll always be a huge figure in my life. I was fascinated with Elvis as a child. I remember also being fascinated with James Dean and older movies. I was always interested in that sort of magical distant past.
There’s so much tragic romance in those lonesome American men. You can go pretty deep, on YouTube, with some of Elvis’s performances. A few are absolutely and eternally devastating.
You hear it in the voice, you know. Me, as a singer, I think we don’t talk enough about what artists are actually doing. We talk about their lives, and find out more about their history. But when you actually just listen to his voice, it’s incredible. It’s unlike anything else—so moving. It’s beyond my comprehension. I can’t even describe in words how magnificent his voice is.
You’re doing some really ambitious things with your voice on the new album—you always do, of course, but, here, it feels especially purposeful.
I really don’t have any interest in just doing something I’ve done before; what excites me is uncovering something I feel like I haven’t heard anywhere. That becomes harder and harder the older I get and the more albums I’ve made. But I love the challenge of it. You have to find the ways into it, find whatever doors are going to open to help you find the new voice. I was really, really happy with the singing on this record, because I do think I’ve never heard myself sing like this.
There’s something so primal and intense about your own body making a sound it has never made before, whether through grief or ecstasy. I’ve been reading about the idea of “keening,” of crying out in grief and sorrow, as an almost musical practice—it has deep roots in the Gaelic-Celtic tradition, but I think it happens across cultures.
It can be extremely transformational and kind of frightening. I think the hardest part is allowing it to happen. I think the possibility is there in all of us. You have to really allow yourself to be extremely open, and therefore very vulnerable in order to release that inner voice, as it were. You have to really be willing to go there and let it happen. We still have to try and hold ourselves together on a day-to-day basis, don’t we, in order to function? You have to let all of that drop. It’s like taking the scaffolding away. That’s a very frightening thing to do.
There’s a lot of found sound on the album, some of which is recognizable, and some of which is inscrutable. Where were those samples sourced?
I’ve got some great sound-design friends who have libraries of this stuff. I’d often go to them and say, “Hmm, have you got the sound of wind blowing through barbed wire in November?” And they’d send me back, like, three different options. There are so many really specific sounds for sound design in theatre. So some of them were sourced that way; some of them were recordings that I’d made; some were recordings that [the producer and engineer] Cecil had made in the studio. And then I sorted them into what I thought might be appropriate for each song according to lyrical content. As we began to record, we set up a very free-flowing improvisational room together—Flood, John [Parish], Cecil, and I, just the four of us. We had instruments at our disposal. I had the chords and the melody and the words, but that was it. Cecil was in control of the library of natural sound recordings, and he would begin to play those through strange loops and feed them back through cassette players—speeding them up, slowing them down, shifting the pitch. He was playing the nature sounds like an instrument, and we would improvise with him. I would sort of sing, and the song would slowly come together. We would shift instruments if it wasn’t working; I’d go onto bass and John would go onto guitar, or Flood might start working on a feedback loop through one of his really old synthesizers, and that might become the rhythm of the song. That’s the sound you hear on the record, because everything was done live. My singing was done live in the room with all the players. We could never separate my voice because there’s drums and all sorts of other sounds going right down my microphone. It gives it such a beautiful unification of sound. When you step into this album, you sort of feel like you’re stepping into a particular room, because all of the sounds are coexistent with each other.
Have you always been open to improvisation?
“Let England Shake” was the first time. I think prior to that I had been, as my younger self, very particular about wanting to keep things exactly as I’d written them. But, as I’ve got older, I’ve started to relax more. I began to realize that giving the players more freedom really enhanced the energy in the songs. On “The Hope Six Demolition Project,” there were sometimes up to ten players improvising with each other in a small space. The songs I bring in have their chord structure, they have their chord progression, they have their melody. But, on top of that, there’s a lot of room. I’ve really begun to enjoy that. You have to be extremely vulnerable, because you will offer ideas that aren’t good. “Should we try this?” “No, it’s terrible.” Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, and no problem was insurmountable because somebody else would always have an idea.
You’ve been in a collaborative partnership with John Parish for almost thirty years, and with Flood for almost as long. How have those relationships evolved?
I don’t know where to begin. I met John when I was seventeen, maybe. He’s ten years older than me. At that time, his band was coming down to Dorset to play, and they were a really unusual band, like you’d never seen. It was basically two enormous percussion setups and a bass guitar. Just three players. And then both drummers sang complicated harmonies. It was a fascinating, really unique sound. I so aspired to something unusual like that. I think John saw one of my earliest shows, when I was just on an acoustic guitar. But he could see that I had something going on. He asked me to sing in his band, and that’s how it started. But I think because of our age gap, and because I came from quite a remote place in the country, John was able to introduce me to so many things. He became a combination of a best friend, an older brother, and a teacher. He’s remained all of those things, actually—it hasn’t really changed. I have so much respect and admiration for John, and I still look up to him. If I’m in need, he would be the first person I would reach out to. And I feel like he probably knows me better than just about anyone.
Flood is similar. I began my relationship with Flood, in ’94, I think. When I met him, we shared an emotional feeling around music—the music that we liked and the things that we were striving for, searching for. It’s hard to explain. As you get older, it’s not often that you meet someone and you want to make a new friend. But, every now and again, you want to bring a new person into your life. Why is that? We use the word “wavelength” to describe it, which, interestingly, refers to music and sonics. But it’s this sort of indescribable emotional quality, where you’re two bells ringing with the same note. I think that’s what I found with Flood.
You’ve spoken about feeling disillusioned with music prior to making this record. In the past few years, you went through what I guess could be called a fallow period; you were writing poetry and rereleasing some older demos, but you weren’t making new music. Did you have a moment where you thought that part of your work was over?
When I was writing “The Hope Six Demolition Project,” I thought, This feels like hard work. I had to write a lot of material in order to get any good songs, and it was often not enjoyable. I worked through it, and we recorded the album and went on the tour. Now, looking back at it, I was moving into my fifties. That’s quite a natural time to be looking at your life and thinking, Is this really what I want to keep doing? You begin to see that there’s a finite amount of years left. When I finished the “Hope Six” tour, I promised myself that I wouldn’t just work through it and look at it as a phase. I’m a very conscientious worker. Even though I’ve been an artist all my life, I work hard, like anyone in a nine-to-five job would. I’m somebody that thrives on structure; otherwise, the creative life doesn’t really have a beginning and an end. But I did take some time where I didn’t do anything unless I wanted to do it. It was quite a while before it started to come back, but, when it did, I was so relieved.
I often think back to that time when I first got a guitar, when I was sixteen or seventeen. Prior to that, I’d written lots of words. When I saw that I could put words together with music, I remember it feeling like gates opening, this joy. That was what I’d been missing. That’s what I was waiting for. But, in order to find it, I had to be patient. It returned in a different way. I learned something about not just going about my work. It had got to a point where it was actually limiting me, because it was stopping my joy. Now I’m much more in touch with responding to the joy of making as it comes upon me, following it. As you get older, you let down your barriers a bit, because you realize you can. When you’re younger, you feel like you’ve got to hold everything together, or everything is gonna go wrong. As you get older, you realize, No, I can let go of it.
It sounds like you approached it with grace and patience rather than what I would have done, which is panic.
[Laughs.] There was certainly a time when I thought, O.K., maybe I’m not gonna feel that again. But I didn’t panic. I’ve seen this in my friends of a similar age. You reach a position where you just have to ask yourself, Is this still something I want to do with my life? Is this making me happy, or is this making me miserable? With a limited amount of time left, you want to try and maximize your joyfulness. I think that a lot of people go through that, no matter what their vocation is.
There is a theme here of elemental transformation—I think of the phrase “I Inside the Old I Dying,” which is such a heavy and gorgeous way to describe that sort of foundational change. Are you a person who has always embraced change?
Artistically, it’s always what I’ve strived for. With every album, I’m trying to change. I’m so interested in learning new things. You learn new things by letting go of the things you already know, and going somewhere you don’t. That can be a very frightening thing to do, but I thrive on it. I love that feeling of the unknown. And you’re absolutely right that the album does carry this theme of transformation, and of a between-worlds place—poised on thresholds between child and adult, day and night, dream and wakefulness, life and death, across the different seasons and the different months. This constant transformation of one part to another. That’s also why the title felt appropriate, “I Inside the Old Year Dying”—this transformation of both person and year into something else.
What is your relationship to performance, to touring? Does it feel like an extension of writing, or its own project?
When I’m writing and recording, touring is not on my mind. But I really love the stage. I love being in a theatre with people on the stage. I don’t even have to be the person on the stage; I just love all of it.
There’s a unique element of danger to live performance.
It could all fall apart at any moment. There’s this wonderful connectivity between the audience and performers—everyone’s rooting for you to work; everyone wants this to work. That’s a beautiful, connective feeling of love and good will. We’ve just had the Glastonbury Festival here in England. I didn’t go, but I was watching on the television, and it sort of occurred to me that that’s what it’s all about. The fact that that many people—is it two hundred thousand people?—want to gather, in a field, outside, and listen to music together.
When does visual thinking start to enter your work?
Often at the writing stage. Color, usually. There might even be a scene, and I’ll draw the scene to help me find my way into a poem. If something is moving into song, it’ll have color or a shape. So there’s those visual elements at the writing stage. But then, once the album is recorded, the songs present their own visuals. They just do. And I let that guide me.
My last question is not really about music at all, though I suppose it is, a bit, about art. When we talked in 2007, you said that you’re drawn to objects and instruments that feel real, tactile, soulful. You said, “I do tend to like broken things and things that have already lived their lives.” This is not a question about the new album, but one thing I wished I’d asked you then: do you have any especially meaningful objects in your life?
I still do feel that. I love old things, whether it’s an old instrument or an old piece of furniture, an old piece of jewelry—when you can feel that it has seen other lives. It’s imbued with energy from another plane. It’s just so nourishing. It stimulates me. I feel like it gives me something back. I’m almost feeling an object’s resonance. I think you can feel it in places, too. I remember going to Kosovo with Seamus Murphy, and feeling it through the land, feeling its history through the earth. Those resonances are there, but you have to be open to letting them in.
Polly, thanks for speaking with me today.
Oh, thank you, Amanda. It’s really nice to talk to you again. Let’s hope it’s not another sixteen years before we talk again! [Laughs.] But, if it is, let’s hope we’re still enjoying ourselves. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
