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How PJ Harvey Found Her Way Back to Music
For PJ Harvey, the English singer-songwriter, an idea can take many forms. One of her drawings can grow legs and lead her to a poem, and a poem on the page might rise into a song. Such was the journey to her most recent album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, lifted from her 2022 book of fantastical poetry, Orlam. “Often when I was writing these poems, if I was stuck, I’d try and draw it,” says Harvey. “That would help me find the answer to what was holding me back with the journey of the poem.” Written in the dialect of her native Dorset, Harvey spent about eight years, under the mentorship of Scottish poet and editor Don Paterson, writing the whimsical epic that follows a nine-year-old heroine coming of age.
But the book, and in turn, the album, almost never came to be. Even as the only artist to ever be awarded the esteemed Mercury Prize twice, Harvey was hesitant to try her hand at poetry in a real way. “I think there’s a part of me that felt not worthy to be even attempting to be a poet. I can hardly say it even now because I feel so not worthy,” she says. ”I actually don’t think poetry writing and songwriting are similar. I think they’re very, very different things. There’s very few people who do both well.” But with Patterson’s guidance, what was swirling around in her imagination, ready to take shape, materialized onto the page. “He wanted me to cast that aside and just dive in and be as rough and as bold with my attempt at poetry writing as I was with my songwriting.”
Though she had no intention of making an album, her poetry manifested into music organically. After a long road to Orlam, I Inside the Old Year Dying, was born in just weeks. “We didn’t want them to remain complicated, difficult poems,” says Harvey. “We wanted them to have an immediacy and a beauty that would carry the listener to the place, without actually really having to even read the words, but just to get carried there in the music.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?Ahead of announcing her first North American tour in seven years, on a “cloudy but dry” day, from her home in London, Harvey spoke with Vanity Fair about falling in love with music again, making magic onstage, and looking back at her storied career.
Vanity Fair: I'm curious about how you harvested these poems, like you said, into an album. The original intention was not to make an album from these but was your impulse as a musician to turn this into music, just something you couldn’t stop yourself from doing?
PJ Harvey: I think you're right. It was something that really organically happened. When I was a younger artist, I used to want to keep things in categories. I didn't like things sort of bleeding over into each other. So I was either making a drawing or I was writing a poem or I was writing a song, but they didn't mix together. The older I've become, the more I don't feel that's important anymore to distinguish between them as much because I'm just an artist and I become interested in something. I want to explore it really deeply. And in order to do that, I have to explore it in many different ways. So it is actually really natural for me to want to try and find if there's a tune in there or if there's an image to draw in there.
As a musician, I practice my instruments in order to try and keep my hand in. And during times of practicing every day, I sometimes would feel like singing. So if I was practicing on the piano, I might sing along with it or I might find a melody and then I'd store that thinking I might use that in the future for something. And because all of my poems were just lying around the house being written, I would quite naturally pull at a poem and just try and sing that.
Was that an exciting feeling, to see this universe you’ve created expand?
It was incredibly exciting. It's the moments that you always wait for as an artist. They don't always happen, but they did. Within the first couple of days in the studio, we knew something magical was happening, and it happened with the first song that we captured, which was “Prayer at the Gate.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?That’s great to hear because I read that after your previous album, you were feeling disenchanted with making music and touring.
It was a very difficult time for me. After the Hope Six Demolition Project Tour, I'd found actually writing that album very tough. I had just worked through the difficulty thinking this will pass, this will pass. I worked and worked and I finally had an album, and then we recorded that album, then we toured that album. But something about the initial spark and love of songwriting was just not burning as brightly as it should for me. When I came off that tour, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't just do what I usually do, which is get back to work and write another album. I thought I would just see where I was drawn artistically. And if that was nowhere, then it was nowhere.
What led you back to songwriting?
I would often play other artists that I really love and respect, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Neil Young. It’s sort of a meditation and it helps me become a better songwriter or a better writer in general. As I was singing these songs, I just started to heal my love of music. I realized, oh, I do love that. That was the beginning of this sort of healing process. I love music and I love songwriting, and it was sort of reignited by that. Then taking these poems to John [Parish] and [producer] Flood, and then that first instant with “Prayer at the Gate” rekindled everything for me.
So far you’ve toured around Europe with this album and this fall, for the first time in seven years, you will perform across North America. How has being back on the road been?
It's been really amazing, really special, quite unlike any other tour. It's the most I've ever enjoyed performing. I think that is to do with that journey that I went on. That was quite a difficult one for me. But also becoming older and growing in self-acceptance and growing in my understanding of myself and what I'm capable of.
Most of my band I've worked with for 30 years or more. I think that connection enables a great sort of magic to happen, almost spell-like between, a sort of magical conjuring where we feel the energy of the music and the words, the audience, the place come through us. It's made for some very powerful performances, some of which I will long remember for a really long time. This tour, performing this album has been a great highlight for me in my life, and I'm really excited to be able to play it more this year and certainly to come to the States, to come to Canada, playing it and just sharing this enjoyment that we're having.
Looking at your career, retrospectively, do those early albums, and that version of yourself, still resonate with you? Will those songs remain on your setlist?
John [Parish] and I went back through the songs and tried to find something from every album to play on this tour. I think there pretty much is, but some songs I couldn't, for instance, off the first album Dry, there were some songs I just couldn't sing because they were written as a 16 or 17-year-old young woman. I just couldn't sing those words now at my age. But choosing carefully, there are some that I can sing, the ones that I could authentically inhabit now and still find a way into the words.
Even if you can’t bring yourself to sing some of those songs, do you look back at your 16-year-old self and feel for her?
I suppose with the grace of time, I can see it objectively. I can't even remember myself at that age. I think that they're great albums and it's really wonderful to see how young people enjoy them now. A lot of my friends' children are really enjoying those albums and get a lot from them at that age. So it is wonderful to see that.
- After all these years you’ve retained a private life and often reject the assumption that your work is autobiographical. Is that a protective measure?
Well, as an artist, you have to draw from some of what you know, but you add a huge amount from your imagination. I think we all start with what we know and then you embellish them and you add all the information that you've gathered that far in your life, every book you've ever read, every film you've ever seen, every experience you've ever felt. That comes from the artists' work, it comes from the world and what's happening in the world from politics, and it gets all sort of stirred up in the pot that is you and somehow comes out in a new form.
So nothing is ever autobiographical. It's always mixed in, unless I'm writing an autobiography, which I'm not. I use the example of I never had a daughter and drowned her in the river, but there was a song called “Down by the Water.”
On that note, would you ever write a memoir?
I don’t know. Maybe a fictional one.
You’ve had your hands in everything but what mediums are currently exploring?
I'm studying again. I'm slowly moving towards what would be my next book. It's so gargantuan at the moment. I couldn't even possibly tell you what it is, but I'm having to do a lot of study and I'm enjoying that. It is very unwieldy right now, and that's usually the process. You start off with aiming in such a wide field, you're never sure where it's going to end up. And slowly it'll start taking me somewhere, which will come a more refined path.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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