'Life and death is such a fine line': PJ Harvey on creating in a place between worlds
Polly Jean Harvey is indisputably one of the most adventurous musicians of our time. In fact, to call her simply a musician is inaccurate: She is a visual artist and a multidisciplinary performer who has worked in theater, film and video and published two books of poetry. She's released 10 studio albums under the name PJ Harvey, two with her longtime collaborator John Parish, scores for the film All About Eve and the TV show Bad Sisters and three video albums.
In 2022 Harvey published her most ambitious written work, the epic poem Orlam, written over eight years as she learned to be a poet and mastered the dialect of the English coastal county Dorset, where she grew up. She uses that almost-lost dialect throughout Orlam as she chronicles the journey out of childhood of a 9-year-old girl named Ira-Abel. Her heroine encounters ghosts and other supernatural beings — her oracle is the all-seeing eye of a dead lamb, the Orlam of the book's title — as well as humans who fail her, leading her to assume a new self. The plot matters less than Harvey's evocation of a landscape that teems with every kind of life. Part hero's journey, part almanac, part ode to a lost tongue, Orlam, like PJ Harvey's music, creates an artistic realm of its own. It runs on the rhythms of the seasons and captures the beauty, fantastical rawness and occasional horror of English rural life.
PJ Harvey's new album, I Inside the Old Year Dying (out July 7), further illuminates the world Orlam brought to the page. Originally Harvey planned a theater piece to expand upon the work, but these musical expansions of her poems came to her in a three-week rush as she practiced piano and guitar. Enlisting her "musical soulmate" Parish and longtime producer Flood, she concocted a sound that evokes the natural world without sounding at all like what we now think of as folk music. It's ragged, yet highly crafted — a key element is the field recordings Adam "Cecil" Bartlett brought to the studio, which the team distorted to add eerie atmosphere — and as immediate as it is mysterious. Voicing phrases in the Dorset tongue, Harvey becomes an every-creature, part Ira-Abel, part ghost, part animal, always herself.
From her home in Dorset, Harvey spoke with me about working to make her music stranger, adopting characters throughout her career and the value of a good joke.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ann Powers: In the song "Prayer at the Gate," which opens I Inside the Old Year Dying, you have a line: "Speak your wordle to me." "Wordle" here is not a popular American puzzle, but the term for "world" in the Dorset dialect, which you use throughout the album. The phrase serves a purpose inside the story that the song is telling, but it also describes what you've done with this album, with the
