PJ Harvey
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Photo: Steve Gullick
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Bio
Jump to VideosI Inside the Old Year Dying is PJ Harvey’s tenth album, and her first in seven years. Throughout her career, she has always ensured that each phase of her progress has taken her somewhere new, but her latest music is audacious and original even by her own standards. Full of a sense of a cyclical return to new beginnings, it combines its creative daring with a sense of being open and inviting, in the most fascinating way. The new songs, Harvey says, offer “a resting space, a solace, a comfort, a balm - which feels timely for the times we’re in.”
The record’s story goes back six years, to the end of touring around The Hope Six Demolition Project in 2017, and how Harvey felt immediately afterwards. “I was quite lost,” she says. “I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do: if I wanted to carry on writing albums and playing, or if it was time for a change in my life - ‘OK, I've done this for a long time. Do I want to carry on for the remainder of my life doing the same thing?’”
What she keenly felt was that somewhere in the endless cycle of albums and tours, she had lost her connection with music itself, a realisation that was troubling beyond words. “I can't express how heartbroken I felt. It had always been my everything; my way of understanding.”
This was hardly a time of creative withdrawal: thanks to mentoring by the Scottish poet Don Paterson, she worked on Orlam, the accomplished work of poetry – her second, after 2015’s The Hollow of the Hand - that was published last year, and which became one of the new album’s key inspirations. There were also the reissues of Harvey’s preceding albums – and, in new editions, their demo versions – that came out between 2020 and 2022. But eventually, two things began to push her in the direction of new songs, music and sounds.
One was the memory of a meeting with the artist and film-maker Steve McQueen, in Chicago, during the Hope Six period. “He said, ‘Polly, you have to stop thinking about music like it's all albums of songs. You've got to think about what you love. You love words, you love images and you love music. And you’ve got to think, What can I do with those three things?’”
The other catalyst for a return to music was simple: the sheer act of playing it. “As a way of trying to heal myself - and I can't think of a better word to use - I would go to the piano or the guitar and play my favourite songs by other people: a lot of Nina Simone's songs, or “What A Wonderful World” - which would bring me to tears as I was playing them - or [The Mamas and The Papas’] “California Dreamin’,” or “Golden Brown” by The Stranglers. And I would just realise: ‘No, it's still there; I still love this so much that it's like it keeps me alive.’”
Something soon started to cohere. When Harvey began to write new songs, there was a liberating sense of making music for its own sake, rather than the first steps back into the album-tour-album-tour cycle. She drew on the sense of creative freedom she had felt in past musical work on soundtracks, and in the theatre. At the same time, her perspective was shifting, away from the big themes of Let England Shake and Hope Six (“looking out, at war, politics, the world”), towards something more intimate and human. “I instinctively needed a change of scale,” she says. “There was a real yearning in me to change it back to something really small – so it comes down to one person, one wood, a village.”
The new songs, Harvey says, “all came out of me in about three weeks”. But that was only the beginning. The key to what would happen next – at Battery Studios, in North West London - lay in a three-way creative bond that now goes back nearly thirty years, between Harvey, her enduring collaborator and creative partner John Parish, and Flood: nominally a producer, though that word does not really do him justice.
“This record sounds like it does because of our relationship, and the fact we've worked together for so many years,” she says. “The three of us come together and we all want the same thing – to challenge ourselves and not repeat ourselves.” This attitude has run through all their work, but this time it was hardened into an explicit mission: to avoid anything reminiscent of their musical past.
Achieving this, she says, required a kind of creative letting-go. “When I was younger, I felt such a need to try and stay in control of the music,” she says. “And as I've got older, that seems far less important than seeing what can be created in that moment, in that room with those people, if you just let yourself be open.
“The studio was set up for live play, and that's all we did,” she says. The importance of this is hard to overstate: if I Inside the Old Year Dying is a very tactile, human record, that is partly because just about everything on it is rooted in improvisation: spontaneous performances and ideas, recorded at the moment of their creation.
There is another revelation: Harvey’s voice, and what she felt able to do with it. “I don't feel I've ever sung as well as I've sung on this record,” she says. “Again, I think that comes from being a bit older. It also comes from my absolute trust in Flood and John and allowing them to put me in situations that weren't comfortable. Any time I seemed to be singing in what they would call my PJ Harvey voice, it was vetoed.
“I remember with “Prayer at the Gate,” Flood was encouraging me to sing like I was much older than I am, and to have something desperate in my voice. I don’t even recognise myself. On “All Souls,” I don't think I've ever sung in such a low and restrained way. I Inside the Old I Dying is another one. I was standing in the vocal room with the headphones on, and Flood said ‘No, no – you sound like PJ Harvey.’” She ended up recording the vocal with her eyes closed, unaware of where the microphone was: “Flood would just experiment all the time like that, to find the thing he wanted.”
There is one other crucial aspect of the album: an abundance of field recordings and material from audio libraries, woven into Flood’s surreal reshaping of sounds made on standard instruments. This is what gives I Inside the Old Year Dying the sense of music somehow located in a space between life’s opposites, something also embodied by Wyman-Elvis, a Christ-like presence in some of the songs who symbolises the thin line between life and death – and, for that matter, between recent history and the ancient past.
In the album’s liminal world, scattered with biblical imagery and references to Shakespeare, all these distinctions dissolve. “I'm somewhere where I've not been before,” Harvey says. “What's above, what's below, what’s old, what’s new, what's night, what's day? It's all the same, really – and you can enter it and get lost. And that's what I wanted to do with the record, with the songs, with the sound, with everything.”
This is a big part of the album’s magic. In all those shadows and ambiguities, there is something profoundly uplifting and redemptive, qualities exemplified by the record’s lead-off single, “A Child’s Question, August.” “I think the album is about searching, looking - the intensity of first love, and seeking meaning,” says Harvey. “Not that there has to be a message, but the feeling I get from the record is one of love – it’s tinged with sadness and loss, but it’s loving. I think that's what makes it feel so welcoming: so open.”
Videos
Jump to TourSeem An IPlay
Lwonesome TonightPlay
I Inside the Old I DyingPlay
A Child's Question, AugustPlay
