COVER STORY | Shapeshifting With PJ Harvey

It’s a Tuesday morning, and Polly Jean Harvey is calling in from her home in Dorset. Her South West England county is dark and rainy, much like the sky outside my apartment here in Columbus across the Atlantic. I’ve interviewed more than 100 artists in the last calendar year alone and, at this point, I’ve outgrown most of the nerves that come with carrying out that task—but something was stirring deep within me the eve before my conversation with Harvey. For all of my time spent here on Earth, her work has existed not too far away. For much of my adulthood, the songs—especially “Down By the Water,” “This Is Love” and “Rub Til It Bleeds”—have been ferocious, empowered, fuck-you mementos of muscle-memory storytelling and transgressive, astonishing rhythm.

To be alive is to know PJ Harvey’s work like some biblical achievement, and I so often think about her eight year run at the dawn of her career—from Dry to Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea—and marvel at how, in my lifetime, no other artist has had a string of records quite like that. And then, in July 2023, she turned around and released I Inside the Old Year Dying—her first album in seven years and, quite possibly, one of the most sublime artistic left-turns I’ve had the pleasure of watching unfurl, as Harvey mastered the Dorset dialect in an effort to imagine her own mystical, folklorish rendition of it, all while remaining true to the generational, traditional linguistic and cultural history she’s so deeply studied and lived through.

But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about her 2011 masterpiece, Let England Shake. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about how the first two Pogues albums—Red Roses for Me and Rum Sodomy & the Lash—were crucial, influential components when Harvey was writing it. She’d studied their songs “A Pair of Brown Eyes” and “Summer in Siam” when she was building her own voice as an artist more than 30 years ago, so I couldn’t help but first check in with Harvey about how she was doing in the wake of Shane MacGowan’s recent passing. “It’s a great loss,” she tells me. “I had enormous respect for Shane as a songwriter, as a singer, as a musician, as an artist—I think he changed the course of songwriting in quite a profound way. As a teenager, his songs had a huge impact on me because not only were they full of energy and rebellion, but the words were so rich and so dense and full of meaning—full of layers that, the more you went into them, the more was revealed.”

Let England Shake looms heavily over our conversation, because it was the album that helped spur Harvey into her contemporary fascination and affection for poetry—which has come to define I Inside the Old Year Dying and the collection of poems she wrote at the same time, Orlam. 12 years ago, Harvey, like she does with every project, started with a very generalized, broad picture of what story she wanted to tell. She landed on something massive like war (or anti-war, really), and vaulted it into the core world of her first poetry book, The Hollow of The Hand, which was published back in 2015. “You think, ‘Okay, how on Earth am I gonna write about that in a way that’s not trite or cringeworthy?’ How do you tackle such a subject? It’s like saying, ‘I’m going to write about love,’” Harvey explains. “So, when I have a desire to try and tackle one of these ungainly subjects, I do it by process of elimination, really, of ‘Okay, that’s not going to work. What can I do?’ But, then, I study people that have done it well.”

Those people include William Blake, Thomas Hardy and William Barnes, the latter of whom is the best-known Dorset dialect poet. In the 19th century, Barnes gathered together a dictionary of the dialect, and that became Harvey’s main source of discipline when writing Orlam (and she credits Barnes’ text in the back of the book, too) over the last seven, eight years—as it gave her access to her home county’s culture of perennial celebrations and connections with nature. “Then, in the true tradition of passing down language, I made up words that I couldn’t find,” she adds, laughing. Before writing Orlam, Harvey had always been aware of the dialect, because it was still being spoken around her. “I could recall, as a child, hearing it spoken between the elder members of the village,” she continues. ?I partly knew it from those days and then, when I began to study it, I could learn it really quickly. I think it was in my blood, in some way. [Poetry] is a lifetime’s work, I think, but I really enjoy the study and I enjoy learning the craft and trying to improve upon my ability,” she says. Harvey has always had a fascination with language and with etymology, especially with how words grow out of each other and how speech patterns slowly change when you cross borders. For her, it was a natural interest that, when paired with her pre-existing interest in mining what she knew about Dorset, became an instinctive progression for her artistically.

---

On I Inside the Old Year Dying, Harvey is singing in the Dorset dialect and pronouncing words that are alien to me and countless others—largely because they contrast with what I understand about the English vocabulary as an American. What fascinates me is how seamless it all sounds, how her verses juxtapose familiar, iconographic imagery—like Pepsi fizz and peanut butter sandwiches and Elvis Presley—with antiquated speech that includes buzzes like “mampus,” “scrid,” “charken” and “croopied.” As a listener, engaging with a tapestry that is, at times, challenging and, at other times, familiar is the kind of music and language I want to be present and interested in. Harvey didn’t intentionally set out to write an album based on the book, it happened in an organic way.

“I practice piano and guitar every day to try and get better at it. And sometimes, when I’m practicing, I’ll come up with a melody or idea—that’s often how I collect ideas—and I usually save them, thinking ‘Oh, that could be a good chord progression for a song,’ and I’ll just save it somewhere,” she says. “But as I was doing my practice, I felt I wanted to sing. And so, I would just pull at words and all the words that were around me were these words. I had reams of pieces of A4 paper all over the place with words scribbled on them. I just thought, ‘Well, how would that sing?,’ and I would listen to the chord progressions I was working with and feel what emotion that was giving me. ‘Which poem would I pull up that matches that emotion in this music?’” Harvey never found it very hard to sing her poems, because the texts she chose were quite often the more lyrical offerings anyway. The only hurdle—if you can even call it that—came in the editing stage, when she had to find a way to take the density out of some of the work, for the sake of preserving simplicity.

On I Inside the Old Year Dying, Harvey also incorporates field recordings to the songs—a medium you just can’t get on a page. It’s a very bare-bones way of showcasing just how musicality can change the DNA of a story and where it can or should go. “Something that music has that a poem doesn’t is this musical universe to help guide it,” she says. “This is why poetry is so much more difficult than song, because you have a whole world on a sheet of paper with black print and the shape that the print is in and with rhyme and with rhythm. But the song, you can shape it and guide it with the music; you can make the listener feel what you want them to feel with the music. I could guide the story with the music, and that would take the listener on the right emotional journey to arrive at the end of the story of the song.”

There was no real learning curve for Harvey when it came to performing and singing in a tongue that is not her immediate, familiar own. “It was very easy to do, because some words are melodic,” she says. “They’re like tone, like melody. Something I was taught quite early on in my poetry tuition was that sound equals sense and, by that, I feel it means that if the sound is right, the sense will come. So, you can sing some of those words and, even though you don’t immediately understand them, the actual sound and the way they’re sung somehow permeates and lets you understand what is being meant anyway.” She likens this process to our human inclination to phonetically sing the words of songs we fall in love with even if we don’t know what the words actually are.

And the idioms of Orlam and I Inside the Old Year Dying are not bound exclusively to English turns of phrase, either. Every character has two names, and each name carries a specific meaning and historical perspective. “Our surnames very often come from the occupation of our forefathers—so that’s why you get people with the surname Shepherd or Smith, because they come from the occupations that used to be done,” she says. “They are part of history. Names do have meaning to them, and being someone that’s fascinated with words, of course that fascinated me. I wanted my characters’ names—double-barreled names—to echo their qualities. And, often, the names are of different genders. One name might be male and one name might be female.” Ira-Abel loosely translates to “watchful son,” while Wyman-Elvis translates to “all-wise warrior.”

---

But, on a broader scale than the work of Barnes and Hardy, Harvey really clued herself back into what her English literature studies from secondary school, which was poets from the first World War. “I remember that as having a really big effect on me as a teenager,” she continues. “And I went back and I re-read all those first World War poets, and their poetry was so incredibly powerful and moving to me that I thought, ‘I want to write like that, I want to learn how to write poetry’—because it’s a really different craft than songwriting.”

War plays a role in Orlam and I Inside the Old Year Dying, too, in the form of the Christ-like soldier figure who acts as a vessel and a voice carrying the word of positivity and love for the book and album’s central character, Ira-Abel—a nine-year-old child who lives and dreams and wanders in the UNDERWHELEM village and the nearby Gore Woods, a sanctuary overseen by the titular Orlam, her protector. It’s through this wooded world that Ira is able to make sense of her own final year of innocence, told through Harvey’s renderings of familial oppression, confusion, violence, rituals and necessary, remarkable enchantment—all of which are draped in a far-ranging palette of sunlight and unsettling gloom. The soldier, Wyman-Elvis, is Ira’s wounded savior who bears the message of “Love Me Tender,” a direct reference to The King.

At the same time I’m talking with Harvey, I’m also working on an essay about Priscilla—and it only furthers the intensity of which Elvis is on my mind. I think about the story of Ira-Abel and how she is hoping to discover not just who she is, but what her life’s purpose is. And then there is Elvis’ tragedy, and the question of what existed beneath the showmanship. Did the stillborn death of his twin sibling affect the destiny of his own life or heighten his desire to become something worth talking about for years and years after his passing in 1977? We’ll never know, but there is something enchanting, haunted and gripping about the folkloric emotions of Orlam and I Inside the Old Year Dying, especially in how Harvey is, all at once, mining for discovery while also searching for something vulnerable and true and divine. There’s an uncertainty that is scary yet harbors small triumphs, and you can feel that in the godly omnipotence of Wyman-Elvis, who is dying but never quite dies; a reliquary of the star whose light continues to burn beyond the tragedy that should have snuffed it out.

“One of the wonderful things about poetry is you can bring anything into the mix,” Harvey explains. “I think it was the early stages of writing the book, and I had my forest and I had my hero in the form of Ira and I needed to guide her story and its dynamic. I needed a positive, Christ-like figure to lead Ira. And you can bring anything into a poem; you can be in a forest and you can bring a clown in. What does that do to the forest? For my forest, I though, ‘Okay, I’m going to bring in a soldier’ because, again, I had done so much research on war through the writing of The Hollow of the Hand, through writing Let England Shake—and some of the images and things I’d read had had a profound effect on me and still haunted me. It brings you to imagine this beautiful young man as a soldier—of course, which Elvis was, at some point—bleeding from a cut in his throat with the word of love and, somehow, that all wrapped up to me in this Christ figure and the overarching theme of love overcoming all.”

I think about Blake especially and his depictions of innocence, how he was never sentimental or naive towards it. He has a quote in The Four Zoas, “Innocence dwells with wisdom, but never with ignorance,” and it speaks greatly about how, in his poetry, the universe has its own understanding of love and harmony, and that we ought to be tuned into that. I can feel a similar undercurrent of spirit across Orlam and I Inside the Old Year Dying, especially in Ira’s story and the immense foundational transformations she goes through, where conversations around sentimentality and preciousness do begin to crop up—and it is our job, or Harvey’s as the writer, to reckon with that. “I think you become really attached to your character, and you really feel for them and you feel as them and you have to, in order to write with any amount of feeling,” she explains. “You care a lot about them and their path, and I certainly felt that towards Ira-Abel in this book.”

---

But Harvey is quick to emphasize that she doesn’t necessarily feel like you need to hear the album to make sense of the book, or vice versa—and I have to agree. The songs arrive separate from the book, even though the two texts share throughlines and transformations. The imagery and the dynamics of the Orlam and I Inside the Old Year Dying stories are what the readers and listeners dare to make of them. But there is this idea that art is often never finished, that you can continue editing and editing forever, making the work new over and over again. I always think about that in regards to my own poetry, how I can return to it years later and find new ways to change it. The living archive of Orlam and I Inside the Old Year Dying are not, however, explicit, intentional deliberations made by Harvey in the name of continuing Ira-Abel’s story in a new light.

“When we perform the album live, it’s a show of two halves, in that we play the album in running order at the start of the show and, when I go on that journey with singing those songs, I very often feel quite young,” she says. “A song like ‘Lwonesome Tonight,’ I really feel every feeling that that narrator is singing, and I feel quite small—quite a young person—as I’m doing it. Not on all of the songs, some are quite different. Some songs are more like an older person looking back at when they were young. I really love performing ‘All Souls,’ because it’s almost like a meditation. It moves myself and the band and the audience into a sort of trance, and it’s a very, very powerful song in that respect. It doesn’t really need the story, it’s just this trance that we all go on together.”

In Harvey’s work, across more than three decades, there have always been multiple layers of imagination. She’s even mentioned before that everything she makes has elements of experience married with the vastness of imagination. On every album and every project, she assumes a different persona in order to try and write from a main character’s—or main narrative voice’s—point of view. In The Hollow of the Hand, the voice at the center of it all came from a disembodied, one-step-back narrator that Harvey purposefully didn’t want to be biased in opinion. “I simply wanted to, journalistically, say ‘This is what I saw’ and not have any comment upon that,” she says. “Or, if I did, it was very subtle.” Likewise, on Rid of Me, she was very interested in a gargantuan character—or confident character—who was standing with a very powerful stance and shouting what needed to be shouted.

“I do think it just changes according to the time in my life and the work that I’m doing and the voice I’m feeling like I want to express,” Harvey adds. “And it does shapeshift, and I shapeshift according to it. It’s very much influenced by my time in life, as well. Obviously, when I [made] Rid of Me, I was a much younger woman than I am now, when I was writing I Inside the Old Year Dying. I try to always be authentic and truthful to what I’m feeling as a person, as I grow older and as my knowledge about myself and the world changes and deepens, hopefully.”

---

At her recent celebratory performance at Warsaw in Brooklyn (and her first public appearance in the United States in years), Harvey told the audience that she thought being older helped her singing on I Inside the Old Year Dying. It’s a stroke of honesty that most folks in the industry aren’t always upfront about. In a way, the unavoidable act of growing up is admonished in the name of always recycling touchstones of youth. It’s a vicious cycle that dismisses what the benefits of age can provide to a musician who is no longer 25 years old. And, given that Ira-Abel’s story is a coming-of-age one, it’s no wonder that Harvey herself is also thinking about mortality—especially in the sense of what it can mean for someone at any age to grow older and how that might hinder or inspire certain movements or ideologies.

“I think you do, naturally, think about that more as you get older. You think about it, I think we all do. It’s just like, ‘Well, what is this all about?’ Especially when you get to your 50s, you think, ‘Oh, I’ve got 20 or 30 years left, if I’m lucky.’ And you know how fast that goes by then—blink of an eye and 10 years ago, and you think, ‘Oh, crikey,’” Harvey continues. “It’s tentatively stepping into that netherworld of ‘Well, what is the other side of this?’ And I think I was exploring that in Orlam and in I Inside The Old Year Dying. I’ll probably continue to explore it more, but I’ll find different ways of doing it—because it is one of the most profound questions of being a human being.”

On I Inside the Old Year Dying, Harvey does not retreat to the voice we’ve come to instinctively remember as most famously hers. Her expansive contralto vocal range is a mirage of expression across the album, as she works through cries, warbles and upper-register pleas of sonic gloaming and full-bodied grief that is actively—always—resisting the urge to mimic the familiar octaves of Is this Desire? or Dry. You can hear this dynamic shift immediately on “Prayer at the Gate,” which was one of the first songs she, John Parish, Flood and Cecil recorded. “I remember finding that voice towards the end of the song and knowing that I had never sung like that before in my life,” Harvey says. “And it was a very moving thing to actually do at the time, but I still find it very moving to listen back—because I don’t recognize that person, when it breaks into the slightly more minor chord progression at the end and the voice is almost on the edge of breaking.” On “All Souls,” she taps into a low register that is as rich and strong as it is delicate. The title track is similarly gentle, connecting as a half-whispered, half-sung vocal that is awakened. “It’s almost singing to itself rather than singing outwardly to anyone else,” Harvey adds.

Harvey has been vocal about how, after releasing The Hope Six Demolition Project, she fell out of love with making music. Though she’s never really held a 9-to-5 job, she’s very honest about how her work-conscious nature has allowed her to build a structure similar to a workday in her music-making life—and, after it became too arduous and the art appeared to suffer as a result, Harvey gave herself permission to not work for a while after 2016. “I didn’t want to just bludgeon myself into doing that again if it wasn’t enjoyable to me anymore. And, at that time, it didn’t feel enjoyable to me anymore,” she says. “I knew that pushing myself to work hard, even though I wasn’t enjoying it, was not a recipe for writing good songs. It just isn’t. And I didn’t want to do that to myself or to the songs. I didn’t want to write mediocre songs, so I took a step back to see what would happen if I didn’t force myself to do anything. And I even thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll never feel that inspiration again, that love for music, that desire to just create through singing and playing.’ And I had to wait quite a long time in this treading water pattern of not really knowing if it was going to return. It took quite a while.”

In the meantime, Harvey was still practicing piano and guitar and composing theater and TV scores—just to keep one hand in the fire. She joined a local Dorset poetry group and studied under Greta Stoddart and then, after buying a place in London, took up weekend and evening course attendance at the Lambeth Poetry School and the Faber Poetry Academy, where she met her longtime mentor and editor Don Paterson. There are countless conversations around poetry being its own form of music (and vice-versa), but it wasn’t the deliberate act of writing structured language that galvanized Harvey’s return to songwriting. Instead, it was the act of singing other people’s songs. “I’m always trying to learn more about chords and scales so I would, daily, practice this. Then, I’d often finish up with just playing a few songs by my favorite artists or some of my favorite strongest songs on the piano,” she says. “And, as I was doing this, I think singing other people’s songs—singing the great songs of all time, in my opinion—healed me. I was really moved and knew that music was the love of my life. It’s the key to the door of my heart and soul, really.”

Orlam, the eyeball that watches over Ira-Abel as she explores the sanctuary of Gore Woods, is a familiar figure—the spirit that keeps pace with us as we grow in and out of ourselves, take risks and continue to make sense of everything around us. PJ Harvey has been at this game for 30 years, and her own Orlam exists in the form of one universal sense: gut instinct, which, on I Inside the Old Year Dying, takes shape through improvisation, abandonment of sonic continuity and total tonal and vocal liberation. “I think there’s a lot we don’t touch on as human beings that gets lost over the years,” she says. “It’s this inherent wisdom and inherent instinct.” A few days before our call, Harvey watched a nature program about mountain goats who scale vertical dams for survival, and the joy in her voice becomes more pronounced as she recites it to me. “How brilliant they are, these little mountain goats. [The well] was vertical, and the only reason they could scale it was because there were little bits of cement poking out of the brick work,” she says. “They scale this dam, risking their lives to lick the mineral salts that ooze through the wall from the water—and these mineral salts restore their bones, restore all their vitamins. And they go there to do that, because they know they have to keep well.”

“And I guess, in a roundabout way, I’m saying that there’s some instinct that draws me towards my path as an artist and a person,” she continues. “And I absolutely trust it. I absolutely believe it, and the whole job of my life is to remain open to it and to never block it.”

---

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.