PJ Harvey’s Return to the U.S. Celebrates I Inside The Old Year Dying and the Poetry That Inspired It

As she was recording her latest album, Polly Jean Harvey had only one rule for herself and her collaborators: Don’t repeat yourself. If she ever found herself sounding like PJ Harvey, she would scrap what she was doing, try something new, sing the verse a different way—anything to avert imitation, even of herself. As an artist, PJ Harvey has allowed herself zero tolerance for derivativeness.

“I just never wanted to make the same thing again. I was just so curious to see what else I could do. And I’m always very interested in learning,” Harvey told an audience at the Warsaw in Brooklyn. “I can’t learn unless I keep going into areas I know nothing about. As a songwriter, the more songs I’ve written, it becomes harder not to write something that reminds me a bit of something I wrote in 1995. And then you just try to put it somewhere else or start a new song, but I love that challenge. It’s such a thrill when I feel like I’ve written something that I just haven’t heard before. That’s really exciting.”

On November 7th, Harvey made her first appearance in the United States in over six years. She came to Brooklyn to share an evening of poetry, parlance and performance with an intimate crowd. The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich hosted the event, leading Harvey and her longtime friend and creative partner John Parish in a discussion about the creation of her 2023 Grammy Award-nominated record I Inside The Old Year Dying and her 2022 poetry collection, Orlam—on which the record was based.

If anyone can stake claim to a career defined by constant originality, it’s PJ Harvey. From her Steve Albini, three-piece, genderless grunge days to her organ melodies, piano ballads and protest songs, constant evolution is an understatement. Harvey moves through the world as an artist. That night, she was wearing a white, mid-length Victorian-style dress. On it was the outline of a forest, trunks and branches intersecting and interweaving. In the top of one tree, an eyeball sat between the branches. She told us that the art on her dress is actually one of her own drawings, and it was hand-embroidered by her costume designer Todd Lynn. It’s her visualization of Gore Woods, the forest where much of Orlam takes place. Orlam, she says, is the name of the giant eyeball that watches over the epic’s heroine, a nine-year-old boy-girl named Ira-Abel, as she grows out of her childhood.

Harvey’s recitation of poems from Orlam brought the audience through a year of Ira-Abel’s life, beginning in the bitter cold of January, through the dog days of July and August, and back around to the transformed November and December. In the cold autumnal air, her warm voice cut through the crowd. An ancient Dorset dialect converged in the ether with visions of Harvey’s childhood, held together by her Shakespearean lilt. The reading was soundtracked by an ominous ambience, the chirping of crickets, birds and the rustling of wind.

Liminality sat at the core of PJ Harvey’s intention with the collection. “It’s a whole mixture of things,” she said of the book. “But that is what I wanted it to be—not of any time in particular, just out of time. In that sort of threshold between things, the transformation between things between realms, and that gray area in between the black and white, girl, boy, day night dream, sleep, awake—” Her voice trailed off. At the reading’s close, Harvey received a second standing ovation. Petrusich mused that, out of all the rock shows she’d seen at Warsaw over the decades, none had been even close to as transportive as Harvey’s poetry.

Transportive, is an understatement. Harvey blew the roof off the place before she even started singing. But the intimacy of her recitation invited us all into that liminal space of Orlam. Each word was a hand reaching out, pulling us deeper into her. Warsaw that evening, was out of time. With Petrusich, Harvey discussed her journey into poetry, how she re-learned words of the Dorset dialect—a specific English native to the villages in which she grew up. She told us that, after recording her 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project, she completely fell out of love with music. It became something of a chore for her; an uphill battle almost completely devoid of the joy she had previously found in writing and recording. She turned to poetry then.

“I went off on this poetry journey, but the whole time, not ever making myself write a song, or even play instruments very much,” Harvey told us. “I felt quite out of love with music, and it was very heartbreaking for me for a while because music had been the love of my life and I felt like it was far from me. But while I was working on these poems… even the musicality of poetry was kind of calling me back into the music that way. I kind of fell in love with it again, because I hadn’t been trying to do it.”

I have been a PJ Harvey fan for a good deal of my life. Her music soundtracked my adolescent years like almost no other, whether it was her man-gobbling alter-ego on some Rid of Me tracks, or the cooler-than-you trip-hop lore she built out of Flannery O’Connor stories on Is This Desire. Nine albums—and even more sets of demos—in, I would have bet my life on Harvey being more than settled into the world of music-making, so entrenched I couldn’t imagine her finding a way out.

But Harvey never really settled into anything, though the ease and grace with which she played the set at Warsaw would have had you fooled. The five-song set was nothing short of breathtaking. It was an apparition of an Old English folk song. Her voice stretched and contorted itself on “I Inside The Old I Dying,” reaching screeching heights on the verses just to resolve within a deep, rich chorus. She used the thinning of her voice’s upper register to her advantage; the clarity of her sound was otherworldly, but her lows were a rich parachute guiding you quickly back to the ground.

“I definitely feel it’s the best singing I’ve ever done,” she said of I Inside The Old Year Dying. “I think being older helps. I think my voice is in a good place. One of the good things about aging actually is the voice. It’s in a really lovely place where it’s much richer, can access much deeper levels.” Her dynamic with Parish was as tight as the compositions they harmonized on. She spoke earlier of auditioning for him while she was still in high school, their recording of the Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller tune “Is That All There Is” done in just one take, and the immense trust that characterizes their partnership. That trust was more than evident on the Warsaw stage. Harvey’s live showcases show no signs of stopping. That night, she revealed her plans to bring her European tour to the States late next year. She’d just recorded a set on NPR’s Tiny Desk series. I’m sure wherever she goes next, it will be someplace we’ve never seen her before. “It’s so lovely to be playing the songs with my band and singing again,” Harvey said. “It really is the love of my life.”

Madelyn Dawson is a music intern for Paste, hailing from New York. She currently goes to school in Connecticut. You can find her everywhere @madelyndwsn.