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