Voicing phrases in the Dorset tongue, Harvey becomes an every-creature, part Ira-Abel, part ghost, part animal, always herself.įrom 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. 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. 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. 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. PJ Harvey's new album, I Inside the Old Year Dying (out July 7), further illuminates the world Orlam brought to the page.

It runs on the rhythms of the seasons and captures the beauty, fantastical rawness and occasional horror of English rural 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. The plot matters less than Harvey's evocation of a landscape that teems with every kind of life.

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.

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. 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'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 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. Polly Jean Harvey is indisputably one of the most adventurous musicians of our time.

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