PJ Harvey Talks New Album, Let England Shake
"The world that we live in is very brutal, and I wanted to be honest about that."
Throughout a career that's lasted over 20 years, PJ Harvey has remained restless, always jumping from one challenging persona to the next without a glance back. Her forthcoming album, Let England Shake (out February 14 in the UK and February 15 in the U.S.), is the latest in a long string of hard lefts. It's a meditation on war and nationalism with plenty of evocatively gruesome battlefield imagery. But, musically, it could be the least confrontational thing in her catalog. Over expansive beds of guitars and samples, Harvey often sings in an upper-register coo a world away from the gutted moan of her early records. It's a serious, committed piece of work from an artist who never makes anything less.
Last week, Pitchfork spoke with the singer about the new album's genesis, her love of the Doors, and the experience of singing in front of the UK's Prime Minister. Our interview is below:Pitchfork: One of the main lyrical themes on the new album seems to be a deep sense of ambivalence with England.
PJ Harvey: Well, the record is dealing with a lot of things that are happening in the world right now-- conflict, shifts in power, the change in society and in countries' relations to each other. Although I sing specifically from the point of view of an Englishwoman in England, I hope that I'm addressing feelings that are much more universal. Hopefully, many people can relate to these sorts of feelings-- the push and pull that you have with your country, the love and the disappointments. And the nature of conflict is timeless, this cycle of war that has been here since time began and will be here long after we're gone. It's something we all live with.Pitchfork: More than in any of your other records, there's imagery of violence that really just sticks in your gut on this one. Like the line about seeing soldiers fall like lumps of meat. What led you to write about this stuff in this way, right now?
PJH: The world that we live in is very brutal, and these things actually happen. I wanted to use language that was being honest about that.Pitchfork: Musically, it's not a rough album the way that something like Rid of Me was. It has this really pretty float to it that contrasts with some of the imagery.
PJH: I knew that I wanted the music to offset the weight of the words. That was very important. I wanted the music to be full of energy and to be very uplifting and unifying, almost insightful in its creation of energy. It took me a long time to find out how to sing such words because to sing it in the wrong voice would have given it the wrong feeling-- maybe too self-important and dogmatic. I wanted the songs to be much more ambiguous than that. This was the way that the language was best moved from lip to ear.Pitchfork: There are several samples on the album, how did you decide to fit them in here?
PJH: It was very natural in that I'm always listening to music, and I liked these songs. A line would resonate with me, I would meditate on that line, and it would somehow work its way into the music at a later date. I spent maybe two years just writing the words to this record before I even thought about music. I worked on them as if they were poems to work on a page, and I discarded many. I found it a very difficult record to write in that I had to get the words right at the very beginning or else the whole thing would fail.Pitchfork: Aside from the music that you sampled, what else were you listening to while you were making this record?
PJH: I listened to lots of the Pogues and the Velvet Underground; I love the energy of their music whilst dealing with very important and difficult subject matter. It gets the blood running. I listened to lots of the Doors because they had a certain indefinable quality to the music that was really intriguing, and I wanted to try to capture some of that. And, for me, their music is associated with a particular era of great turbulence and change. And I listened to a lot of folk music from all across the world-- not just English or Irish, but some from Russia, Cambodia, traditional Jewish folk music, all over. I just tried to listen to as much ancient, traditional music as I could.Pitchfork: In listening to this older folk music, do you hear some of these same themes of eternal struggle and warfare and conflict?
PJH: Yes, of course. It's all there since time began. It's passed down from one generation to another, and that's the beauty. One can learn so much from traditional music, and when you take music back to how it first began, there's a way of really conveying news from one province to another. A storyteller would move from one place in the country to another to relay the news, and often that was done in song. Before, there's wasn't any way of correspondence. And so it has great importance, and I think there's a lot to be learned from it as a songwriter. I learn a lot from looking at that ancient music now.Pitchfork: Writing these lyrics, was there anything you were reading that was pushing you in certain directions?
PJH: I read a great deal and I did a lot of research in many different areas for this album because I had to find a way into the language I wanted to use. I did a lot of research on the Internet and found myself reading a lot of Harold Pinter's work, actually-- not just his plays, but his political essays and his poetry. There's a contemporary playwright who I greatly admire called Jez Butterworth, and I saw a play of his called Jerusalem which I was quite affected by. And I was looking at artwork like Goya's "Disasters of War" series and Salvador Dali's pictures from the Spanish Civil War era. I was watching a lot of Stanley Kubrick movies, particularly Paths of Glory, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Barry Lyndon. All of these things somehow go into a big melting pot inside of me and come out in my own way.Pitchfork: The photographer Séamus Murphy is making videos for each of the songs on the album. How is that going to work?
PJH: They're going out throughout this month-- the first one is for "The Last Living Rose". He will also be making a film that will be coming out later this year. He's a photojournalist whose work I came across from an exhibition of his work in Afghanistan over the past 10 years. He's mostly a freelance photojournalist who works in conflict zones and doesn't particularly work with people like myself.Pitchfork: You sang on British TV last year with then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown watching. How does something like that happen?
PJH: I was invited to play on that show by Andrew Marr. I had no idea that Gordon Brown was going to be on it until a week or two beforehand, and it was just what Andrew Marr and his show had chosen. I was absolutely delighted, obviously, to have that opportunity, and it's something that I'll never forget. It was really a high point for me, something that I cherish.Pitchfork: Did you have any interaction with Brown?
PJH: Unfortunately not. I would have loved to but security was very high.Source:
http://pitchfork.com/news/41160-pj-harv ... nd-shakei/
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for whatever reason, i thought one would be released per week up until the album release. apparently it's not like that, hah. now, when's this film coming out? behind the scenes of polly recording the album (like a long EPK) pleeease?
