Excellent piece. Thank you.

I find it very interesting discussion of the Hope Six time, and afterward, where Polly was having a hard time - feeling spent (if that is the right word). This record appears to have totally rejuvenated her.

By the way, my inner librarian has been collecting the press interviews Polly has done for Orlam and I Inside the Old Year Dying so far (after the great drought of 2012-2021 lol), and why not share the list for easier reference:

1. Kate Kellaway, PJ Harvey, poet: ‘Dorset is light and dark, ecstasy and melancholy’, The Guardian, 24th April 2022;
2. Johanna Paulsson, P J Harvey: Min mamma har alltid varit väldigt viktig för mig, Dagens Nyheter, 6th June 2022;
3. Kory Grow, ‘It Doesn’t Feel Dark to Me’: PJ Harvey on Her Surreal New Novel, Growing Older, and the Beauty of Ugliness, Rolling Stone, 28th June 2022;
4. Stevie Gallacher, ‘People think I live in a cave and eat children. I don’t mind. I accept it’: Enigmatic rock siren PJ Harvey is happy to let book of poems speak for her, The Sunday Post, 21st August 2022;

5. Louise Brailey, Into the Woods with PJ Harvey, Crack Magazine, 1 June 2023;
6. Carole Boinet, “Cet album est très intrigant pour moi” : confidences de l’indémodable PJ Harvey, Les Inrockuptibles, 16 June 2023;
7. Laura Snapes, ‘Am I still any good? Have I still got it?’: PJ Harvey on doubt, desire and deepest, darkest Dorset, The Guardian, 1 July 2023;
8. Ann Powers, ‘Life and death is such a fine line’: PJ Harvey on creating in a place between worlds, NPR, 6 July 2023;
9. Liam Hess, PJ Harvey Is Making Music for Different Reasons Now, Vogue, 11 July 2023;
10. Amanda Petrusich, Feeling the Sting of Time with PJ Harvey, The New Yorker, 23 July 2023.

If I missed something, let me know!

Cracking read.

As for the album - i adore it - it is a brilliant, deep, mature, stately and fascinating record that keeps on revealing more with each listen.

It is everything I hoped it would be.

Are they no longer doing the "serial exploration of the creative process song-by-song"? The last email for Lwonesome Tonight was almost a month ago....

Yeah or it is extremely slow... but i think whoever is in charge might be on holidays ?

Kinda disappointed with how the promotion for this album is going tbh, but I don't think she really cares that much about it at this stage of her career.

Maybe they’ll pick it up in September once we’re closer to the tour? I mean, the shows are sold out anyway so I guess there’s no real need to advertise them, but I hope the IItOYD era is not over yet promo-wise, and that we’ll get some more behind-the-scenes tidbits, interviews etc. Would love it if she made a live appearance on Jools or something like that, or maybe a podcast involving some Orlam readings alongside the new songs, but TBH even a Spotify playlist of influences for the new record would be welcome.

ETA: Okay they just tweeted the series will continue this Friday lol

it's confirmed, a PJ's operative is infiltrated in this forum

The email for August/A Child's Question landed just now.

I don't know why Polly thinks that Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea is one of the worst ones she ever made. It is still a classic in my opinion. I am not knocking Polly's musical artistry. I believe for the long time fans it would have been nice playing a song like You Said Something or Good Fortune. My two cents.

Stories has a special place in my heart, like basically all of PJ's albums.

why does she dislike it? based on various interviews and other media i read in the years, it appears PJ's judgement was influenced by the musical legend ( and Polly's friend) Captain Beefheart, who didn't like the album at all; keep in mind that, back in the day, according to Polly, she always asked for the opinion of her closest friends and influencers (namely the Captain himself and, obviously, John Parish) whenever a new album came out. The only other reason that comes to my mind is the 2000-2001 tour: it was, as confessed by PJ herself in an interview, a tiresome ( and quite long) tour, full of dates and with little time to rest.
Add to that the usual tours' tediousness ( doing basically the same songs for an year, over and over again) felt by the band and, well, what happened in 2001 ( she was touring in the USA at the time, if i remember correctly), et voilà.

Almost immediately afterwards she was describing Stories to interviewers as 'an exercise in songwriting', something she did as an experiment in producing a mainstream pop album - even if, of course, it turned out to be very little like a mainstream pop album. I think she came to see it as a piece of work which had little of 'herself' in it. It wasn't just Beefheart who didn't like it, as John Parish wasn't sympathetic to it either and found other things to do than take part. She must have felt very ambiguous about the fact that it made more money than anything else she'd done. In my view she was a bit unjust about it, actually, but that was how she came to remember the experience.

So almost a couple of months in, which is always a good time to evaluate a record IMO, after the initial excitement and new music fever has worn off and have lived with it for a while.....What are peoples thoughts?

Tbh, I was really excited at first since it was the first time I was able to follow the release of a new studio album from her - I started listening to her work in 2019 -, so I guess I kind of forced myself to like it at that time more than I actually do right now.

So after the hype, I don't listen to the album as a whole that much anymore, but some songs that I didn't like very much at first, are more on my repeat these days - like August, A Child's Question, July and Lwonesome Tonight. It's a pretty decent album anyway, with superb poetry and some moments of brilliance scattered throughout the record.

Even so, I'm quite curious to see the performances of all these songs live, as she must be one of the greatest living performers, imo.