new interview from forbes magazine
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebalti ... ven-years/Q&A: PJ Harvey Talks Her First U.S. Tour In Seven Years
Steve Baltin
Senior ContributorAlternative superstar PJ Harvey begins her first North American tour in seven years tonight in Washington, DC. The return of Harvey, the only artist ever to win both Britain’s Mercury Prize twice (for 2000’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea and 2011’s Let England Shake), is a gift for all serious music fans.
As Harvey reminded all music connoisseurs last year with I Inside the Old Year Dying, inspired by her poetry book, Orlam, she remains just as adventurous and cerebral as when she first burst on the scene in 1992 with Dry.
One of the most daring and challenging artists in any form of music over the last 30 plus years, Harvey continues to push the envelope. On the eve of the tour I spoke with Harvey about returning to music, how her poetry infuses her music, why she admires Bjork, touring and more.
Steve Baltin: How has your relationship with music changed in the seven years between albums?
PJ Harvey: It was 2017 that I stepped away from music for a while. I'd been on tour for quite a long time, but also I think I'd been in the same pattern of write an album, record an album, go on tour for a very long time. At that time, I was edging towards being 50. I think quite naturally at that time in one's life many of us sort of step back and just take a look at your whole life today. I think you make the decision about, “Okay, do I want to just carry on doing the thing I've been doing? Or could I be doing something better with my life or something?” I needed to step away just to find that. So that's why I took some time off. For me personally, it was about trying to see if the joy that had driven me to want to express myself through music and words in the first place was still there and was just somehow buried by time and by slipping into a pattern of doing things, rather than spontaneously doing something for the absolute need and joy to do it. I just thought, “No, I want to see if actually I still want to do this.” Because if you don't want to, then you're not going to make good work and I didn't want to go down a path where I was making weaker and weaker work because my joy and passion wasn't in the work anymore. So I needed to step back and it did take a while but it did come forward and I re-found that joy and love of music and expression through words and singing. Being at this stage in my life, I feel like having been through that hiatus and coming out the other side knowing this is what I want to do, this is what I love. I've applied myself to it in a different way and maybe because of being older and realizing that okay maybe I'm entering the last third of my life, and I want to maximize the benefit. I find a lot of hope in my audiences in being able to share a moment in time with these people that I maybe haven't met before. Spending that moment in time in this space with them sharing music and emotion seems of profound importance to me and actually the stuff of life itself, really, because I think that when it comes down to it, the things that are of great worth are actually very simple. They're like showing kindness to somebody, or sharing a loving moment, or appreciating love in those small places, they're not big grand things but the tiniest moments. That's what I've come to appreciate and that's where I think I place my hope, actually, in an individual way. I always want to be hopeful that I can become a better person, a better friend, a better performer or one that touches people more and gives people something in the way that they do for me.
Baltin: What I love about poetry is that every word is so critical. Every word serves a purpose.Harvey: I became more and more interested in poetry over the last 15 years or so. It started with Let England Shake. I knew that the words I was trying to write around war and England's relationship with wars were so difficult to get right, to get the balance right, and not sound like you're preaching to people or not sound like you're biased in one way or the other. I wanted to have a completely non-biased view, almost a childlike view, just to put in front of people to think about and make their own minds up about. I knew that was a very difficult thing to get right. Therefore, I started studying poetry and read a lot of First World War poets, read a lot of contemporary poets as well, and started taking poetry lessons then because, like you just said, every word counted and was a great import. Then that carried on. After that, I just was so enthralled by trying to become a better poet and learning about the craft that I continued my study, and still do to this day. I study under a Scottish poet called Don Paterson, who's been my mentor for the last 15 years or so now. I continue to learn but it carried on through the following album, which also became my first book of poetry, called The Hollow of The Hand. It was an album called The Hope Six Demolition Project. Then into the current work that we're coming to perform, but that's a book of poetry written in the Dorset dialect called Orlam. It became an album called I Inside The Old Year Dying. It's become a pattern that I work in. I've always wanted to improve as a songwriter, but I fell in love with poetry. Now I just try to improve at both. I think they're very different disciplines, poetry, as you said, every word counts. It can be very dense, it requires to have everything to make the atmosphere, the emotion, the story work on the page. All you've got is the page and the black ink and the shape that the ink makes on the page. But with song, the words can be much leaner, much more of a sketch because the music will fill out the rest of it, the music will fill out the emotion, the music will either undercut what you're saying, or improve upon it, or double it in its intensity. There's so much more that music takes care of with song, so the words can be a lot less dense.
Baltin: If there's one poem you wish you had written, what is it and why?Harvey: It's so hard, isn't it? To choose one when somebody asks you to. T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, I have come back to that book so many times in my life. I probably read it first as a teenager, and didn't understand it, but knew it was having a big impact on me emotionally, but not quite understanding why. I've read it so many times throughout my life. Reading it heavily again now, and each time, it strikes me in a different way. That would be one. If only I could get anywhere near to writing a poem like that. Not that I ever will, but I say that one just because I'm listening to it and reading it aloud and listening to it and reading it for myself at the moment.
Baltin: Are there older songs that you are playing now on this tour that have completely changed meaning for you or that you appreciate now in a different way, the same way you appreciate TS Eliot differently every time you read it?Harvey: I still enjoy playing some of the earlier songs like “50 Foot Queenie,” like “Dress,” but now being 30 years on since I wrote them. When I wrote them, I was a young woman. I can approach them in a different way now and enjoy them in a different way. I can enjoy them for the strong song that they were and are and yet don't have to fully inhabit that teenager that wrote them. That's how I come to those songs. Then there are other songs that I can fully inhabit at this stage of my life as I am now, and they're probably the more recent songs. I mean, certainly on this tour, we found that performing some of the songs like “Words That Maketh Murder” and “The Glorious Land,” have reached a different level of understanding, looking at what's happening now in the world as to when they were written. Songs and poems can take on different meanings according to the current time that you're in.
Baltin: Are there songs from I Inside the Old Year Dying that you were surprised by how people responded to them live?Harvey: Yeah, a song like “Lwonesome Tonight” actually. I really wasn't sure how that one would go down because it's such a fragile song, it's so delicate, and I didn't know how that would come across. People seem transfixed when we perform that one, so that surprised me. A song like “All Souls,” which we'll be playing on this tour, which on the album relies so much on the atmosphere created by the recording, but again, does seem to work in a trance like kind of way live. We seem to be able to conjure the same spell that we did on the record, so that's also been a welcome surprise.
Baltin: Are there artists that you really admire for the work they did later in their career, and because they still have that passion?Harvey: Probably the thing I admire most in other artists is their ability to keep pushing forward. You mentioned Bob Dylan, but I think Rough and Rowdy Ways, his last album, was lyrically one of the best he's ever done. It was just astonishing, the lyrics on that record. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to see an artist that far down the line in their career and in their wisdom, and they still come out with something new. I always admire Bjork for always pushing herself into new territory, you're never quite sure what's coming next. I love that about her as well.
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