A string doesn't sound like an extensive tour to me.




That wasn't posted on her official FB page. Interesting. Leak maybe?
Thanks for sharing. I'm trying not to listen to these songs too much, as I want to enjoy the album as a whole. Besides, the release is less than 2 weeks away!

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"He intentado ahogar mis penas, pero el hijo de puta aprendió a nadar."

Faceplace • El Jay

Whoa. The song sounds devastating. Love it!

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Must be a leak. I'm trying to listen too, but this just popped up.

We're getting close...

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Click to see the PJ Harvey Gigography

I know she spoke about the song she sampled in England in a recent interview. Did she mention the name?

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I'll rub it, until it...

^ I thought that was the reggae sample she used in another song. The sample used in "England" was uncovered by someone here I thought. They even linked to a youtube version of the whole track.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelqPcoaAB8"

Yes, but it certainly sounds like more than just SF and NYC..

Black Hearted Love, where did that press release come from?

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelqPcoaAB8"

Oh, I must have missed that. It's not Blood & Fire, it's by Kaseem Miro, I just went through her interviews and saw she mentioned it in her NME interview. It's this song if anyone else missed it link

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I'll rub it, until it...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/the ... 45911.html

PJ Harvey took poetry classes and learned to play the autoharp for her stunning new album Let England Shake . And it’s only now that she’s had the confidence to take on the world, penning songs that take in battlefields, bloodshed and bleak landscapes – but with a mercifully upbeat backing. She talks to SINÉAD GLEESON .

IN A LONDON boutique hotel on a drizzle-filled day, Polly Jean Harvey is perched on a sofa that almost swallows her up. She’s tiny. Petite. Diminutive. All of the above. Then there’s her disproportionately huge eyes. She is dressed in black, friendly and relaxed, with a hint of wariness. Far more striking in person, she, like most artists, is professional about publicity chats with journalists. She is here to promote her exceptional new album, Let England Shake , a whirling dervish of a record and a very distant relative of predecessor White Chalk . The latter was an eerie, painfully introspective record, but these songs are much more about the external world and feel less personalised.

“Yes, I think it would be fair to say that. It’s certainly a record that’s looking outwards at the world around us. In the past, I’ve been more interested in the external landscape of emotion and relationships and the way we deal with each other. This time, it’s still those issues I’m addressing, but in much more tangible, concrete language. I wanted the record to be communal, so that it was open for other people to come in and take hold of it.” This shift from the inner to the outer world is represented by the themes she explores. There’s war – from Gallipoli to Afghanistan – immigration, England and Englishness. Months before the record was released, she performed the title track on BBC’s Andrew Marr Show , a programme more synonymous with politics than music. Is she political? “Always. All my life, I’ve been profoundly interested in what’s happening in the world we live in. When I talk about England, I wanted ambiguity, so that I could talk about emotions that anybody might feel regardless of what country they live in. I tried to describe those feelings of love/hate and push/pull that you have with your country of origin. All of the disappointments and hopes that you have.”

Harvey admits that despite her lifelong political leanings, she couldn’t have written a record like this before now. “I’m an instinctive writer, and there was a sense of urgency about tackling issues – and with the right language – that affect me now. It’s taken me a long time to gather my confidence in my writing. If you’re going to deal with such weighty subject matter, you have to do it well or don’t do it at all. I didn’t have the confidence to try to write like this until three or four years ago.” That confidence possibly came with a change in her songwriting process, something she has altered over the years. Where once it was led by guitars and even her voice, she says that words are now her “primary concern”. Harvey writes every day, not just songs but poetry that sometimes mutates into lyrics, short stories or even plays. The words that became the backbone of Let England Shake have been percolating for years. “It took me a long, long time to write these lyrics. I worked on them for nearly three years. Just words. No music. I had to discard a lot of it that wasn’t working, and would only save one line from 20, but that’s just part of the process.” The discipline of writing every day makes sense for a writer. I ask about a rumour I’d heard that, while the album was in progress, she took a poetry class to learn about rhyme and metre. “Oh yes, I have done. Over my years as a writer, say the last 20 years, I’ve always kept learning. It’s very important to me, so I often go and do writing classes or painting or drawing classes. Even language classes. I’m always doing night school.” She puts this down to a curiosity for new things. For the new album she learned to play autoharp, just as she’d learned piano for White Chalk . “The autoharp is linked to what I said about learning. I like to try new experiments in terms of sound and language. Ones that will lead me into new areas. And there are lots of ways of playing an instrument I’m very familiar with, like the guitar. Physically you can affect it’s sound just by how you play it.”

Harvey lives in rural Dorset, not far from her parents. When she’s not making music she paints and draws, but thinks of herself as a full-time writer. It’s interesting she chooses this word over “musician”. “They’re all linked, they’re all inter- connected. Painting, music, writing: they’re just different ways of articulation.” This expression extends to her physicality and the way she represents herself on stage. The once-garish make-up and Stars and Stripes sequinned bra were pure theatre and a playful take on persona. “What I wear on stage, the lighting, where people are standing – all of that is quite important to me. I’m a visual artist, so I think very visually even when I’m dealing with sound. Often I can see the way a song should sound before I make the sound. I can see it, almost in colours . . . ” She trawls off and I ask if perhaps she has synaesthesia. “Yes, maybe it is a bit of that all right. Sometimes I know the subject I want to discuss, but I know it more by essence than by words.” At this points she bursts into “what am I talking about?” laughter. The huge smoky eyes that dominate her face light up. Harvey is quite shy and fiercely protective of her privacy. Her relationship with singer Nick Cave is well-documented, but questions about her private life are not entertained, although she will admit she’s a big reader (she loves James Joyce, Harold Pinter and TS Eliot).

People’s urge to know more about her often leads to a rush to interpret her songs as autobiography, which irks her, especially when it’s clear she hasn’t drowned a daughter (Down by the Water) or killed any soldiers (The Words That Maketh Murder). “It’s still a relatively new phenomenon that songwriters sing their own songs. So many songs are about first-hand experience, but a lot are much more about adopting perspectives or different lives purely as a way of articulating points of view that aren’t your own. There are a lot of voices on this record, and I was fearful that people would think it was me being preachy or dogmatic. I tried very hard to make the narrator of these songs impartial, to merely narrate the action.” That action takes in battlefields, bloodshed and bleak landscapes, but the musical backdrop is upbeat. There’s a rousing bugle on the title track and a swirling rush of sounds all the way through. There’s even a sample of Niney the Observer’s reggae classic Blood Fire (“I love reggae!” she says, but won’t elaborate). Long-term collaborators John Parrish, Flood and Mick Harvey are all involved, and it’s a credit to their collective creative partnerships that through years of working together they’re still able to reinterpret and reinvent Harvey’s sounds. “I always like working with a variety of people, and I knew these players were the ones that could bring the songs to their fruition. I wanted the music to be quite fluid and indefinable and I was after that swirling sound that you talked of. For me, there needed to be a certain confusion about the music, to echo the times we’re living in. I also wanted them to have a big melodic quality, and to be songs that would lend themselves to being sung by many people, many voices.” The album was recorded in a cliff-top church close to where the singer lives. It took just five weeks (as opposed to White Chalk ’s five months), and she says it was recorded live, with everyone playing together. “It had to be recorded like that because it’s a record about community. I needed the musicians to react to each other to get that energy on the record. Most of the songs were recorded with two or three takes of everyone playing them.”

Let England Shake is another triumph in Polly Harvey’s career. It’s an immutable piece of work, brilliant in its range and inventiveness. “With this record, I’ve been thinking about the fact that we’re all from all over the place, and we’re all interconnected. It comes back to the way human beings relate to each other, which I’ve always done as a writer, in all my songs.”

England is mine

Three Lions

PJ Harvey looks at nationality and Englishness on her new album, but she’s not the first to slay that old dragon.

* MORRISSEY
From the geographical name-checking of Panic to the self-examination of Irish Blood, English Heart , Moz has always been interested in Britishness, even if his Union flag-waving remains ambiguous.

* PETE DOHERTY
Diamond Geezer Doherty wears his Englishness like a bad trilby, from The Libertines’ Likely Lads track to Babyshambles’ titular nod with Down in Albion.

* KATE BUSH
On Oh England , my Lionheart Kate Bush talks of Peter Pan, Kensington Park, London Bridge, Shakespeare, Spitfires and the Thames. There’s a definite connection between the song and PJ’s The Last English Rose .

...already posted - you People are so fast............... (lovely!)

First mention of Captain Beefheart in any of Polly's interviews since his death I've read thus far.

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment ... 25277.html

Queen of darkness
PJ Harvey’s new album is a stark meditation on modern England. But there are still reasons for hope, she tells Eamon Sweeney

Here's some rather startling food for thought. Polly Jean Harvey first strapped on an electric guitar at the tender age of 17.

Ever since that fateful day, she's enjoyed a remarkably consistent career. What other contemporary British recording alternative artist, male or female, is still making such a similarly iconic and influential contribution? Apart from Damon Albarn and Thom Yorke, there's an extremely telling and gaping void.

Since leaving the moderately successful Bristol band Automatic Dlamini in 1991 to form the PJ Harvey trio, Polly has authored eight studio albums of dazzling diversity and ambition along with several other collaborations.

Choosing her best album depends on what PJ Harvey fan you ask. Some would plump for the ragged rawness of Dry (1992) or Rid of Me (1993). I know several who swear Is This Desire? (1998) is the overlooked masterpiece, while others fly a flag for White Chalk (2007) over the crossover success of the Mercury Music Prize-winning Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000). Truth be told, there isn't a dud in the entire batch.

Polly Jean Harvey hasn't lost her unique capacity to astonish on Let England Shake, a meditative song cycle about England, war, nationality and history with universal and timeless resonances. A pretty and impeccably polite Harvey is sitting opposite Day & Night in the library room of the Gore Hotel in Kensington, a room adorned with a huge portrait of Kind Edward VII and an intimidating wall of ancient dusty tomes. It's the perfect setting to explore the motivation behind this latest English-themed opus.

Let England Shake deals with the dysfunctions of modern Britain, society and all the other clouds hanging over early 21st-century life.

"I think we're beginning to all sense a building up of urgency," she reflects. "This feeling was coupled with having a new-found confidence that I was at a stage in my journey as a writer where I could be able to address these things properly. I hadn't felt confident enough before, not only in my language skills, but in my stage of life as a human being. I'm a bit older now and I feel a pressing need to really start using our own voices fully. Amidst all this gloom, there is something wonderful in the fact that people now want to start saying exactly what they think and feel."

Just as Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea is sometimes lazily pigeonholed as her 'New York' album, Let England Shake shouldn't be regarded as the 'British' one. For a start, they're all British.

"Obviously, I was born in England, so I'm always dealing with that," she says. "I wanted to use ambiguous language and an openness that other people could fully enter into, no matter where they come from. We all wrestle with intense feelings of love, hate, fear, hope and disappointment for our respective countries. It's all intertwined and no matter what country you live in, you feel these things daily."

Let England Shake was recorded in the space of five weeks in a church in Harvey's native Dorset. "I had Berlin in mind and I went to see a few recording studios, but nothing felt right," she explains. "I was at loss where to record it. It was a pure coincidence that a man I knew, who ran this church in Dorset primarily as an arts space, offered it to me as somewhere to rehearse, so it found me so to speak. I think it lent itself very well to the record. Obviously, in recording in such a big stone building, you get a lot of space. I think there's a sense of space on the record, which helps with the subject matter. The soundscape I was looking for was something indefinable -- difficult to pin down to any particular style, era or country. I just wanted it to be quite rootless. The space of this church presented a wonderful opportunity to try and create that."

One person who loves Let England Shake, but sadly didn't live to see its release, is the great Captain Beefheart himself, Don Van Vliet, who died on December 17 just gone. Polly lost a massive source of inspiration, who'd also become a creative colleague, confidante and dear friend.

"I feel very, very lucky to have had that relationship with him, which started back in 1994," she says in tribute. "I always sent him the rough demos of each project. Later on, he'd get the finished album. I was always interested in what he thought. We had an ongoing phone relationship where we'd spend ages talking to each other for hours on end."

Jack White has just written a lovely and long poetic epitaph, which says the singing and painting Captain will be glad to see "his creations spinning in the living world of canvas and stereo".

Intriguingly, the PJ work that the Captain enthused most about was Uh Huh Her, an album that doesn't seem to enjoy a place of prominence in Harvey's canon. "All I can do is do my work and do it as well as I can," she reflects. "When it leaves my hands and goes out into the world, there's nothing more I can do with it. I don't spend time analysing how it gets received, as that'll drain my energy in a way that I don't want drained. I've just got to get on with it. Obviously, you always hope that it'll be recognised, but I learnt long ago there's nothing I can do about it, and nor would I want to."

PJ's favourite part of the whole process is being onstage. "I love playing live because it feels like the vital and most fundamental part to what I do," she enthuses. "The songs make most sense in that shared physical moment of their coming together in real time as opposed to a studio. People gather together in a room for music. It's a ritual that goes back to the very reasons that storytelling and songwriting ever began in the first place; it's all about a need for sharing and communication. I've loved playing the Olympia. It's got such a history in those walls that you really feel it and soak it up. I've very fond memories of the warmth and exuberance of Irish audiences everywhere and every time I've played."

As Polly rehearses a set for a tour of Europe beginning in February, which also takes in a couple of gigs in the US, she listens to her earlier work to compile a set list, the only time she ever threads on these musical records of the past and their towering 50-foot Queenies.

"I've a very odd relationship with my back catalogue," she admits. "I do find I can deal with it quite objectively, because it's a long time ago, but, then again, I'm obviously going to feel very affectionate towards all of it. I'm astonished at how remarkably different it sounds. I'm very glad and grateful of that. Otherwise..." she pauses briefly for thought. "Well, I imagine I would have started getting bored a very long ago."

Let England Shake is released next Friday. For further information, music videos and more, visit pjharvey.net

I read a post from halo eighteen over at the unforumzed
but didn't put the source unfortunatly
http://www.unforumzed.com/showthread.ph ... uot/page58

Apparently the album is available now over at an Irish-based site called Eircom. But only people in Ireland can access it, of course.

Via Twitter:

New PJ Harvey album Let England Shake seems to b available at #eircom #musichub. Official release 15th Feb. Liking what I hear. #nowplaying

http://eircommusichub.ie/#/Release/3...0%94_PJ_Harvey

you can't preview tracks on that site without signing up - which is free for Eircom broadband users, but there's a monthly charge for everyone else to even register first.

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^ saw that last night. very annoying, ha!

:O C'mon Irish PJ fans. Get to work!

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