During the interview portion of PJ Harvey‘s multimedia event in Brooklyn on Tuesday — her first U.S. live appearance in six years, which included a poetry reading, a conversation, and a musical performance — she told the audience that she felt her voice has only gotten better with age. “I definitely feel it’s the best singing I’ve ever done,” she said. “I think being older helps. One of the good things about aging, actually, is the voice is in a really lovely place. It’s much richer, and I can access much deeper levels with it.” Then the 54-year-old proved it.
Performing as a trio with her longtime collaborator John Parish and multi-instrumentalist James Johnston, Harvey presented five songs from her excellent I Inside the Old Year Dying album, which came out this past summer. Even though they’d been doing the songs with additional musicians on a European tour in recent months, each song sounded lush and full. And Harvey’s voice indeed sounded rich.
Although she’d said earlier in the evening that one of her goals with the album was to avoid singing like herself — she told the audience that the mandate was such that “If I ever started sounding like PJ Harvey, John would pull me up and go, ‘No, you have to sing it a different way’” — her voice, which transitions from alto to soprano ranges with grace on “Seem an I,” couldn’t sound like anyone else’s. Parish and Johnston handled the instruments and backing vocals for the first three songs, and Harvey picked up an acoustic for “A Child’s Question, August,” as Parish moved behind a drum kit. She made her voice sound thin on the opening lyrics, “Starling swarms will soon be lorn,” and deep and Kingly as she channeled Elvis with the “Love me tender” refrain.
The trio, obviously well-rehearsed, navigated some of the proggy chord changes of “I Inside the Old Year Dying,” a song that feels almost like a live improvisation even on the album. But still she summoned the innocent emotion that inspired the song, whose lyrics come from her novel-in-verse, Orlam, which came out last year.
The first third of the evening was dedicated to Orlam, as Harvey read poems from the book. Since she’d written it in the archaic dialect of Dorset, the county in England where she grew up, she displayed modern English translations of the verses. As with Harvey’s best songs, the poems were variously dirty, bloody, bawdy, and moving, depending on the theme. Later, she remarked that it was special for her to return to the poems as poetry rather than singing them as her songs, since she hadn’t read them as such in months. She even sang the words to some of the poems in melodies that didn’t come across the same way on the album. Her recitation couldn’t help but raise the question of when she’ll release an audiobook of her reading Orlam.
In the interview portion of the event, which found her speaking with The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich and, later, Parish, she reflected on how writing poetry saved her career in a way. “I can remember when I was writing the songs for The Hope Six Demolition Project, the songs didn’t come easy,” Harvey said. “It felt like I was climbing uphill all the time. … I can remember during the writing thinking, ‘This feels like homework. I’m not sure if this is what I should be doing anymore.’” Writing poetry relit her creative spark, and she was surprised when songs started coming from some of the verses she wrote. “I think even the musicality of poetry, there’s an embedded music in it,” she said. “The chiming of the rhyme is songlike.” (She cited Seamus Heaney as a favorite poet of hers whose verses are songlike.)
To challenge herself further, she said she started learning piano and how to fingerpick on the guitar. This led to a creative rejuvenation. “Going back on tour again with I Inside the Old Year Dying … was absolutely a joy,” she said. “It was so lovely to be playing the songs with my band and singing. It really is the love of my life actually.”
During the chat, she and Parish also recalled when they first met — when she was 16 — and how he gave her a hard time during her audition for his band at the time, Automatic Dlamini. “From this teenage girl, I couldn’t quite square the words she was singing at the time with somebody with that voice,” he said. “There seemed to be something timeless in the voice, and I knew it straightaway.” The moment that everything clicked for him was when she improvised vocals on the song “Giraffe in Warszawa.”
When Petrusich commented on Harvey’s varied career, adding that she would have been a good candidate for an “Eras Tour,” like Taylor Swift, Harvey looked almost surprised as the audience cheered. But what was clear in Brooklyn was that Harvey’s interests are firmly in the present. As she pointed out, the concept behind the title “I Inside the Old Year Dying” isn’t entirely sad — it’s also about rebirth. And her performance showed that when she returns for a full U.S. tour next year, the performances will be unlike any she has done before.
PJ Harvey set list:
“Seem an I”
“I Inside the Old I Dying”
“A Noiseless Noise”
“A Child’s Question, August”
“I Inside the Old Year Dying”
