In a rare interview, PJHarveyUK talks about her surreal new novel in verse, the new album she's recording, and how she feels about her early material. 'At that time, it was a type of expression I needed. Things change. You get older.'
], I was looking outward, looking at war, looking at the political landscape, looking at what was happening to all sorts of places in the world. I think I’ve always just followed my instinct as a writer, and my instinct was telling me I needed to change the scale to come back down to a small scale. One person, one village, one wood, and almost needed to as a resting place, if you like, or somewhere to sort of gather my energies again.
Still in use would be words like “t’other,” for “the other” and “b’aint”; instead of saying, “he isn’t” or “it isn’t,” you’d go, “b’aint.” Meaning that “it ain’t” — it “be ain’t” — if you see what I’m mean., too, like “munter,” which you wrote in a footnote meant “fugly.”]. I had a lot of fun writing this book. I really wanted it to be not only a book of a lot of dark and very sensitive and emotional things, but also of great humor.
A lot of the knowledge about lambs in the book is firsthand. Very often lambs die, whether they’ve been born with a weakness or were cade lambs, and one of the first things that happens is that the rooks [scavenger birds] will come and take the easiest part to take, which would be an eyeball. I’m sure it’s very tasty. So that is how you would find the lambs often, already half eaten.
Often, the Dorset folklore had to do with farming. There’s one [piece of folklore] in the poem where, if a cow calves too early, and the calf dies, you take that calf and you put it in a maiden ash tree, a very young ash tree, facing east. And that’s supposed to stop the rest of the cattle from calving too early.
I think because a lot of time had passed since making those demos and now, it felt like a nice thing to do. To let people in, to see a little more of the process, how the songs first start. Also, I was very attached to the demos because they’re always the first incarnation of the songs. There’s something about the spirit of the song being caught in a way that it’s never quite captured again on the album.Yeah, it was interesting.
You do so much of the artistic process, whether writing or making art, alone. Do you consider yourself an introvert? Do you feel introversion has its advantages?