Orlam

Product Information

Another artist might have turned to identifiable folk sounds for this album, with its rural setting, its connection to old stories. You did not. This is a PJ Harvey record; it's recognizable completely as part of your various but unified body of work. But I wonder if you were thinking about folk traditions at all as you were creating the music. But perhaps that kind of thing might be expected from a songwriter producing a book of poetry. What's more surprising is just how good her individual word choices are and how brilliantly she wields language in general, without the comfort of any musical support. It was all wonderfully sort of homemade, you know? We were just feeding off each other in the moment. My vocals were done at the same time, so my voice has the drums and all the other sounds going down it, which leads to this beautiful sort of world that you enter. Everything was recorded in the same room together; all of the sounds are going down every single microphone. We're all very interested in continuing to discover new things and create new sounds, and that gets harder the more work that you've made, because there's more to avoid. But I really feel that we pushed ourselves into quite new places — certainly with my singing, I feel like I haven't sung before like I do on this record. There are some graphic scenes in Orlam of assault and bestiality, which were surprising. But at the same time, it’s not too different from reading a Flannery O’Connor story, looking at the darkness through a different lens.

I find it really enjoyable. It wasn’t something I consciously planned to do. My previous albums had gone out of print on vinyl, and so we had to remaster and recut. Because we were already going to the trouble, I got the idea to present more of the demos. It was a pleasurable thing to really hear myself searching for different voices, different ways of approaching different subjects. Can you explain the story and the world of Orlam and the new album, for those who might not have yet had the pleasure of entering them? One of my favorite songs of yours, “Nina in Ecstasy,” didn’t make the cut with the demo albums because it’s a B-side, but you used to play it at concerts. I saw you perform it as your final encore in Denver shortly after 9/11, and it was very emotional. What’s the story behind that song?Her poetry about the haunted Gore Wood conjures vivid imagery, enough maybe to lend itself to other types of art. Does she hope it might become something else, like a movie? Ira’s world is a magical realist outpost of the West Country where PJ Harvey grew up. Conjured through tightly rhyming poems, often taking the form of songs or incantations, the village of Underwhelem appears: “Voul village in a hag-ridden hollow. / All ways to it winding, all roads to it narrow.” Like a more terrifying Llareggub, Underwhelem is populated by a large and peculiar cast of characters. There’s Ira and her family; their sinister neighbours, including the world’s worst babysitters, The Bowditches of Dogwell; ghostly civil war soldiers; and the many presiding spirits of woods and fields.

There is a theme here of elemental transformation—I think of the phrase “I Inside the Old I Dying,” which is such a heavy and gorgeous way to describe that sort of foundational change. Are you a person who has always embraced change? In “A Child’s Question (July),” PJ Harvey sings in a jaunty rhythm, “Who’s inneath the Ooser-Rod?/Horny devil? Goaty God?” Ann Powers: In the song "Prayer at the Gate," which opens I Inside the Old Year Dying , you have a line: "Speak your wordle to me." "Wordle" here is not a popular American puzzle, but the term for "world" in the Dorset dialect, which you use throughout the album. The phrase serves a purpose inside the story that the song is telling, but it also describes what you've done with this album, with the book Orlam that you published last year and the drawings you've made depicting the landscapes in these projects: You have spoken a world.

Orlam – Special Edition

I'm so glad you brought that up — I've been thinking about your voice on this record and how it does reach a new place, but carries with it the voices you've given us in the past. Many people might mark the beginning of your intense vocal experimentation at the album White Chalk , when you first focused on your higher register. But throughout your career, you've distorted your voice, both as it emanates from your body and using studio effects. Far from the pastoral madding crowds of Thomas Hardy’s Dorset, PJ Harvey contours an altogether more gritty and at times ominous exposé of rustic traditions, woven through a tableau of natural world simplicities and charms. PJ Harvey was born in Dorset in 1969. Her debut poetry collection,The Hollow of the Hand,was created in collaboration with photographer Seamus Murphy.

Do you feel a song like “50ft Queenie” differently when you perform it live now? It was a staple of your last tour. PJ Harvey's latest album is I Inside the Old Year Dying. It's a knotty musical expansion of the world she created in Orlam, the epic poem Harvey published in 2022.O wildest, wildest wood / of goodness and not good” – Gore Woods are where Harvey creates her most vivid poetry. Here Ira meets the ghost of a Christ-like wounded soldier, Wyman-Elvis, who becomes a symbol of faith and salvation (his name and his message, Love Me Tender , are no coincidence). The woods are also the home of Orlam, the oracle of Underwhelem, a spirit manifested from the eyeball of Ira’s beloved lamb, planted high in an elm tree. There’s something of Dead Papa Toothwort from Max Porter’s Lanny here, a rapturous, unsettling spirit of the green. Following the first publication in April, a special edition of Orlam incorporating Harvey’s own illustrative artwork will be published in October 2022.