Before launching her explosive 1992 debut album, *Dry*, which fused lava-like folk-blues and initiated her ever-evolving artistic career, PJ Harvey studied sculpture in London. Her continuous exploration of art and experimentation with new things laid the foundation for her subsequent musical creations, demonstrating a commitment to pushing creative boundaries.
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03-20, 2025During her Australian tour, she recalled the time in an interview with Karen Leng of Double J: "I remember my tutors being a bit baffled because every time I produced something, I wanted the next thing to be almost the complete opposite, using different materials, depicting different things." This curiosity has driven Harvey's exciting artistic transformations over the past three decades, including 10 solo albums, two poetry collections, and countless collaborations, showcasing her versatility and innovative spirit.
Harvey is one of Britain's most acclaimed contemporary artists and the only artist to have won the Mercury Prize twice. The first time was for her vibrant, nostalgic rock album *Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea* in 2000, and the second was for 2011's *Let England Shake*—a harp-led anti-war folk album that examined Harvey's homeland's bloody past and present, with all songs sung in a high, ethereal voice that was a stark contrast to the husky shouts and screams of her previous two decades.
"I have an insatiable curiosity about things I don't know," she said. "I want to learn. I want to see. I want to do things I don't know if I can do, and that's just in me. I'm not sure why that is, but it's been that way since I was a child. It's this great curiosity that drives me to see what I can do, and you can only do that by entering new territories." This innate drive pushes her to constantly evolve and explore uncharted creative landscapes.
Harvey, now 55, says she has a "more rounded perspective" than she did when she was younger, which allows her to be more engaged on stage, as those who were mesmerized by her Australian performances can attest. "Generally, as you get older, you become more accepting of yourself," she said. "You see that you're just a tiny part of a whole, rather than a huge whole that everything revolves around, as you might feel when you're younger. These days, I feel I can be more of a vessel for the music to pass through, because there isn't the ego inflation to get in the way."
Her latest innovation—and the reason for Harvey's first Australian tour in eight years this March—is 2023's *I Inside The Old Year Dying*, a psychedelic folk album based on Harvey's epic poem *Orlam*, published the previous year. While the specifics of *I Inside…*—which tells the story of a nine-year-old girl living under a seer in the form of the eyes of a dead lamb (mistaken for Elvis)—may confound all but the most diligent listeners, it's a powerful, impressionistic album in which rural beauty and innocence are intertwined with violence and decay, themes that echo Harvey's work from her debut single, "Dress," onward.
*Orlam* is written in Dorset dialect, named after the southwestern English county where Harvey grew up and resides, and it took nearly a decade to research the local language, myths, and ecology—a process that reconnected Harvey with her homeland and the wider natural world. "It was a humbling discovery that I'm just a tiny part of a very big picture, that I'm the latest addition to something that's been going on for tens of thousands of years," she said. "It made me feel much more connected to nature, even though I'm a country girl anyway. I grew up in a small village that was farmland: sheep, cows, crops growing. That was my life. I studied the seasons. I meticulously recorded what was happening every day in each season as I walked through the countryside and the woods. I feel it really inspired me, and it can never be forgotten now."
Harvey didn't have *Orlam* or the album in mind when she began her research, but rather a need to "take a break" from the war and violence of *Let England Shake* and 2016's *The Hope Six Demolition Project* (a politically conscious album drawn from travels in Afghanistan and Kosovo). "I almost needed to become quite introverted again and delve into this small corner of the world that is Dorset and spend eight years writing a book in Dorset dialect, which was exactly the medicine I needed. I didn't set out to create work from it. I did it for myself, to heal myself, but also to try and find where I might need to go next as a person, not necessarily as a working artist, just as a person."
But as Harvey felt the importance of "bringing back to the fore" Dorset's culture and dialect (which still exists but is declining in popularity), *Orlam* and *I Inside…* took shape. "We're losing our local dialects, as most places are—I was particularly aware of it in Australia, with the Indigenous languages all over the country," she said. "I think it's a beautiful thing to try and keep them alive. We can learn so much about ourselves now through ancient languages."
Harvey says she was daunted by the scope of *Orlam* and *I Inside…*, but she persevered. "On the one hand, I felt like I wasn't worthy. On the other hand, I felt, 'Well, somebody's got to try and do this.' I often feel that way about my work. A lot of the time you feel, 'Oh, how could I possibly think I could do this? You're terrible! You're a hopeless writer-performer.' And then, other times, you just [think], 'Well, you have to try.'" This constant self-doubt and determination fuels her creative process, leading to groundbreaking and innovative works.
