pj harvey poetry tour

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PJ Harvey  

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PJ Harvey (born October 9, 1969) is the stage name of seminal British indie/alternative rock musician Polly Jean Harvey, who through steady critically-acclaimed releases has become of the one most revered artists in the genre, hailing from Bridport, Dorset, England.

Born in the coastal town of Bridport, Dorset, Polly Jean Harvey picked up her first instrument in her early teens, the saxophone. She later joined the octet instrumental group, Bologne, during her time in school before becoming one half of the folk duo, the Polekats. It wasn’t until Harvey was 19 however that the singer began to grow in recognition with the Bristol-based group, Automatic Dlamini. It was here Harvey met John Parish and Rob Ellis who would subsequently prove to have a huge influence on the musician’s future output. After recording the album “Here Catch, Shouted His Father” towards the tail-end of 1989 and early 1990, Harvey left the group and formed her own alongside Ellis and Oliver.

Initially a trio, PJ Harvey recorded their debut album “Dry” in 1991 for under $5,000, and played their first show at a bowling alley at Charmoith Village Hall. The band’s debut single, “Dress”, was released by Too Pure Records in October 2001, drawing instant and widespread critical acclaim. Following the release PJ Harvey was invited to record a live radio session for John Peel, and recorded the tracks “Oh, My Lover”, “Victory”, “Sheela-Na-Gig”, and “Water”. PJ Harvey’s debut album was subsequently released in February 1992. Highlighting Harvey’s tremblingly candid lyrics, and raw heavy-hitting guitar, the musician was later named Rolling Stone’s Best Songwriter and Best New Female Singer in late 1992.

After singing with Island Records in mid-1992, the trio enlisted the help of producer Steve Albini to aid the recording of their sophomore “Rid of Me”. Featuring a punk-infused cover of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited”, the full-length was released in May 1993. In support of the record, PJ Harvey embarked on an extensive tour of the UK, before heading to the U.S. in the summer, which is where tensions stated to rise between members. Following a final tour as a trio in support of U2 in August, the group announced it had disbanded with Polly Harvey continuing as a solo artist.

Her debut solo album, “To Bring You My Love”, arrived in February 1995 extolled by critics, and followed by her last full-length of the millennium “Is This Desire?” in 1998. Marked by themes of love and affection, and winning the 2001 Mercury Prize, PJ Harvey’s fifth studio album “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea” was released in October 2000. Cementing the multi-instrumentalist’s position as an uncompromising, wildly-talented, high-integrity music maker, the record was seen as her finest to date. The studio album “Uh Huh Her” appeared in 2004 in which Harvey played every instrument on the album, followed by “White Chalk” in 2007. Winning her second Mercury Prize, PJ Harvey’s eighth studio album “Let England Shake” was released in February 2011.

Live reviews

I had never heard that many songs by PJ Harvey when I saw her live. A friend of mine had an extra ticket, and she was like, "You should come. You won't regret this." She played a few PJ Harvey songs for me before we left, and I thought "Ok, I guess I'll go." I had nothing else to do that night so I went, and my life was forever changed! PJ Harvey is this quirky, indie rock, folk rock singer whose magic doesn't translate until you see them live.

When I saw her in 2012, it was a few months after her album "Let England Shake." She had a long black feather in her hair and a magnetic personality. Her voice had this fanciful energetic quality to it that echoed into the entire crowd, which was pretty amazing coming from such a tiny singer.

One of the reasons, I think she's so awesome as a singer live is because she's a great improvisational singer. No rendition is exactly the same as the other, I could tell.

She yodels; she plays the autoharp; she sings earnestly. I've never seen a singer, who so completely trusts her audience, and when I say trust I mean she trusted all of us to hear the music, to appreciate it without the added distractions that contemporary singers add to their performances.

She sang from the heart. She sang her truth, and the entire experience was magical, mellow and contemplative. I like to go to performances, where I can just chill and feel the whole world around me transported to me through music. She moved me profoundly.

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PJ Harvey is one of Britain's most critically acclaimed artists having won the Mercury Prize award twice. She also holds an MBE for her services to music, so clearly she is rather adored in her homeland. One would not imagine her as a festival act, yet when she stepped onto the Bestival stage following the release of 'Let England Shake' the crowd erupted in cheers.

An eccentric through and through, the multi-instrumentalist made sure the crowd were continuously involved within the show. Constant interaction kept the growing number of revellers engaged as Harvey ran through a sort of career smorgasbord setlist for those who were not familiar with her work. Performing a bold rendition of the title track from 'Let England Shake', she swiftly moved on to earlier material such as 'The Devil'.

Her ability as an artist is applaudable and there is no real variation from the high quality of work in this variable setlist. The emotive way in which PJ delivers her personal sonnets is captivating as you imagine it must be exhausting to continuously lay your soul bare onstage for thousands to see.

Unfortunately, I found the pictures to be the best of the show. Second was PJ's music, but I wasn't blown away by it... It's a pity to say so, but I feel like she stood still in her style, and I feel no surprise as with 'This is England'.

Finally, the American woman leading the show annoyed me with both her pace and her ongoing praise, which felt like a forced feeding to me. I want to like things myself, because I judge them myself, not because someone else repeatedly talks about how great, unique, and special they are.

In general, I was disappointed by the whole show, not the least because listening to PJ's poetry would have been nicer to experience, read by someone else.

I feel really sorry to express my disappointment, but when I would have loved the show, I would have told so as well...

I think this was one of her best performances i've ever seen. PJ Harevey was superb! The band behind her are extraordinary and i loved that she individually introduced them half way through the set. Her voice was exquisite and it was fascinating to see how she dealt with a couple of awkward situations, making everything more intimate and special (the night we saw her) And her outfit was wonderful. I think Brixton Academy is the perfect setting for this kind of gig, particularly the sound system and I’m quite fussy. Absolutely LOVED the show

The majority of the songs she sang were from her last two albums, but she also did some of her classics such as 50 Ft Queenie, Down By The Water, When Under Ether... The band was so perfect and PJ was so full of energy. It was such a dynamic gig, she also stated herself that it was 'wonderful' to be in Istanbul. The audience was so pleased by the performance, almost every song was sung by hundreds. Even after the encore 'Near the Memorials of Vietnam and Lincoln' the crowd didn't dissolve, they eagerly clapped, cheered and asked for more.

What a fabulous show by a fabulous artist and band. the Shrine is magnificent venue; sort of a cross between a factory and a giant European church with great acoustics.

we got in a little late because parking near USC is impossible. but once in we were in heaven.

my favorite was To bring you my love. the best. and by the way, it plays on Peaky Blinders.

dont know her work as well and i should and no music critic but she was in great voice, the band amazing.

well worth going

they need to sell merch!

Energetic. If you like PJs most recent work,The Hope Six Demolition Project and Let England Shake, this concert pleased. John Parish was on hand along with about 6 additional band members, supplying lots of percussion and guitar. PJ was in fine singing form. Show went about an hour and 10 minutes and then a 10 minute encore. Only minor disappointments were the venue and the lack of more early material to balance the new material.

She is perhaps my favourite artist of all time, love all her records, and saw her last time she was in amsterdam. unfortunally her last record of 2016 only has one good track, in my opinion. In her concerts she plays 95% of the time the songs from her last album, then one or maybe two of older songs, therefore I would not recommend to go to her 2016 tour. Such a pity... hope next album is awesome again.

An absolutely mesmerising performance.

Performance is definitely the correct word, the show was the most perfect Edinburgh Festival evening I can remember.

Largely featuring music from the Hope Six Demolition Project but with a selection of classics from her back catalogue, the audience could not help but be entranced.

The only regret we had was that we were not able to go both evenings.

Fabulous and distant, always in charge of everything. A great band, two hours of concert and several interesting moments. The set-list, is exactly the same of the whole tour, includes songs like 'To Bring You My Love', 'Donw By The Water' and 'Shame' in addition to the themes of his last albums. She is unique.

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An Evening With PJ Harvey

• Date Oct 2 , 2024
• Event Starts 8:00 PM
• Doors Open 6:30 PM
• Ticket Prices $69.50
• On Sale On Sale Now
• Ages 18 & Over with Valid Government ID

ALBUMS AND RELEASES:

From the outset of her career, the work of PJ Harvey has commanded attention.  A multi-instrumentalist, she is primarily a vocalist, guitarist and pianist.

In 1991, Harvey formed the eponymous bass/drums/guitar trio in Dorset, England and by that autumn had released the debut single ‘Dress’ on independent label, Too Pure.  Dry , released March 1992, was hailed globally as an astonishing debut album, particularly in the United States, where Rolling Stone magazine named Harvey ‘Best Songwriter’ and ‘Best New Female Singer’ of 1992.

In 1993, she signed to Island Records and released her second album  Rid Of Me . The album, supported by a lengthy world tour, brought Harvey her first Mercury Music Prize nomination. The original trio dissolved and Harvey’s solo follow-up,  4-Track Demos  was released in the autumn of 1993.

To Bring You My Love , an eclectic and starkly original album followed in 1995, and was accompanied by live performances that saw Harvey explore a more theatrical edge on stage. She received her second Mercury Music Prize nomination, two Grammy Award nominations, and ‘Artist of the Year’ awards from both Rolling Stone and Spin.

Her fourth album  Is This Desire?  released in September 1998, attracted plaudits globally, gaining several BRIT and Grammy Award nominations. The much anticipated follow up,  Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea , was released in October 2000 and went on to win Harvey’s first Mercury Music Prize. ‘Stories…’ was supported by a sold-out worldwide tour. After a summer of live dates, including the first rock concert to be held at London’s Tate Modern gallery, Harvey finished work on her next album,  Uh Huh Her .

White Chalk  was her critically-acclaimed seventh studio album, which marked a departure as it was composed almost entirely on piano. It was supported by a string of notable solo performances including Manchester International Festival, The Royal Festival Hall, the Hay-On-Wye Festival of Literature, the New Yorker Festival, Sydney Opera House and a performance at Copenhagen Opera House for the Crown Prince couple.

In 2006  PJ Harvey: The Peel Sessions  was released – a collection of recordings for the veteran British broadcaster John Peel, spanning her career to date.

Harvey’s 2011 album,  Let England Shake , was created with long-standing collaborators Flood, John Parish, and Mick Harvey. The songs focus on both her home country and events further afield in which it has embroiled itself. The record evokes the troubled spirit of its time, whilst also looking back through our history.  Let England Shake  won Harvey her second Mercury Music Prize, setting her apart as the only artist to have won the award on two occasions, an achievement recognised by The Guinness Book Of Records. The album was also awarded ‘Album of the Year’ at the 2012 Ivor Novello Awards and was named ‘#1 Album of the Year’ by numerous publications including The Sunday Times, Los Angeles Times, Mojo, Uncut, Washington Post, The Guardian, NME, Spin, Sydney Morning Herald, Le Matin, OOR Magazine, Irish Times, The Independent, and The Sunday Telegraph. Prior to the album’s release, in May 2010, Harvey made a guest appearance on BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show, the week before the UK General Election. She was interviewed by Marr and performed the song ‘Let England Shake’ in front of Marr’s other guest, the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. She was invited back on the show in April 2011 alongside Brown’s successor, Prime Minister David Cameron, and performed the song ‘The Last Living Rose’.

Let England Shake  was accompanied by 12 short films by award-winning photojournalist Seamus Murphy. Murphy, with whom Harvey began working in 2011, has spent over two decades documenting the world through his lens. His work has taken him to Rwanda, Eritrea, Kosovo, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

Harvey’s work with Murphy continued over subsequent years, with the pair accompanying each other on trips to Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington D.C. This unique artistic, journalistic and photographic journey became Harvey’s ninth studio album , The Hope Six Demolition Project.  In early 2015, the album was recorded during a month-long unique residency called ‘Recording in Progress’ at London’s Somerset House, during which audiences were given the opportunity to observe Harvey at work with her band and producers in a purpose-built studio housed in the basement of the iconic London building.  The Hope Six Demolition Project  was released in April 2016 and became Harvey’s first UK number 1 album.

In 2019 Harvey released her first original theatrical score album,  All About Eve , via Invada Records & Lakeshore Records. The 12-track album contains 10 original pieces of instrumental music as well as two new songs written by Harvey and sung by Gillian Anderson and Lily James.  Harvey’s score for  All About Eve  is performed by herself, James Johnston and Kenrick Rowe ,  and uses Franz Liszt’s ‘Liebesträume’ (a musical element of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s original 1950s classic film) as a musical touchstone, exploring the more somber and deeply psychological aspects of the story.

2020 saw the start of a comprehensive reissue campaign which saw  PJ Harvey ’ s  entire back catalogue – plus her two albums in collaboration with John Parish – reissued on vinyl over the course of 12 months. For the first time, each of  PJ Harvey ’ s album demos  were also made available as stand-alone albums on vinyl, CD and digital.

In the summer of 2023 PJ Harvey released her tenth studio album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, via Partisan Records. Co-produced by Flood and John Parish the album was nominated in the Best Alternative Album category at the 2024 Grammy Awards. Soon after its release she toured the UK and Europe, with her bandmates John Parish, Jean-Marc Butty, Giovanni Ferrario, and James Johnston. To develop the live show she worked with director Ian Rickson, who had also directed the live shows for the Let England Shake and the Hope Six tours.

COLLABORATIONS:

PJ Harvey has collaborated with a wide range of musicians, including Thom Yorke, Nick Cave, Tricky, Sparklehorse, Josh Homme, John Parish, Pascal Comelade, Gordon Gano, Ramy Essam and Mark Lanegan. She also wrote, recorded & produced material for Marianne Faithfull’s 2004 album ‘Before The Poison’.

In 1996 she worked with John Parish on  Dance Hall At Louse Point , both an album and a live accompaniment to the Mark Bruce Dance Company production of the same name. The follow-up collaboration with Parish, entitled  A Woman A Man Walked By , was released in 2009 ahead of an extensive tour of Europe and America. The video for the first single, ‘Black Hearted Love’, was directed by the acclaimed British artists Jake & Dinos Chapman.

Her work with photographer Seamus Murphy has seen them collaborate on two albums:  Let England Shake  and  The Hope Six Demolition Project , as well as Harvey’s debut book of poems,  The Hollow of the Hand  and the feature-length documentary  A Dog Called Money .

COMPOSITION, SCORING AND ACTING:

Harvey has composed extensive soundtracks for film and television, in 1994, covering ‘The Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife’ for the documentary ‘September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill’, and in 1996, contributing ‘This Is Mine’ with Nick Bicât for Coky Giedroyc’s film, ‘Stella Does Tricks’ and ‘Who Will Love Me Now’, again with Bicât for Philip Ridley’s ‘The Passion of Darkly Noon’.

In 2009, Harvey composed the soundtrack for renowned director Ian Rickson’s New York production of ‘Hedda Gabler’. They worked together again in 2011 on the music for Ophelia in ‘Hamlet’ at the Young Vic, starring Michael Sheen, and for his highly acclaimed 2014 production of ‘Electra’ at The Old Vic starring Kristin Scott Thomas. She also scored Rickson’s “The Nest,” as well as “The Goat” starring Damian Lewis. In 2024 Harvey’s original score with songs co-written by playwright Ben Power will feature in Rickson’s ‘London Tide’, produced and presented by The National Theatre.

In 2019, Harvey was commissioned to score Ivo Van Hove’s West End production of ‘All About Eve,’ starring Gillian Anderson and Lily James. Her artistic process on this and previous scores was documented by BBC Radio 4 journalist Jon Wilson, as part of the BBC’s highly respected ‘Behind the Scenes’ series.

Harvey contributed original music for the BBC’s ‘Peaky Blinders’ Series 2, starring Cillian Murphy, and the radio drama productions, ‘Eurydice and Orpheus’ by Simon Armitage and ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ by Linda Marshall Griffiths. Other projects have included soundtrack work on the films ‘Basquiat’ by Julian Schnabel, ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ by Tim Robbins, ‘What’s This Film Called Love’ by Mark Cousins, Sarah Miles’ ‘Amaeru Fallout 1972’, which she also appeared in, ‘Dark River’ by Clio Barnard, and ‘Six Feet Under’.  Her tracks, ‘Horses’ and ‘Bobby Don’t Steal’ featured in Mark Cousins’ 2012 film, ‘What’s This Film Called Love’. Original music by Harvey features in Shane Meadows’ 2019 drama series, ‘The Virtues,’ including the end credits song “The Crowded Cell.” Harvey also co-wrote the music to Sharon Horgan’s 2023 series ‘Bad Sisters’ with composer Tim Phillips, including the theme song, a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Who By Fire”. They also co-composed the music for the show’s second series.

As an actor, Harvey appeared in the 1990 film, ‘Lost in the Stars’ and as Mary Magdalene in Hal Hartley’s movie ‘The Book of Life’ in 1998. She also had a cameo appearance in Sarah Miles’ 1999 film, ‘A Bunny Girl’s Tale’.

In addition to her musical career, Harvey paints, draws and creates sculptures.

Summer 2010 saw Harvey guest design Francis Ford Coppola’s art & literary magazine; Zoetrope: All-Story. The issue featured her previously unseen paintings, sculpture and drawings. She contributed artwork to Beat Magazine in 2015 and a photo montage she created appeared in Vogue Australia in 2016. She continues to paint and draw, and some of her latest work will be released in the special edition of her new poetry collection.

OTHER NOTABLE PROJECTS:

In August 2013, PJ Harvey released the song, ‘Shaker Aamer’, to highlight the detention of the then last British resident held without trial inside the US prison at Guantánamo Bay. The track was streamed exclusively on The Guardian’s website and received positive worldwide attention. Aamer was eventually released two years later in October 2015.

In June 2017, PJ Harvey collaborated with Egyptian recording artist Ramy Essam, and producer John Parish, to write and record ‘The Camp.’  The song was created to raise awareness and funding for The Beyond Association, a national Lebanese NGO. Beyond’s work provides access to education, healthcare, and psycho-social support for displaced children in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon.

In 2008, Harvey appeared on ‘Private Passions’ on Radio 3. She was a guest editor on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme in December 2013, and in 2017, Radio 4 broadcasted a 15-minute drama, ‘On Kosovo Field’, inspired by PJ Harvey’s notebooks and poetry from her travels in Kosovo, written by Fin Kennedy.

PJ Harvey’s first collection of poetry titled  The Hollow of the Hand , in collaboration with photographer Seamus Murphy, was published by Bloomsbury UK in October 2015. To celebrate the release, Harvey and Murphy presented  The Hollow of the Hand  – two sold-out live events of poems, new songs, images and conversation at the Royal Festival Hall – as part of the London Literature Festival. Her poem,  The Guest Room,  was first published in The New Yorker in 2015.

On 4th November 2015, PJ Harvey appeared alongside Irish poet Paul Muldoon in a new experimental series of ‘In Conversation’ style evenings called ‘Soundings at the Byre’, created by the University of St. Andrews’ new International Writer in Residence, Reif Larsen, and Professor of English, Don Paterson.

PJ Harvey continues to study poetry under the tutelage of friend, mentor and editor Don Paterson. Harvey’s second book of poetry,  Orlam , a beautiful and profound narrative poem set in a magic realist version of the West Country, was published in Picador Poetry hardback format on 28th April 2022. . A special edition incorporating Harvey’s own illustrative artwork followed in October 2022’. Orlam is not only a remarkable coming-of-age tale, but the first full-length book written in the Dorset dialect for many decades. Harvey undertook a headline and Literary Festival tour of Orlam across 2022 and 2023, during which she also engaged in ‘In Conversation’ discussions with several hosts including Max Porter, Frank Skinner, and Amanda Petrusich.

AWARDS AND RECOGNITION:

In 2013, Harvey was awarded an MBE for services to music. The following year, she was awarded an Honorary Degree in Music by Goldsmiths, University of London. She has been nominated for eight Grammy Awards, eight BRIT Awards, and is the only artist in history to have won the Mercury Music Prize twice.

PJ Harvey Plans First North American Tour in Seven Years

PJ Harvey will embark on her first North American tour in nearly a decade this fall in support of her latest album, last year's I Inside the Old Year Dying . Tickets go on sale on Friday.

In addition to the tour announcement, the singer is also releasing a video for the LP's "Seem an I." The clip opens with scenes of an ominous barn, a tree with a cutting of black hair hanging from it, and an open meadow. Then actress Ruth Wilson ( The Affair , Luther ) comes speeding through the shot, and she runs and runs. The clip, which director Colm Bairéad filmed at Kennel Farm outside Salisbury, England (think Stonehenge), also features Blair Witch –type closeups of an armoire with the words "love me tender" scratched into the wood. The mystery of it plays into Harvey's poetry book, Orlam , whose verses provided the lyrics for "Seem an I" and the rest of the album.

"Ruth and I became friends after working together on Clio Barnard's film Dark River ," Harvey said in a statement. "I have always greatly admired Ruth's work as an actor, so I had long harbored a dream that we might work together again in some way. When the opportunity to work with Colm Bairéad came up, I knew him to be a director Ruth thought highly of, as I did, so it felt right to ask her if she would star in the film. I find the resulting short film beautiful and moving for having Ruth's magical presence, and Colm's unique vision."

"I have always been a huge fan of PJ, so it was a great privilege to work alongside Colm and Polly to bring ‘Seem an I' to visual life in this mysterious and hypnotic short film," Wilson said. "There is no better way to spend a day in the magical world of PJ Harvey."

For the tour, Harvey collaborated with British theater director Ian Rickson, as well as set, lighting, and fashion designers. Her band for the tour includes John Parish, Jean-Marc Butty, Giovanni Ferrario, and James Johnston.

Parish and Johnston performed with Harvey last year at a special event in Brooklyn where Harvey recited poetry, participated in a Q&A, and played five songs from I Inside the Old Year Dying . "Although she'd said earlier in the evening that one of her goals with the album was to avoid singing like herself … her voice, which transitions from alto to soprano ranges with grace on ‘Seem an I,' couldn't sound like anyone else's," Rolling Stone wrote in a review. "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." She also performed some of those songs as part of NPR's Tiny Desk Concert around the same time.

PJ Harvey tour dates:

Sept. 11 – Washington, DC @ The Anthem

Sept. 13 – Philadelphia, PA @ The Met

Sept. 15 – New York, NY @ Terminal 5

Sept. 16 – New York, NY @ Terminal 5

Sept. 18 – Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall Fenway

Sept. 21 – Laval, QC @ Place Bell

Sept. 25 – Toronto, ON @ History

Sept. 26 – Toronto, ON @ History

Sept. 28 – Detroit, MI @ Masonic Cathedral Theatre

Sept. 30 – Chicago, IL @ The Salt Shed

Oct. 2 – Minneapolis, MN @ Palace Theatre

Oct. 6 – Seattle,WA @ The Paramount Theatre

Oct. 7 – Portland, OR @ Theater of the Clouds

Oct. 10 – San Francisco, CA @ Masonic

Oct. 11 – San Francisco, CA @ Masonic

Oct. 14 – Los Angeles, CA @ Greek Theatre

More from Rolling Stone

• PJ Harvey Reads Noted Cat Lover Captain Beefheart's Poem About Her Cat
• See PJ Harvey Sing Dorset Dialect Songs in Front of NPR's Tiny Desk
• PJ Harvey Shows Her Range at First U.S. Live Event in Six Years

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PJ Harvey at Moda Center

Moda center at the rose quarter, portland, oregon, moda center at the rose quarter, tickets from $88.

English singer-songwriter, PJ Harvey, has announced a set of fall 2024 North American tour dates! She will be making a stop in Portland, Oregon at its Moda Center on October 7, 2024, Monday!

This tour is in support of her album - I Inside the Old Year Dying - that was released last year. As always, Harvey has stunned the world with her jaw dropping music and absolutely unique style.

Her songs are poetry and as an artist, she continues to surprise her fans with her music evolution and her capacity to play with minimalist post-rock to trip-hop, acerbic punk to piano ballads, heavy metal to weird pop, and making these styles her own.

With eight Grammy Award nominations and two Mercury Prize wins, Harvey has definitely captivated the hearts of so many music lovers. It is not a surprise at all that she is also known for selling out shows too quickly!

PURCHASE YOUR TICKETS HERE!

PJ Harvey Tickets from $88

PJ Harvey has notched up her first official North American 16-date tour in seven years. September marks the start of the new performances in support of I Inside the Old Year Dying. Her whole tour includes stops in Europe and the UK throughout the spring and summer.

Harvey performed at the Chicago Pitchfork Music Festival as part of her 2017 North American tour. Along with theater director Ian Rickson, set designer Rae Smith, lighting designers Paule Constable and Louisa Smurthwaite, and fashion designer Todd Lynn, she created her current live performance. She performs with bandmates John Parish, Jean-Marc Butty, Giovanni Ferrario, and James Johnston.

To announce the news of her tour, Harvey has also released the music video for "Seem an I," which was directed by Colm Bairéad and features Ruth Wilson. It was shot at Kennel Farm in England.

Harvey says - “Ruth and I became friends after working together on Clio Barnard’s film Dark River. I have always greatly admired Ruth’s work as an actor, so had long harboured a dream that we might work together again in some way. When the opportunity to work with Colm Bairéad came up I knew him to be a director Ruth thought highly of, as I did, so it felt right to ask her if she would star in the film. I find the resulting short film beautiful and moving for having Ruth’s magical presence, and Colm’s unique vision.”

Ruth Wilson admits - “I have always been a huge fan of PJ, so it was a great privilege to work alongside Colm and Polly to bring ‘Seem an I’ to visual life in this mysterious and hypnotic short film. There is no better way to spend a day in the magical world of PJ Harvey.”

PJ Harvey was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2024 for Best Alternative Music Album for I Inside the Old Year Dying. The British musician has received eight nominations in her career so far.

America has been waiting for her to do a run of this tour. Obviously, so many American fans are already scrambling to score tickets to her shows. Don’t dilly dally and purchase your tickets now!

• Moda Center
• | PJ Harvey

About the Venue

Moda Center at the Rose Quarter, Portland, Oregon, 97227, US

PJ Harvey Shows Her Range at First U.S. Live Event in Six Years

By Kory Grow

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.

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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 .

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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.”

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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”

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The Montreal Music Blog

PJ Harvey announces Place Bell concert, shares “Seem an I” video

PJ Harvey is hitting the road again, marking her return to North American stages after a seven-year hiatus. The tour, set to kick off on September 11th in Washington, DC, will feature stops across the continent, including a highly anticipated show at Place Bell on September 21st.

This tour comes hot on the heels of Harvey’s critically acclaimed 2023 album, I Inside the Old Year Dying . While the artist made a memorable appearance in Brooklyn last year, showcasing her multifaceted talent through a blend of music, poetry, and conversation, this upcoming tour promises a deeper dive into her latest musical offerings.

Accompanying the tour announcement is the release of the mesmerizing video for “Seem an I,” a track off her latest album. Directed by Colm Bairéad and featuring acclaimed actress Ruth Wilson ( Luther, His Dark Materials ), the video is a visual feast that captures the essence of Harvey’s music with ethereal grace.

Reflecting on the collaboration, Harvey shares her admiration for Wilson’s craft, highlighting their previous work together on Clio Barnard’s film Dark River . “Ruth and I became friends after working together on Clio Barnard’s film ‘Dark River,'” Harvey explains. “I have always greatly admired Ruth’s work as an actor, so had long harboured a dream that we might work together again in some way.”

Wilson reciprocates the sentiment, expressing her delight in bringing Harvey’s vision to life on screen. “I have always been a huge fan of PJ, so it was a great privilege to work alongside Colm and Polly to bring ‘Seem an I’ to visual life in this mysterious and hypnotic short film,” she remarks.

PJ Harvey – 2024 Tour Dates 09/11 – Washington, DC – The Anthem 09/13 – Philadelphia, PA – The Met 09/15 – New York, NY – Terminal 5 09/16 – New York, NY – Terminal 5 09/18 – Boston, MA – MGM Music Hall Fenway 09/21 – Montreal, QC – Place Bell 09/25 – Toronto, ON – History 09/26 – Toronto, ON – History 09/28 – Detroit, MI – Masonic Cathedral Theatre 09/30 – Chicago, IL – The Salt Shed 10/02 – Minneapolis, MN – Palace Theatre 10/06 – Seattle, WA – The Paramount Theatre 10/07 – Portland, OR – Theater of the Clouds 10/10 – San Francisco, CA – Masonic 10/11 – San Francisco, CA – Masonic 10/14 – Los Angeles, CA – Greek Theatre

Tickets on sale Friday at 10 a.m. via Evenko.

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PJ Harvey on how she turned her epic poem 'Orlam' into a potent new album

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. Steve Gullick/Courtesy of the artist hide caption

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.

Polly Jean Harvey is indisputably one of the most adventurous musicians of our time. In fact, to call her simply a musician is inaccurate: She is a visual artist and a multidisciplinary performer who has worked in theater, film and video and published two books of poetry. She's released 10 studio albums under the name PJ Harvey , two with her longtime collaborator John Parish, scores for the film All About Eve and the TV show Bad Sisters and three video albums.

In 2022 Harvey published her most ambitious written work, the epic poem Orlam , written over eight years as she learned to be a poet and mastered the dialect of the English coastal county Dorset, where she grew up. She uses that almost-lost dialect throughout Orlam as she chronicles the journey out of childhood of a 9-year-old girl named Ira-Abel. Her heroine encounters ghosts and other supernatural beings — her oracle is the all-seeing eye of a dead lamb, the Orlam of the book's title — as well as humans who fail her, leading her to assume a new self. The plot matters less than Harvey's evocation of a landscape that teems with every kind of life. Part hero's journey, part almanac, part ode to a lost tongue, Orlam , like PJ Harvey's music, creates an artistic realm of its own. It runs on the rhythms of the seasons and captures the beauty, fantastical rawness and occasional horror of English rural life.

PJ Harvey's new album, I Inside the Old Year Dying (out July 7), further illuminates the world Orlam brought to the page. Originally Harvey planned a theater piece to expand upon the work, but these musical expansions of her poems came to her in a three-week rush as she practiced piano and guitar. Enlisting her "musical soulmate" Parish and longtime producer Flood, she concocted a sound that evokes the natural world without sounding at all like what we now think of as folk music. It's ragged, yet highly crafted — a key element is the field recordings Adam "Cecil" Bartlett brought to the studio, which the team distorted to add eerie atmosphere — and as immediate as it is mysterious. Voicing phrases in the Dorset tongue, Harvey becomes an every-creature, part Ira-Abel, part ghost, part animal, always herself.

From her home in Dorset, Harvey spoke with me about working to make her music stranger, adopting characters throughout her career and the value of a good joke.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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.

Can you talk a little bit about how you've woven together each practice that you've employed to do so — writing, drawing, making music, even performing the poems as a reader — to bring this encompassing narrative to life?

PJ Harvey: It quite quickly took its own shape, and then felt like it was leading me. But one of the keys that opened up this world for me was the Dorset dialect. As a poet, it gave me such another lively form to work with, because it gave the words a kind of double meaning. For instance, you're pulling the word "wordle" out. Although it means "world" in Dorset dialect, you've also got "word" in there — and, of course, the word of God. It carries such an enormous capacity for wrapping everything together.

That was a journey I went on with the whole of the dialect within the book. Initially, I was just aiming to write my second collection of poetry. I was working with Don Paterson, who was my mentor, on a three year poetry course, and it was on my coursework that the first few poems of Orlam were written and Don and I quickly saw that something was beginning to take shape. I've always been someone that draws and creates music, and as I've got older it's become more and more natural for me that they all just sort of bleed together: If I'm a bit stuck on a poem and I can't work out where it's going, I'll often spend time drawing it as a way to help me understand more of what I'm trying to say. Likewise, I might also play it through the piano — sort of "play" the feeling. And therefore, this work kind of morphed into drawings, and then into music as well.

It's almost like you're accessing different parts of your body, your own sensory system, to bring this to life.

It does feel like that. I think when I was younger, I used to try and keep them in their separate categories. But now I realize that you really can't, and it's actually detrimental. The whole of the work flows better if I just let it be what it's gonna be; I've realized that I'm just an artist that makes things out of words and music and images, and I'm never quite sure what I'm going to end up with. Even in the early stages of writing a song, I very often see things very visually: I might see a scene, almost like a scene from a film, and I'll see the colors and the time of day. The images, the words, the music — they all feed each other.

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?

The book Orlam is my second collection of poetry. It took me eight years to write. It's basically a year in the life of a 9-year-old in a rural part of the west of England, in a non-specific era. And it documents her year, month by month, paying particular attention to what's happening in the natural world around her, observing nature and its cyclical patterns. It's just what happens to her in that one year, and it's fantastical, nonsensical, but sensical at the same time.

I loved reading Orlam . It's both linear and nonlinear; as you say, it runs on kind of a seasonal clock and collapses things together. For example, Gore Wood is a real place in Dorset that contains your imaginary village of "Underwhelm," where the child hero Ira-Abel lives.

In one way, this is very personal work: It reflects your home, the place you know best. In another way, it's absolutely mythic — fantastical, as you say. It makes me want to ask you, Polly, where are you in this work? Where is the self? Are you standing apart, or are you there with Ira-Abel? Or are you Ira-Abel herself, in the forest pulling bark from the trees?

I think it's a mixture, Ann. As far as I can tell, pretty much every artist draws on what they know; there has to be elements of experience in order to really reach deep inside of you. But I also have a playful imagination, and I think that the work of an artist is to really keep the imaginative capacity alive that we have as children. As a child, we can create anything out of nothing, and do, on a daily basis. And I find that in order to remain an active and creative artist, I have to keep tapping into that same place.

I read several interviews with you in which you talked about this idea of collapse, as a kind of aesthetic or action that runs through these works: the collapse of time and space, blurring of genders, of myth and reality, life and death. How do you convey this within these songs? I was thinking of "Lwonesome Tonight," which is also a poem in Orlam, and blends images of Elvis, Jesus and the natural world. How does collapse work for you as a principle in this music and in the book?

Coming back to poetry, you can make the language work really hard for you: Often words carry double, sometimes triple meanings. You've got things like Elvis, who was also known as "The King," appearing on Maundy Day, which is a religious festival celebrating the last supper. So, we've got Christ, we've got Elvis, we've got a king — do you see what I mean? We can bring lots of threads in, but the beauty of poetry is that you can have those layers existing all at the same time. It can mean a lot of things, depending on what the reader or the listener wants to pull out of it and make theirs. I very specifically wanted to set out to do that, to have this nonlinear, no-era, every-era world going on.

Also, going back to the nonlinear collapsing of time and space, I sort of feel that on a daily basis anyway. Particularly simple things like dream or wakefulness, going into sleep, day and night — like, where do we go when we sleep? You enter this whole different parallel universe, and I feel that we're sort of there anyway. Life and death is such a fine line. Marrying that with the way the seasons change year after year, the way one year collapses into another — what is the line between male and female, or child and adult? That's what I was very interested in, that place of a threshold where you're in a sort of between worlds, a shadowland.

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.

I very much wanted to avoid tipping into predictable folk music, which these words and this subject matter would have lent itself to so well, so I went the opposite direction. Other than the main instrument and the voice, I really wanted everything to be quite unidentifiable and strange, because of that need to create this magical, mystical unknown universe that I wanted the words to inhabit. It was a very hard thing to do. So often, we would jettison a sound because it was too familiar to us. And Flood and John Parish , who I worked very closely with in creating the sound, we were all on the same direction: trying really hard to not sound predictable, but also not to sound like anything that we felt that we'd done together before, because we've worked together for 30 years now.

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.

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.

It's almost like your voice is more a channel for all of these different selves — Polly, the characters you create — than simply "your voice." Was there a point when you realized, about your singing and your music in general, that you were able to channel all of these selves and worlds?

I think on the first couple of albums, Dry and Rid of Me , I was just doing it naturally, but I wasn't really aware that I was doing it. For me, it was trying to inhabit the character of the song: Who's the narrator of this song, and how would they portray that song. As I've become more consciously aware of what I'm doing, probably from To Bring You My Love onwards, I would dive into that even more — like, really inhabit the character. A song like " Working for the Man ," I think Flood had me singing underneath a blanket with a microphone taped to my throat, in the process of trying to find that claustrophobic, terrifying voice.

The more that I've worked in the world of theater and film, I've come to really enjoy and appreciate watching actors and how actors inhabit a character. That's not to say that I feel like I'm leaping into a different character — I often don't. It's more like just opening the doorway for something to come through you in a really pure way.

Speaking of actors, your good friend Ben Wishaw appears on this record — he does some vocalizing. He was a sounding board for you for this record, right?

At one stage we were thinking about putting Orlam onstage, and so I'd been experimenting with read-throughs and workshops with Ben Whishaw, the actor Colin Morgan and a wonderful theater director called Ian Rickson. It just didn't really come to life; we all felt that it's not at its best in this form. But then it grew into a musical piece, which has become this album. And so because Colin and Ben had already been on quite a lot of the journey with me — they'd been reading the poems with me, I'd been showing them the poems as they've grown — it made a lot of sense that they'd be involved as the other voices on the record, and I knew that they had great voices. When their voice steps in, it adds a completely different dimension — like when you hear the male characters stepping in the choruses, or Ben's voice stepping in to sing "Love Me Tender."

Is he the Elvis of this record?

I think he is, yeah. [ Laughs ]

He might be the Elvis of a lot of people's hearts.

Having said that, I do think Colin's singing some parts in "I Inside the Old I Dying," which are also the Wyman-Elvis character's, so I think it's kind of a combination of the both of them.

I really wanted to ask you about the incorporation of field recordings, found sounds, distorted elements, to build the world.

When I was first thinking that I might put Orlam on stage, I began to just collect field recordings, recording them myself. But then also, because I've worked in the theater world a lot, I had a lot of great sound designer friends. And sound designers for theater have just about any sound you can think of at their fingertips, just a sort of library of sounds which are open for sound designers to use. So I could be as specific as to say to somebody, " Can you find me a November wind, blowing through barbed wire at dawn? " And they would have, like, three different options for me.

When it turned into a musical album rather than a theater piece, I still wanted to make use of these natural noises. But in the same way that I wanted to avoid using a stereotypical folk sound, I wanted to avoid these natural sounds as being stereotypical "nature" noises. And so we fed them through lots of very basic analog gear, which was manipulated by hand in real time, so the album actually was basically recorded live. We were all in a room together — myself, John Parish, Flood and Cecil. Cecil was operating the field recordings, playing them in real time — through tape recorders that you're speeding up, slowing down, or playing on keyboard after programming in the natural sounds. John and I would improvise with him: Sometimes I might be on bass, or I'd be on guitar or piano; John might be on drums, or he might be on guitar or keyboards. And then Flood, very often, would set up some sort of mic that he'd feed back into one of his really early synthesizers, from when they were first built. I mean, these synthesizers, I'd never seen anything like it — they look like an old wooden dresser or a sideboard, crossed with a telephone exchange.

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.

I know you call yourself a maker, and this feels like very much a maker's project. It fits in with, you know, people who are hand-dyeing quilts made from marigolds.

I've always felt like that. I don't know why. I've tried so many times to step into the digital world with equipment that actually works when you press go, but I still go back to my analog equipment. There's just something so tactile, and I love that it makes mistakes and it makes hiss and it goes wrong. There's something so wonderful about that haphazardness.

Well, in this world of all of these hand-hewn elements, the central one for me is the Dorset dialect. You were so diligent in learning this dialect, employing it within Orlam in remarkable ways. It's a nearly lost language, and you use it throughout your poetry, mixing it up with standard English and what I like to call "the PJ Harvey language," which also exists.

In some ways, this recalls for me the work of poets like George Mackay Brown, who I know you love, or more currently, someone like Doireann Ní Ghríofa in Ireland, or Martin Shaw, the storyteller — who are not exactly preserving lost stories and lost languages, but revivifying them by changing them. I wonder how you first made the decision to use the Dorset dialect — and then, as they say in the most corny way, how did you make it your own?

One of the poems I wrote early on in my mentorship course with Don Paterson had been leaning into some of the words I'd remembered from being a child — I remembered the elders in the village using those words. And they're still used to this day in rural parts of England and Wales and Scotland. You know, there's a lot of dialects still running through people, and it's precious. I was just so fascinated in it because it still felt alive within me at some level. I sort of knew the words, but they've also got this guttural sonic quality that you sort of understand the word, even if you don't in a comprehensive way. You feel it through the sound. You understand it through the sound of the word.

Because I'd begun to use it in these early poems, it was Don that said to me, "I think this could be a really fantastic direction for you to go." And that led me on to reading poets like William Barnes and Thomas Hardy, both of whom used dialect in their work. William Barnes collected together the Dorset dialect in a glossary, and that sort of became my bible. But you were very right to mention George Mackay Brown: Even Shakespeare invented his own words, but the thing about Mackay Brown is that he also invented his own iconography. He'd build his characters. I was very interested in building my cast of characters as he did, and inventing my own words. When I couldn't find the dialectal word for what I needed, then I just made it up. And that is the way that dialect was built anyway. There's no wrong way of doing it.

Is there a favorite word or phrase in one of these songs that you can single out? Something you'd love to sing, something you'd love to have roll off your tongue?

Well, I think that the song title "Seem an I" is a great example, because "seem an I" means "Well, it seems to me ... ." I just think it's beautiful. It's so elegant and so beautiful and so moving, really. And that started off that whole song.

In "Seem an I," you have the wonderful Dorset phrase "bedraggled angels" to describe wet sheep, and then this image of Ira-Abel's ripped fingernails from pulling clay from the riverbank. As a woman who grew up a country girl, I imagine this imagery came naturally to you. So much writing about nature can be sentimental, or gauzy; how do you keep it dirty?

I don't know if it makes sense to say a "sense of humor." But I think I have a great sense of humor, and a lot of people don't know that. There's a lot of darkness in our world that we deal with on a daily basis, and I think to see the humor in really dark things can be a lifesaver. You can see a wet sheep at dusk, you can see a bedraggled angel, and there's humor but it's also serious at the same time.

I think I also refer to the ewes as "shabby mothers." Again, it's kind of conjuring the actual image too. This is the other thing I learned with Don Patterson in my poetry mentorship: Every single word you use in a poem has to work really hard for you. So by saying "bedraggled angels," we think of the whiteness of the fleece, but you also think of the fleece wet and heavy. Fleece kind of gets pulled off by brambles, and they always look a bit shabby with their wool coming off of them. So you've got a lot of different images going hand in hand with the actual meaning of the words that you're using.

Once when you were asked about your penchant for dark themes, you said you have a natural inclination to look under the surface — which gave me an image of you lifting up a log and seeing all the creepy crawlies under it. From this view, darkness is truly illuminating; it's a source of growth. I wondered if it's been frustrating to you over the years when you've been pegged as a sort of goth wraith, when in fact you're someone out there poking around in the life cycle.

Yeah, it's exactly that, Ann. I learned early on to not get frustrated by feeling like people didn't fully see what I was trying to do. I just continued to just go about my work. But it is that. I mean, I've always just been so curious as a person. I love learning. That's also why I don't want to do the same things over and over again — seeing where I can go next just so excites me. So yes, exactly: I love seeing what's under the surface when you lift it up. I love seeing where something might lead me if I've got the courage to follow it. And I've always been like that. Life is such a wonderful thing to just keep exploring.

Especially on your past few albums, you have gone to places where other artists don't always go. You've confronted the absolute goriness of war. You've walked the streets of different cities to see the ugliness and the beauty in those places. And here, you bring us into these woods, into this village, where a specific darkness is happening.

One darkness you confront in this work is sexual abuse, and the sexual abuse of children: A key point in the story of Ira-Abel is when she is assaulted in a shed by a local boy. Other male figures in Underwhelm exhibit predatory behavior. I wondered why, for you, it was important to make this a linchpin in the story of Ira-Abel.

There's a lot of lightness and a lot of humor in the book — but there's also a lot of darkness, as there is in our lives. I wanted it to reflect that. But also, there need to be moments of transformation in order to move our narrative. And so there had to be also this tipping point in my story that was going to move the main character into a moment of transformation and towards her destiny. And this was part of the story, in context, that was going to do that.

Well, that transformation of which you speak — you use the term "unsexed," and there is a fascinating instability of gender throughout the story, and even of species. Orlam, we haven't mentioned, is an all-seeing eye of a dead lamb — an undead lamb, maybe. There's a way in which there's no separation between human and animal in this world, or human and spirit. So I wondered how the kind of, I don't want to say genderlessness, but the fluidity of gender connects with these other forms of fluidity.

Yeah, I think it ties back into what we were talking about earlier: the collapsing of era, and of time and of place. I also wanted to collapse, as much as I could, all of those other boundaries — of man or woman, animal or human, natural or man-made, all of it. I was interested in each character having a dual aspect to them — male, female. A lot of their names are hyphenated names, and each name has a meaning. So again, it was just showing the nonlinear quality of how I feel life to be. I just wanted it to be as open as I feel it is.

There's a way, when you're out in the woods, that that nonlinear quality takes over. I don't want to be corny about it or romanticize nature, but it makes sense to me for this story that you would challenge those boundaries.

I think at a subconscious level, I just knew that I didn't want anything to be pinned down. When I'm in the moment in music — not just my own, but even if I'm enraptured by somebody else's, whether live or just listening on a record — I don't feel one thing or another. I don't feel alive nor dead. I don't feel man nor woman. I just feel the music. And I think it was about wanting to tap into that really pure place where you just feel, and you just experience, and nothing yet really has a name.

Going back to what I was saying earlier about trying to keep the childhood imagination alive: When you're a child, nothing really does have a name, you know? We go around saying, "Why is that blue? What is blue? What does blue mean?" So it's sort of just seeing everything in use for the first time, and then really looking at it again and asking, "What is this?"

I just have one final question. I know that you were at something of a crisis point about making music when you started on this album. When you turned to Orlam as a book, you said that music had lost its primary hold on you. Did that feeling of music as the center return? Or do you feel that you, like Ira-Abel, have transformed — and now, as a whole maker, constantly making in different realms, you are just more holistically creative? Do you think it's more possible today for artists to not necessarily identify as one thing than it maybe was before the various entertainment industries took over? Is it more possible to simply be a maker?

I mean, going back to William Blake: He wrote songs, he drew beautifully, he wrote incredible poems. So I think forever, artists have been doing many things at the same time. David Lynch, he's a wonderful artist as well as a filmmaker. [The British director] Steve McQueen — filmmaker, sculptor. You could go on and on. So I think it's very natural for artists to move through different media.

For me, I temporarily felt that I lost my connection to music. And actually, going back to Steve McQueen, he was enormously helpful to me at that time, when I talked to him about this sort of heartbreak I was feeling, like I'd lost the joy in it all. He encouraged me to take the boundaries away, and just look at what I loved. He was saying to me, "Well, what do you love? You love words, you love images and you love music. Just think about what can you do with those three things. It doesn't have to be anything : It doesn't have to be an album, it doesn't have to be a drawing. You've just got these three things that you love."

It helped me re-find the joy in it again — that joy that I could remember having initially, when I first started writing songs when I was 17. It was just utter joy, and that was what I had lost. Through this journey, through writing Orlam , through spending years doing that alone, I sort of rekindled my love of everything and took away all those boundaries. And now I feel more full of joy, and like anything is possible again, than I'd felt in absolutely years.

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How PJ Harvey Found Her Way Back to Music

For PJ Harvey, the English singer-songwriter, an idea can take many forms. One of her drawings can grow legs and lead her to a poem, and a poem on the page might rise into a song. Such was the journey to her most recent album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, lifted from her 2022 book of fantastical poetry, Orlam. “Often when I was writing these poems, if I was stuck, I’d try and draw it,” says Harvey. “That would help me find the answer to what was holding me back with the journey of the poem.” Written in the dialect of her native Dorset, Harvey spent about eight years, under the mentorship of Scottish poet and editor Don Paterson, writing the whimsical epic that follows a nine-year-old heroine coming of age.

But the book, and in turn, the album, almost never came to be. Even as the only artist to ever be awarded the esteemed Mercury Prize twice, Harvey was hesitant to try her hand at poetry in a real way. “I think there’s a part of me that felt not worthy to be even attempting to be a poet. I can hardly say it even now because I feel so not worthy,” she says. ”I actually don’t think poetry writing and songwriting are similar. I think they’re very, very different things. There’s very few people who do both well.” But with Patterson’s guidance, what was swirling around in her imagination, ready to take shape, materialized onto the page. “He wanted me to cast that aside and just dive in and be as rough and as bold with my attempt at poetry writing as I was with my songwriting.”

Though she had no intention of making an album, her poetry manifested into music organically. After a long road to Orlam, I Inside the Old Year Dying, was born in just weeks. “We didn’t want them to remain complicated, difficult poems,” says Harvey. “We wanted them to have an immediacy and a beauty that would carry the listener to the place, without actually really having to even read the words, but just to get carried there in the music.”

Ahead of announcing her first North American tour in seven years, on a “cloudy but dry” day, from her home in London, Harvey spoke with Vanity Fair about falling in love with music again, making magic onstage, and looking back at her storied career.

Vanity Fair: I'm curious about how you harvested these poems, like you said, into an album. The original intention was not to make an album from these but was your impulse as a musician to turn this into music, just something you couldn’t stop yourself from doing?

PJ Harvey: I think you're right. It was something that really organically happened. When I was a younger artist, I used to want to keep things in categories. I didn't like things sort of bleeding over into each other. So I was either making a drawing or I was writing a poem or I was writing a song, but they didn't mix together. The older I've become, the more I don't feel that's important anymore to distinguish between them as much because I'm just an artist and I become interested in something. I want to explore it really deeply. And in order to do that, I have to explore it in many different ways. So it is actually really natural for me to want to try and find if there's a tune in there or if there's an image to draw in there.

As a musician, I practice my instruments in order to try and keep my hand in. And during times of practicing every day, I sometimes would feel like singing. So if I was practicing on the piano, I might sing along with it or I might find a melody and then I'd store that thinking I might use that in the future for something. And because all of my poems were just lying around the house being written, I would quite naturally pull at a poem and just try and sing that.

Was that an exciting feeling, to see this universe you’ve created expand?

It was incredibly exciting. It's the moments that you always wait for as an artist. They don't always happen, but they did. Within the first couple of days in the studio, we knew something magical was happening, and it happened with the first song that we captured, which was “Prayer at the Gate.”

That’s great to hear because I read that after your previous album, you were feeling disenchanted with making music and touring.

It was a very difficult time for me. After the Hope Six Demolition Project Tour , I'd found actually writing that album very tough. I had just worked through the difficulty thinking this will pass, this will pass. I worked and worked and I finally had an album, and then we recorded that album, then we toured that album. But something about the initial spark and love of songwriting was just not burning as brightly as it should for me. When I came off that tour, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't just do what I usually do, which is get back to work and write another album. I thought I would just see where I was drawn artistically. And if that was nowhere, then it was nowhere.

What led you back to songwriting?

I would often play other artists that I really love and respect, Bob Dylan , Nina Simone, Neil Young. It’s sort of a meditation and it helps me become a better songwriter or a better writer in general. As I was singing these songs, I just started to heal my love of music. I realized, oh, I do love that. That was the beginning of this sort of healing process. I love music and I love songwriting, and it was sort of reignited by that. Then taking these poems to John [Parish] and [producer] Flood , and then that first instant with “Prayer at the Gate” rekindled everything for me.

So far you’ve toured around Europe with this album and this fall, for the first time in seven years, you will perform across North America. How has being back on the road been?

It's been really amazing, really special, quite unlike any other tour. It's the most I've ever enjoyed performing. I think that is to do with that journey that I went on. That was quite a difficult one for me. But also becoming older and growing in self-acceptance and growing in my understanding of myself and what I'm capable of.

Most of my band I've worked with for 30 years or more. I think that connection enables a great sort of magic to happen, almost spell-like between, a sort of magical conjuring where we feel the energy of the music and the words, the audience, the place come through us. It's made for some very powerful performances, some of which I will long remember for a really long time. This tour, performing this album has been a great highlight for me in my life, and I'm really excited to be able to play it more this year and certainly to come to the States, to come to Canada, playing it and just sharing this enjoyment that we're having.

Looking at your career, retrospectively, do those early albums, and that version of yourself, still resonate with you? Will those songs remain on your setlist?

John [Parish] and I went back through the songs and tried to find something from every album to play on this tour. I think there pretty much is, but some songs I couldn't, for instance, off the first album Dry, there were some songs I just couldn't sing because they were written as a 16 or 17-year-old young woman. I just couldn't sing those words now at my age. But choosing carefully, there are some that I can sing, the ones that I could authentically inhabit now and still find a way into the words.

Even if you can’t bring yourself to sing some of those songs, do you look back at your 16-year-old self and feel for her?

I suppose with the grace of time, I can see it objectively. I can't even remember myself at that age. I think that they're great albums and it's really wonderful to see how young people enjoy them now. A lot of my friends' children are really enjoying those albums and get a lot from them at that age. So it is wonderful to see that.

After all these years you’ve retained a private life and often reject the assumption that your work is autobiographical. Is that a protective measure?

Well, as an artist, you have to draw from some of what you know, but you add a huge amount from your imagination. I think we all start with what we know and then you embellish them and you add all the information that you've gathered that far in your life, every book you've ever read, every film you've ever seen, every experience you've ever felt. That comes from the artists' work, it comes from the world and what's happening in the world from politics, and it gets all sort of stirred up in the pot that is you and somehow comes out in a new form.

So nothing is ever autobiographical. It's always mixed in, unless I'm writing an autobiography, which I'm not. I use the example of I never had a daughter and drowned her in the river, but there was a song called “Down by the Water.”

On that note, would you ever write a memoir?

I don’t know. Maybe a fictional one.

You’ve had your hands in everything but what mediums are currently exploring?

I'm studying again. I'm slowly moving towards what would be my next book. It's so gargantuan at the moment. I couldn't even possibly tell you what it is, but I'm having to do a lot of study and I'm enjoying that. It is very unwieldy right now, and that's usually the process. You start off with aiming in such a wide field, you're never sure where it's going to end up. And slowly it'll start taking me somewhere, which will come a more refined path.

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Orlam – Special Edition

The Orlam Special Edition contains an additional 48 pages and 24 illustrations by the author.

Orlam, a beautiful and profound narrative poem set in a magic realist version of the West Country. Published by Picador, 2022.

• UNDERWHELEM
• The Wordle Is
• A Vorehearing
• The Bowditches of Dogwell
• Lwonesome Tonight
• Autumn Term
• Slommock-Want Forsey
• Bonfire Night
• I Inside the Old I Dying

The Hollow of the Hand

The Hollow of the Hand, the first publication of PJ Harvey’s powerful poetry, in collaboration with photographer Seamus Murphy’s indelible images. Published by Bloomsbury, 2015.

• Throwing Nothing
• On the Corner of 1st and D
• Begging Bowl
• An Initiation
• The Boy
• The Hand
• Where it begins
• The Abandoned Village
• On a dirt road

Miscellaneous

• Folly Acres

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

PJ Harvey Changed Her Mind About Touring

PJ Harvey has achieved one of music’s rarest feats: a water-tight discography with few weak spots and little repetition. The lone throughline in her work is a desire to convey multiple states at once, collapsing the boundaries between dreaming and waking, euphoria and melancholy, life and death. For three decades, that approach has received unwavering adulation from fans, critics, and peers. Kurt Cobain listed Dry as one of his all-time favorite albums; three of her LPs ( Rid of Me, To Bring You My Love, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea ) appear on Rolling Stone ’s list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time ; and she is the only artist to have won the U.K.’s prestigious Mercury Prize more than once.

Now in her early 50s, Harvey is bringing life to imagined worlds that resemble modern folklore, inhabited by characters rich with contradictions and duality — no more so than on her latest album I Inside the Old Year Dying , one of her strangest and most ambitious achievements yet. The project is a musical extension of 2022’s Orlam , an epic coming-of-age poem that Harvey composed over the span of eight years. Written largely in Dorset dialect, it chronicles a year in the life of its 9-year-old protagonist Ira-Abel, a West Country girl who encounters perverse horrors, spectral magic, and horny goats and gods in the English countryside.

While Harvey originally intended to turn her poem into a piece for the theater, the words took on a new life when she applied them to piano and guitar. That rush followed a period of musical silence from Harvey. The exhaustion caused by her last tour in 2017 had prompted an existential reckoning, and she wondered whether she’d lost her touch or if her love for music had dwindled. Now, as she prepares for her first tour in six years — with stateside shows due for fall 2024 — Harvey seems to have refound her purpose: “I feel excited and ready and confident that the show is a strong one.”

You originally envisioned Orlam as a piece for the stage. Are you bringing any of those ideas to the I Inside the Old Year Dying tour? This show with my band isn’t really connected to Orlam . I think that I Inside is a strong piece of work that stands on its own. I don’t think that that piece needs Orlam to be understood and so we’re really presenting the album as well as my back catalog of songs. It’ll be a look at all of my material over the years but with a concentration on the latest album.

How far back does the catalog stretch on the setlist? Oh, back to album one. I think it’ll be a really comprehensive show for all ages of PJ Harvey fans. It’s been a great joy actually to play some of those earlier songs. I haven’t played many of them live for years. So I think it’s gonna be a special show for that reason as well.

How has it been embodying the voices of early PJ? Were you able to jump right back in? Not all the time, so I had to choose the songs quite carefully. I worked very closely with John Parish, who’s been my right-hand man for 30 years. John and I chose what we felt worked well with I Inside in terms of lyrical content and musicality so that the evening has a certain feel to it and doesn’t lean into lots of radically different fields. But I think over the evening, it will be a very slow progression. A sort of gradual change occurs rather than lots of greater changes all the way through.

Have you thought at all about what your relationship with the audience will be like on tour? Do you have any expectations for a post-pandemic audience? It hadn’t even occurred to me to think of it in a different way. But you’re right in flagging it because I do think it’s taking us quite a long time to adjust to going out into crowds again. I say that because even myself, going out to crowded theater shows or concerts recently, I sense that people are still a little bit cautious.

The only way I might be performing a little differently is purely through getting older — 2017 was my last tour and now I’m at that age where your body changes, and it has different needs, and it can cope with different things in greater or lesser degrees. So I’m looking after myself now as a 53-year-old and that will change the show. But there are wonderful things too, in that my voice is actually better than it’s ever been. I think that is one of the lovely things about getting older as a singer, your voice discovers new depths and greater soulfulness because as we get to know ourselves better, we get more comfortable and accepting of ourselves. The voice is an instrument that you carry with you inside and it’s affected by emotion.

That’s a phrase you’ve used a lot in your latest press cycle: “As I get older.” I’m curious to know whether there was a certain event or marker in time that made you realize, Okay, this is it; I’m in the “older” part of my life now.  It’s funny, I suppose turning 50 is quite a big one. I remember the other one was turning 30. That felt like a milestone to me. I’m not sure when my next one will be — 65, maybe. But I also remember thinking on the last tour: Gosh, it’s taking me longer to recover after a show than it used to . So I noticed it then in quite a big way. When I was a younger woman, I could spring back easily because a show takes a lot out of you. It’s an hour and a half of movement and singing, and singing requires a lot of energy and a lot of use of the diaphragm muscle and all the stomach muscles. So you have to be really fit. And then you put movement and dancing on top of that. I mean, I’m so glad I’m not a dancer or a tennis player because their lifespan can be, you know, a lot less than a singing performer.

Do you see any parallels between childhood and getting older? It seems you’ve refound the kind of joy and creative capacity one might have had as a child. Ah, I think so, especially going into Orlam and the writing of it. Obviously, I had to draw a lot on childhood memory, but I also spent a lot of time reading other books that do similar things. And I think it did take me back to my childhood feelings and imagination. But also, as a creative artist, you never stray too far from that, because the life you have to go into in order to create has to be quite childlike and playful.

It’s such a joy to read Orlam aloud. I feel like I’m put into that childlike state when I read the Dorset dialect; I instinctively understand the words, despite not quite having a context for them. I’d love to hear you talk about your role in the preservation of the dialect. I don’t want to sound too highfalutin, but I did feel it was important to carry on the tradition and not let this dialect die out. I love language and I love dialects from all countries and from all counties. I think it’s absolutely fascinating how words have evolved and changed over so many years. So to even have a small part in trying to keep this alive is really important to me, and I’ve been so happy to see how many people have enjoyed Orlam and have become interested in that part of the world.

Do you remember the first poem you ever wrote? I do. I think it was about my friend Cindy. I had obviously fallen out with her. It was a poem about “I hate Cindy because she is mean;” it was something about shoes as well. I’d also write poems about our animals, our cats, and our sheep. It was when I first learned to write. We used to have these little books at our first school when I was 5 or 6. They had lines at the bottom and a blank space at the top, so you could do a little drawing and you could write a few words. And I loved this book. I carried it around with me while playing in the garden or in the woods. Wherever I was I was making little drawings and writing little poems. I’ve still got it because my dear mum saved everything myself and my brother ever did. I treasure it.

Would you ever want the public to see these early poems? Well, I’m putting together an art exhibition, which we hope to present sometime next year or the year after, but it’s pretty much going to show everything I’ve ever drawn. And I actually find that quite lovely.

Back to the tour. Do you have an outfit planned? Yes, I’ve been working with a designer that I’ve worked with for many years. His name is Todd Lynn. And I first started working with him in 2001. I think the first outfit he made for me was the leather suit that I wore in the “ This Is Love” video . It’s like a beautiful sort of tailored leather Elvis jacket with fringes. He and I became friends after that. This is the first tour that we’ve done together. We’ve come up with an evolution from the dress that you see on the back of the I Inside album cover. So there are different themes on that dress for this tour.

I believe I might have spotted a safety pin on that dress, which made me think about how keen you’ve been in recent years to show the early drafts of your work, whether that’s been recording an album in front of a live audience or releasing your demos . Why do you feel it important to expose the creative process as well as the final product to your audience? It’s not even something I contrive to do; it just happens. You know, I think that I feel more comfortable now than I used to as a younger artist, but I like showing the process because there’s often quite a journey to get from one place to another. I mean, you see it in the poetry drafts. It’s a lot of work and a lot of time. I also think it can be useful to younger artists to see that process.

Going back to the costumes, Todd and I decided that we almost wanted to present what would be the first draft of the costume. So for instance, the back of the album dress is like the first draft. It’s a tulle. It’s made in very cheap material, and we’ve continued that theme into the actual dress that I’m wearing on stage. I think there is something beautiful about showing this sort of skeletal process behind it all.

I’m curious to know what will be on your mind as you try to recreate the voices and embody the characters of I Inside . Will you be thinking about the conditions that were created for you in the studio, for instance? No, I always think of the story I’m telling. I worked for years with a wonderful theater director called Ian Rickson. I worked on soundtracks for his theater plays and then we became greater friends and developed a deeper, collaborative relationship. From Let England Shake onwards, he’s directed my live shows. Something I’ve learned from observing him directing, not only actors but also myself, is that if you visualize something in your head while singing it, the audience will see it.

Do you see “PJ Harvey” as a separate character, someone distinct from yourself? No, everything feels very me. I don’t feel like I have to embody a different person. But like an actor, I can inhabit different characters to portray the vehicle of the song like an actor would portray a character in a film. So it doesn’t mean I’m not Polly doing that.

It was on your last tour that you had this big reckoning of “Do I even want to do this anymore?” Now that you’ve been through that, do you feel more purposeful going into this one? I do. I think I had to go through that questioning. I had to ask myself: Is this still the thing that feels best to put my energies into, and is it the best contribution I have to give? And I think the answer is yes. I think that’s been shown to me during rehearsals and during the making of the new album, where I felt sort of in the place I should be and doing the thing I can do best in this world.

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These teams scored the best '24 Draft hauls

When the Guardians won the 2024 Draft Lottery, they not only secured the No. 1 overall selection but also more spending power than any team has ever enjoyed before.

Cleveland had just the ninth-best lottery odds of grabbing the top choice and the record $10,570,600 assigned pick value that came with it. Their bonus pool for the first 10 rounds is an unprecedented $18,334,000, and they can push that to $19,250,700 without losing any future first-round selections as a penalty.

The Guardians could give $150,000 to each of their choices in Rounds 11-20 without any of those bonuses counting toward their pool, bringing their potential total to $20,750,700. To put that in perspective, the 2015 Astros set the spending standard with $19,103,000 in bonuses for a class that included Alex Bregman, Kyle Tucker, Myles Straw, Patrick Sandoval and a key piece in their first Justin Verlander trade (Daz Cameron).

2024 Draft presented by Nike: Draft Tracker | First-round signings | All-time biggest bonuses Pick-by-pick analysis: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3

Bazzana goes No. 1 | Wake Forest makes history | Mariners nab switch-pitcher | Top 7 Day 1 storylines | Best hauls | Our favorite picks | Famous family ties | Biggest steals | These picks could be new club No. 1's | Picks who could be quickest to bigs | Sons of Manny, Big Papi selected | Complete coverage

So considering the No. 1 overall pick and its spending might, it should be no surprise that at first glance, Cleveland harvested the best crop from the just-completed Draft. With the usual caveat that we won't know how picks truly will play out until several years in the future and the assumption that every player selected in the first 10 rounds will turn pro, here are the six teams that fared the best:

1. Guardians The Guardians started the Draft with Oregon State second baseman Travis Bazzana, the best pure hitter available, and never let up. California prep right-hander Braylon Doughty was the second-best high school pitcher in the Draft for some clubs, and Cleveland floated him down to the supplemental first round before finishing the first day with North Carolina State's Jacob Cozart, one of the top defensive catchers, in the second. On Day 2, it loaded up on more high school righties who belonged much higher in the Draft: Joey Oakie (third round vs. No. 46 on our Draft Top 250 ), Cameron Sullivan (seventh vs. No. 118) and Chase Mobley (10th vs. No. 80). Miami left-hander Rafe Schlesinger (fourth) and West Virginia righty Aidan Major (fifth) are likely relievers, and Major requires elbow surgery.

2. Pirates Despite picking ninth, the Pirates came away with the highest ceiling in the Draft in Mississippi high school outfielder Konnor Griffin, whose swing does concern some clubs. Right-hander Levi Sterling (supplemental first round) was one of the youngest, most polished and more projectable prep pitchers in the Draft, while Wyatt Sanford (second) was arguably the best defensive shortstop among high schoolers. Wake Forest left-hander Josh Hartle (third), Clemson outfielder Will Taylor (fifth) and UC Santa Barbara righty Matt Ager (sixth) showed first-round promise in the past before down 2024 seasons torpedoed their stock. Wisconsin prepster Eddie Rynders (fourth) and UCLA's Duce Gourson (ninth) are offensive-minded shortstops who figure to move to less challenging positions.

More from MLB Pipeline : • Top 100 prospects | Stats | Video | Podcast | Complete coverage

3. Reds Each of the Reds' first six selections ranked 77th or better on the Draft Top 250, starting with Wake Forest right-hander Chase Burns and the best all-around stuff available at No. 2. Nebraska high schooler Tyson Lewis (second round) is an athletic shortstop with 20-homer potential and Louisiana State righty Luke Holman (supplemental second) is a high-floor starter. Northeastern outfielder Mike Sirota (third) projected as a mid-first rounder before slumping at the start of this season, but he still offers the upside of a center fielder with plus power and speed. Arkansas second baseman Peyton Stovall (fourth) and Clemson left-hander Tristan Smith (fifth) turned down first-round money in high school before up-and-down college careers.

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4. Athletics The A's got the No. 1 player on their board with the No. 4 choice, and some clubs believed Wake Forest first baseman Nick Kurtz offered the best combination of swing decisions, contact and exit velocities in the entire Draft. A pair of Louisiana State teammates, slugging third baseman Tommy White (second round) and efficient left-hander Gage Jump (supplemental second), were steals who lasted 20 picks longer than they should have. Rutgers shortstop Joshua Kuroda-Garner (third) finished second in the NCAA Division I batting race at .428. Oakland also grabbed five more signable Draft Top 250 prospects in California outfielder Rodney Green (fourth), Portland right-hander Sam Stuhr (fifth), Canadian prep righty Josiah Romeo (sixth), Texas Tech righty Kyle Robinson (11th) and Texas A&M shortstop Ali Camarillo (12th).

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5. Diamondbacks The D-backs' first three selections came earlier than anyone else's -- at Nos. 29, 31 and 35 -- and they scored with all of them. Two-time Gatorade Arkansas state high school player of the year Slade Caldwell is a sparkplug with hitting ability, well-above-average speed and center-field chops. Kentucky outfielder Ryan Waldschmidt impresses scouts with his tools and analysts with his metrics, and he brings 20/20 potential. Wisconsin prep shortstop J.D. Dix is a switch-hitter who has been likened to a more athletic version of DJ LeMahieu. Puerto Rican catcher Ivan Luciano (second round) and Missouri shortstop Tytus Cissell (fourth) are raw high schoolers who will need time to develop. Righties Daniel Eagen (Presbyterian, third) and Connor Foley (Indiana, fifth) stood out in 2024's thin college pitching group and should have gone earlier in the Draft.

6. Marlins Though the Marlins had just the 16th-highest bonus pool, they landed more Draft Top 250 dudes in the first 10 rounds with nine, one more than the Guardians and Pirates. When Florida State third baseman Cam Smith and Wake Forest third baseman/outfielder Seaver King didn't make it to No. 16, Miami pivoted to South Carolina prep outfielder PJ Morlando because it believed in his power and athleticism more than most clubs. While he wasn't a consensus first-rounder, taking Morlando saved money to spend later. Alabama high school shortstop Carter Johnson drew some late first-round interest, but the Marlins were able to slide him to the middle of the second round. They added a third prepster in Colorado right-hander Grant Shephardson (fifth round) but also stockpiled Draft Top 250 collegians with Oregon State righty Aiden May (supplemental second), Alabama infielder Gage Miller (third), Georgia Tech shortstop Payton Green (sixth), Portland righty Nick Brink (seventh), East Carolina outfielder Jacob Jenkins-Cowart (eighth) and UC Irvine third baseman Dub Gleed (ninth).

Best draft without extra picks: Royals Invariably, the crops that look the best right after the Draft concludes belong to the clubs with additional selections, so let's single out a team that didn't have any. The Royals actually owned a supplemental first-rounder until shipping it to the Nationals along with third-base prospect Cayden Wallace to acquire Hunter Harvey the evening before the Draft. Kansas City started by having the Draft's most imposing hitter, Florida first baseman/left-hander Jac Caglianone, drop into its lap at No. 6. It was no secret the Royals coveted Pennsylvania prep lefty David Shields with the No. 39 overall choice they traded, but still got him two picks later at the top of the second round. Tennessee right-hander Drew Beam has polish and a track record of success, and he shouldn't have lasted until the third round. More college righties: L.P. Langevin (Louisiana-Lafayette, fourth round) and A.J. Causey (Tennessee, fifth) have some crazy pitch metrics, while Dennis Colleran (Northeastern, seventh) can reach 100 mph with his fastball. Louisiana high school outfielder Corey Cousin (18th) is a deep sleeper and quality athlete.

2024 MLB Draft live updates, analysis, results: Every pick from first and second rounds

MLB Draft first-round results

The Cleveland Guardians selected Oregon State second baseman Travis Bazzana with the No. 1 pick in the 2024 MLB Draft.

Bazzana, a 6-foot, 199-pound Australian, starred for OSU for three years, setting the school's career hits record and destroying its single-season home run record.

Here's how the first round played out:

First-round results

• Cleveland Guardians: Travis Bazzana, 2B, Oregon State
• Cincinnati Reds: Chase Burns, RHP, Wake Forest
• Colorado Rockies: Charlie Condon, OF, Georgia
• Oakland Athletics: Nick Kurtz, 1B, Wake Forest
• Chicago White Sox: Hagen Smith, LHP, Arkansas
• Kansas City Royals: Jac Caglianone, two-way player, Florida
• St. Louis Cardinals: JJ Wetherholt, 2B, West Virginia
• Los Angeles Angels: Christian Moore, 2B, Tennessee
• Pittsburgh Pirates: Konnor Griffin, SS, Jackson Prep (Miss.)
• Washington Nationals: Seaver King, SS, Wake Forest
• Detroit Tigers: Bryce Rainer, SS, Harvard-Westlake School (Calif.)
• Boston Red Sox: Braden Montgomery, OF, Texas A&M
• San Francisco Giants: James Tibbs III, OF, Florida State
• Chicago Cubs: Cam Smith, 3B, Florida State
• Seattle Mariners: Jurrangelo Cijntje, switch-handed pitcher, Mississippi State
• Miami Marlins: PJ Morlando, OF, Summerville (S.C.) High
• Milwaukee Brewers: Braylon Payne, OF, Fort Bend Elkins (Texas) High
• Tampa Bay Rays: Theo Gillen, OF, Austin (Texas) Westlake High
• New York Mets: Carson Benge, OF, Oklahoma State
• Toronto Blue Jays: Trey Yesavage, RHP, East Carolina
• Minnesota Twins: Kaelen Culpepper, SS, Kansas State
• Baltimore Orioles: Vance Honeycutt, OF, North Carolina
• Los Angeles Dodgers: Kellon Lindsey, SS, Wauchula (Fla.) Hardee High
• Atlanta Braves: Cam Caminiti, LHP, Scottsdale (Ariz.) Saguaro High
• San Diego Padres: Kash Mayfield, LHP, Elk City (Okla.) High
• New York Yankees: Ben Hess, RHP, Alabama
• Philadelphia Phillies: Dante Nori, OF, Northville (Mich.) High
• Houston Astros: Walker Janek, C, Sam Houston
• Arizona Diamondbacks: Slade Caldwell, OF, Jonesboro (Ark.) Valley View High
• Texas Rangers: Malcolm Moore, C, Stanford

ICYMI: Full coverage of MLB Draft rounds 1-2

Just catching up on Sunday's first two rounds? Here's our full slate of coverage from night one.

Leaguewide stories

• Keith Law’s MLB Draft biggest surprises, best team hauls and best players still available
• Jim Bowden on the biggest winners — teams, players and colleges

Team by team

• Atlanta Braves: Cam Caminiti — cousin of Ken — is excited to help 'win a ring'
• Boston Red Sox: Thrilled Braden Montgomery drops to them at No. 12
• Chicago Cubs: Cam Smith's year-over-year growth made him the No. 14 pick
• Los Angeles Angels: A potential quick call-up for Christian Moore?
• Minnesota Twins: On the additions of college shortstops Kaelen Culpepper, Kyle DeBarge
• New York Mets: Athleticism, versatility on display with first two picks
• New York Yankees: Meet first-round pick Ben Hess
• Oakland A's: Team goes for power early with Nick Kurtz, Tommy White
• San Diego Padres: Kash Mayfield makes it eight straight high school first picks
• San Francisco Giants: Why you should be excited about James Tibbs III
• St. Louis Cardinals: Why JJ Wetherholt is a 'baller'
• Toronto Blue Jays: 'Thrilled’ to add college starter Trey Yesavage with 20th pick

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Analysis of Travis Bazzana and the other Day 1 picks from Keith Law

(Photo: Richard Rodriguez / Getty Images)

After all of the gossip and rumors and claims that there would be some crazy pre-draft deals with players and shocking picks, the first round of the 2024 MLB Draft mostly comprised the guys we thought would go in the first. MLB teams selected 74 players on Day 1, and 66 were in my top 100.

Of the first 30 picks — the true first round — 25 of those players were ranked in my top 31. There weren’t huge shocks, no non-top 100 types taken in the first round, no outrageous reaches, and for the most part the best guys went at the top of the draft.

Here are some general observations followed by my pick-by-pick thoughts for the entire first round. I’ll have team-by-team recaps for all 30 clubs later this week, so if I didn’t mention your team here, patient you must be.

MLB Draft 2024: Analysis of Travis Bazzana and the other Day 1 picks from Keith Law

Twins draft college shortstops Kaelen Culpepper, Kyle DeBarge with first-round picks

Like any team, the Minnesota Twins were happy to be picking No. 21 in the 2024 MLB Draft, rather than holding the No. 5 and No. 8 picks the previous two years, because it meant they were coming off a winning 2023 season.

But it did make for a less exciting first-round experience Sunday night.

Two years ago, having gone 73-89 the prior season, the Twins held the No. 8 pick and were thrilled to land Cal-Poly shortstop Brooks Lee, widely viewed as the top college hitter in the draft class. Lee was immediately regarded as a consensus top-100 prospect, quickly played himself into top-30 status and is now in the big leagues at 23 years old, looking like a future star .

Last year, the Twins got lucky in MLB’s inaugural draft lottery, moving up eight spots to No. 5 in a loaded class to land high school outfielder Walker Jenkins in what was a huge moment for the organization. Still just 19 years old, Jenkins is already the crown jewel of Twins’ strong farm system and a consensus top-10 prospect thought to have MVP-caliber upside.

This time around, the Twins did not lose or luck their way into the top 10, picking at their assigned No. 21 spot in the playoff-team section of the first round. But they still think they landed a potential impact player in Kansas State infielder Kaelen Culpepper, a right-handed hitter who started at third base as a freshman and sophomore before moving to shortstop this past season.

Read more here.

Day 1 trends

As expected the 2024 MLB Draft was heavy on college players, especially at the top. We didn't have a high school player selected until pick nine, when shortstop/center fielder Konnor Griffin went to the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was the latest an MLB Draft has gone before a high school player was selected in the history of the draft. In total, there were 21 college players and nine high school players taken in the first 30 picks.

The draft was also position-player heavy early before turning more towards pitching in the compensation rounds and the second round. Only seven pitchers went in the first round, and only two of those — left-handers Cam Caminiti and Kash Mayfield — were high school pitchers. Both went in back-to-back picks, 24 and 25, to Atlanta and San Diego.

Reds' draft picks in 2023 and 2024

So, last year the Reds took Wake Forest's ace (Rhett Lowder) with their first pick, a right-handed starter from LSU (Ty Floyd) with their competitive balance pick and a cold-weather high school shortstop (Sammy Stafura) with their second-round pick. This year they took Wake Forest's ace (Chase Burns) with their first pick, a cold-weather high school shortstop (Tyson Lewis) with their second-round pick and a right-handed starter from LSU (Luke Holman) with their competitive balance pick.

Reds amateur scouting director Joe Katuska: "I don't want to get too typecast, but... If we're looking at profiles, I think if I've told you guys once, I've told you 1,000 times, middle of the field offensive players, starting pitcher profiles, that's where we're going to start and that's where going to continue to look. I guess figure out who the best at Wake is, figure out who the best at LSU is and maybe you might have to guess on the high school shortstop, that won't be so easy for you."

Final picks of Day 1

Below are the final picks for day one of MLB Draft.

Compensation Round B

Pick 66 -- Tampa Bay Rays -- Tyler Bell, SS, Lincoln (IL) Way East HS

Pick 67 -- Milwaukee Brewers -- Chris Levonas -- Christian Brothers Academy (Middletown, NJ)

Pick 68 -- Chicago White Sox -- Blake Larson, LHP, IMG Academy (Bradenton, FL)

Pick 69 -- Minnesota Twins -- Dasan Hill, LHP, Grapevine (TX) HS

Pick 70 -- Miami Marlins -- Aiden May, RHP, Oregon State

Pick 71 -- Cincinnati Reds -- Luke Holman, RHP, LSU

Pick 72 -- Detroit Tigers -- Ethan Schiefelbein, LHP, Corona (CA) Senior HS

Pick 73 -- Oakland Athletics -- Gage Jump, LHP, LSU

Compensation for losing Shohei Ohtani

Pick 74 -- Los Angeles Angels -- Ryan Johnson, RHP, Dallas Baptist

Second round results

Below are the second-round results for the 2024 MLB Draft:

Pick 40: Oakland Athletics — Tommy White, IF, LSU

Pick 41: Kansas City Royals — David Shields, LHP, Mt. Lebanon (PA) HS

Pick 42: Colorado Rockies — Jared Thomas, OF, Texas

Pick 43: Chicago White Sox — Caleb Bonemer, SS, Okemos (MI) HS

Pick 44: Washington Nationals — Luke Dickerson, SS, Morris Knolls (NJ HS

Pick 45: Los Angeles Angels — Chris Cortez, RHP, Texas A&M

Pick 46: New York Mets — Jonathan Santucci, LHP, Duke

Pick 47: Pittsburgh Pirates — Wyatt Sanford, SS, Independence HS (Frisco, TX)

Pick 48: Cleveland Guardians — Jacob Cozart, C, NC State

Pick 49: Detroit Tigers — Owen Hall, RHP, Edmond (OK) North HS

Pick 50: Boston Red Sox — Payton Tolle, LHP, TCU

Pick 51: Cincinnati Reds — Tyson Lewis, SS, Millard West HS (Omaha, NE)

Pick 52: San Diego Padres — Boston Bateman, LHP, Adolfo Camarillo HS (Camarillo, CA)

Pick 53: New York Yankees — Bryce Cunningham, RHP, Vanderbilt

Pick 54: Chicago Cubs — Cole Mathis, IF, College of Charleston

Pick 55: Seattle Mariners — Ryan Sloan, RHP, York Community HS (Elmhust, IL)

Pick 56: Miami Marlins — Carter Johnson, SS, Oxford (AL) HS

Pick 57: Milwaukee Brewers — Bryce Meccage, The Pennington School (Pennington, NJ)

Pick 58: Tampa Bay Rays — Émilien Pitre, 2B, Kentucky

Pick 59: Toronto Blue Jays — Khal Stephen, RHP, Mississippi State

Pick 60: Minnesota Twins — Billy Amici, 3B, Tennessee

Pick 61: Baltimore Orioles — Ethan Anderson, C, Virginia

Pick 62: Atlanta Braves — Carter Holton, LHP, Vanderbilt

Pick 63: Philadelphia Phillies — Griffin Buckholder, OF, Freedom HS (South Riding, VA)

Pick 64: Arizona Diamondbacks — Ivan Luciano, C, El Shaddai Christian Academy (Puerto Rico)

Pick 65: Texas Rangers — Dylan Dreiling, OF, Tennessee

Angels draft college rivals Christian Moore, Chris Cortez

The Angels always do something ridiculous in the draft, and 2024 seems to be no different. Their first-round pick was Christian Moore, a slugger from Tennessee. Their second-round selection was Chris Cortez, a reliever from Texas A&M. Those two teams met in the College World Series finals just weeks ago, and that's when this happened

Notes on White Sox draft pick Hagen Smith

Hagen Smith is from Bullard, Texas, played his college baseball at Arkansas and said he's kept up with MLB through leaguewide highlights this season.

None of those things would make him intimately familiar with the current state of the Chicago White Sox, the worst team in baseball.

But he’s a big left-handed pitcher and he knows he’s not alone in that regard.

“You want to talk about left-handed pitchers they have in the organization and it's kind of crazy with (Garrett) Crochet and Noah Schultz,” he said.

Crochet, the 6-foot-6 ace of the Sox, leads all of baseball in strikeouts and is an All-Star in his first year as a starting pitcher. Schultz, a 6-foot-9 lefty who was drafted 26th overall by the Sox in 2022, made the Futures Game out of Double A. Smith is probably too young to remember that Chris Sale was once a fearsome lefty for the Sox too.

Most likely, Smith will only pitch with Schultz, as the 25-year-old Crochet is prime trade bait for the rebuilding Sox both this month and in the offseason. But Smith is definitely familiar with his work.

“He's dominant,” he said. “He’s a power pitcher from the left side, it’s super fun to watch him.”

Smith considers himself a power pitcher as well. He was a bit of a surprise pick for the Sox, who have a surplus of pitchers at Double-A Birmingham (along with the recently promoted Drew Thorpe) and are in need of hitters as they rebuild the rebuild that imploded so spectacularly over the past few years.

“I met with them one time before the draft, two or three weeks ago in Omaha, actually,” he said. “I loved everything they were saying.”

But talent is talent and the Sox got a pitcher who had 161 strikeouts over 16 starts this season and set the Arkansas career record with 360. Against No. 7 Oregon State on Feb. 23, he struck out 17 in just 78 pitches.

“You're just kind of locked into the game, so you don't really realize what's actually happening,” he said. “I didn't realize until after I got pulled from the game that I had that many strikeouts. I was like, ‘What in the world?’”

Oakland kicks off Round 2 with selecting Tommy 'Tanks' White

The A's kick off the second round with one of the most familiar players in the college baseball sphere with Tommy "Tanks" White, corner infielder from LSU. White hit the walk-off homer in the semifinal game between LSU and Wake Forest that sent LSU to the finals in last year's College World Series. He had offseason shoulder surgery and his numbers dipped his junior season but he showed better defense at third base than he did previously and he hit 75 homers in three seasons at NC State and LSU.

"I think he's a special hitter. Very rarely nowadays, do you see someone that can hit for such a great average with power with the ability to be clutch and the consistency in which he did it for three years," LSU head coach Jay Johnson said last month. "And this year? He did it coming off of a major surgery (right shoulder surgery) and missing fall baseball. I think this year probably typified how good he actually is. There was no drop off in regards to that, and he made himself an excellent third baseman.

"I think if there was a question going into the year, maybe it's is he a third baseman you have to move to first, but you don't have to move him anywhere. I think he made two errors — maybe three — the entire season, and literally played just about every inning of the season at third base for us. So I think he's, I think he's a very, very high floor player that I don't think will take long to get to the major leagues, because he hits the highest level pitching well, he doesn't drop off. And he really solidified himself as a great defensive third baseman this year."

Full compensation round picks

Below are all the compensation round picks before Round 2 begins:

Pick 31 -- Arizona Diamondbacks -- Ryan Waldschmidt, OF, Kentucky

Pick 32 -- Baltimore Orioles -- Griff O'Ferrall, SS, Virginia

Pick 33 -- Minnesota Twins -- Kyle DeBarge, SS, Louisiana-Lafayette

Pick 34 -- Milwaukee Brewers -- Blake Burke, 1B, Tennessee

Pick 35 -- Arizona Diamondbacks -- JD Dix, SS, Whitefish Bay (WI) High School

Pick 36 -- Cleveland Guardians -- Braylon Doughty, RHP, Chaparral HS (Temecula, CA)

Pick 37 -- Pittsburgh Pirates -- Levi Sterling, RHP, Notre Dame HS (Los Angeles, CA)

Pick 38 -- Colorado Rockies -- Brody Brecht, RHP, Iowa

Pick 39 -- Washington Nationals -- Caleb Lomavita, C, California

Notes on Nationals draft pick Seaver King

Seaver King met with the D.C. media and said he grew up playing with Nationals' prospect Brady House. He was at House's draft party in 2021 when King was a senior in high school. He said he thought he would go in the 12 to 24 range, but really liked his conversations with the Nationals at the combine.

He said playing on a team with fellow top-10 picks Chase Burns and Nick Kurtz at Wake gave him a foundation of how to push himself among other highly-touted talents that could be helpful in Washington, where James Wood and C.J. Abrams and MacKenzie Gore are already up, and center fielder Dylan Crews, the Nats’ first-round pick (number two overall) last year, will likely be up soon.

“You just surround yourself with the right people, and you, as a person, is going to grow, and as a player, just being around those guys who weren’t satisfied with being okay, weren’t satisfied with being the number one team ranked preseason. …. it was just awesome,” King said. “Constant work, and constant wanting to get better. It didn’t have anything to do with what anybody else thought of us; it was kind of what we thought of each other, and what we thought we could be.”

Summing up Round 1

Summing up the first round a little bit, we saw 21 college players picked and only nine high school players. It was very position player heavy — only seven pitchers taken, not a surprise in a year when college starting pitching in general was down (note that this doesn't include Jac Caglianone or Carson Benge as pitchers).

It's time for the prospect promotion incentive round

We’re on to the prospect promotion incentive round, when we applaud teams for calling up their top prospects, ya know, as soon as they’re ready. The Diamondbacks’ reward for promoting Corbin Carroll early: Ryan Waldschmidt, Kentucky OF, at No. 31.

The Orioles get Virginia SS Griff O’Ferrall, which is an amazing name, with the pick they added for having the other 2023 Rookie of the Year, Gunnar Henderson, on their Opening Day roster last year.

What the Rangers are getting in Moore

Malcolm Moore was a darling of models this year, as his batted-ball data was very strong and his baseball-card stats belied his true talent level as a hitter. He walked more than he struck out and still got to 16 homers, but had a .229 BABIP despite an above-average Barrel rate and strong exit velocities.

Scouts were mixed on whether he'd stick as a catcher, but I didn't hear anyone say he absolutely couldn't do it physically, just that he needed a lot of work and could end up at first base.

If he'd posted a triple-slash line commensurate with his batted-ball data, he would have been a top-15 pick.

Keith Law's best available after Round 1

The top 10 players on our board after the first round:

• Ryan Waldschmidt, Kentucky OF
• Brody Brecht, Iowa RHP
• Tommy White, LSU 3B
• Carter Johnson, Oxford (Ala.) High SS
• Ryan Sloan, Elmhurst (Ill.) York Community High RHP
• Griff O'Ferrall, Virginia SS
• Tyson Lewis, Omaha (Neb.) Millard West High SS
• Peyton Stovall, Arkansas 2B
• Kevin Bazzell, Texas Tech C/3B
• Wyatt Sanford, Frisco (Texas) Independence High SS

Final 2024 MLB Draft top-100 prospect ranking: Condon No. 1; Waldschmidt makes leap

Round 1, No. 30: Rangers draft Malcolm Moore

(Photo: USA Today)

The Texas Rangers wrapped up the first round by selecting Malcolm Moore with the 30th pick.

Moore, a draft-eligible sophomore, is going to end up with a team that values batted-ball data over performance — he had terrible luck at the plate this spring but he was not punching out and his contact quality points to a higher average than he had on balls in play. Moore hit .255/.414/.553 for the Cardinal with just a .229 BABIP, a full hundred points down from his BABIP as a freshman, even though he makes plenty of hard contact.

There was a little more than bad luck at work here, to be fair; he put a lot of non-strikes in play and had worse results on those pitches than he did on pitches in the zone, so there’s a pitch selection aspect to his performance as well. He has great bat speed and had no trouble with elite velocity the few times he saw this spring. Moore is a below-average defender right now and scouts are mixed on whether he can stay at catcher; the arm is the worst tool here and his other deficiencies could improve with different coaching. He’s going to be a bat-first catcher if he stays there.

What the Diamondbacks get in Caldwell

Caldwell earned raves for his work ethic and competitiveness, as well as his feel to hit, with one of the better bat-to-ball skills in the class and good contact quality for his age.

He's pretty undersized, and some teams were concerned that there was zero projection left in the body, meaning what you see in his bat is what you get, probably below-average power in the end, so you have to hope he hits .300+ with a strong walk rate.

I do think he will, and that he'll do it as a plus defender in center.

A Corbin Carroll-like player, Diamondbacks first-round pick Slade Caldwell on a fast path

Round 1, No. 29: Diamondbacks draft Slade Caldwell

(Photo: Getty Images)

The Arizona Diamondbacks drafted Slade Caldwell with the 29th pick.

Caldwell won’t go this high in the draft because he’s 5-foot-5 1/2; if he were 6-1, he’d be a top-15 pick for sure, with three tools that are or project to plus. He’s got a short swing (ha ha) and makes a ton of contact, with fringy power, and he’s a plus runner who covers enough ground in center to project to stay there, even with a 45 arm. The impact with the bat is the question — if you think he’ll hit the ball hard enough to keep his batting average up, he projects as a strong regular. If you don’t think he will, you’ll probably just run, run away.