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PJ Harvey Songs Ranked

Polly Jean Harvey  MBE (born 9 October 1969) is an English singer, songwriter, and musician. Primarily known as a vocalist and guitarist, she is also proficient with a wide range of instruments. Harvey began her career in 1988 when she joined the local band Automatic Dlamini as a vocalist, guitarist, and saxophonist. The band’s frontman, John Parish, became her long-term collaborator. In 1991, she formed an eponymous trio called PJ Harvey and subsequently began her career as PJ Harvey. The trio released two studio albums called Dry (1992) and Rid of Me (1993) before disbanding, after which Harvey continued as a solo artist. Since 1995, she has released a further nine studio albums with collaborations from various musicians including Parish, former bandmate Rob Ellis, Mick Harvey, and Eric Drew Feldman, and has also worked extensively with record producer Flood. Here are all of PJ Harvey’s songs ranked.

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15. Rub’till It Bleeds (Rid of Me, 1993)

“This song is so raw…PJ Harvey is amazing. If you’re into clean unadulterated acoustic sounds, then she is an absolute must. She is one of my all time favorite artists.”

14. C’mon Billy (To Bring You My Love, 1995)

“C’Mon Billy doesn’t make me think of blackmail; it makes me think of a lover so desperate to be reunited with her ex-lover. It shows me a woman willing to throw away all dignity and grovel if need be to get her lover back so that he can father the child they both made. And groveling is definitely not something PJ is famous for.”

13. Man-Size (Rid of Me, 1993)

“This song is…I don’t have words to describe the epicness of this. Well think of nirvana walking into a bar late night and meeting Alice in Chains…a drunk Alice in chains with the Melvins recording the full event and invites tool.”

12. When Under Ether (White Chalk, 2007)

“As haunting and creeping as a Victorian fog. (This is neither here nor there, but that piano would make for a really good loop for a beat)”

See more: PJ Harvey Albums Ranked

11. This Mess We’re In (Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, 2000)

“Thom Yorke voice matches up perfectly with PJ Harvey’s. This duet is beautiful. It’s melodic, peaceful and almost puts me in a trance. Their voices complement each others nicely and neither of theirs are overpowering. You would be a fool to not buy this. Get caught up with Thom and PJ and the mess they’re in. You won’t be disappointed.”

10. The Letter (Uh Huh Her, 2004)

“A return to her first times, but not as raw as “Rid of Me” era or “Dry”. A very good guitar, the chorus is just a very good “pj-harveyesque” wail, just like she does! At first listens, this one was not very good, but i read the lyrics and totally understood this absolutely amazing song! Very sexual, very good guitars!”

9. To Bring You My Love (To Bring You My Love, 1995)

“A striking set of demos, could have been released on their own. This is half garage, half lo-fi, totally nineties, totally feminist and edgy and druggy. Her voice takes center stage and my ears are assaulted in the best way possible.”

8. A Place Called Home (Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, 2000)

“Its one of the more commercial songs but that’s because its beautifully listenable and grabs the heart. Yes, Down by the water is dark and To bring you move is dirty but beautiful is good too…and this is undoubtedly beautiful.”

7. This is Love (Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, 2000)

“This Is Love is probably the weakest song from the album, and it’s the weakest of the three songs here. I’m surprised it was chosen as a single, since I might have actually cut it from the album all together.”

6. Good Fortune (Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, 2000)

“Easily one of PJ’s best and most immediate singles. Likable from the first note, and even if singing the same syllable over and over gets tiresome to you (like some kind of weirdo) there’s also one of the best choruses of her career, too. I love that little chiming vibraphone sound after the first chorus. I do wish I could separate this song from a memory of doing a karaoke version of it in front of my high school chorus class and being greeted with a personality-changing silence.”

5. Rid of Me (Rid of Me, 1992)

“I love this album, I think it’s probably better than they say: it’s got the magic of early blues. She evokes whole worlds and universal situations with a few seemingly simple lines that are anything but simple. And the playing rocks–they play it like they absolutely mean it, it spits blood, it’s what it’s all about.”

See more: The Best Albums of 2011

4. Sheela-Na-Gig (Dry, 192)

“One of Harvey’s trademark songs, “Sheela-Na-Gig” is one of the most direct tirades in her ouvre. Polly’s playing is reflective of the time’s sound, distorted and rhythmic; full of effective sidesteps, but not egotistically so. The galloping drums in the chorus are a highlight, as well as the chant at the end of the song: “He said, ‘Wash your breaths. I don’t want to be unclean./ He said, ‘Please take those dirty pillows away from me..'””

3. 50ft Queenie (Rid of Me, 1993)

“It’s a punk-blues banger about pegging that sounds like a bunch of audible exclamation points. Is there anything else that you really need here?”

2. A Perfect Day Elise (Is This Desire?, 1998)

“Inspired by J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (a.k.a. one of the best short stories I’ve ever read, and, I suspect, ever), PJ Harvey transposes the mindset of a war-shocked and suicidal veteran from paper to sound and what results is something clearly inspired by trip-hop but overall more menacing than a lot of trip-hop, probably because its atmosphere is more natural and less self-pleased.”

1. Down by the Water (To Bring You My Love, 1995)

“Its a nice song, but the over repetitiveness of it prevents it from being considered great. The singing is effective, and the hook is good enough. The backing vocals are a bit off, but the worst thing is really the backing instrumentals which is simply boring. Overall, though it is still an enjoyable song.”

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New Times, New Thinking.

PJ Harvey’s songs of England

Across her varied discography, the singer-songwriter conjures images of hyper-local folk tales and white Dorset cliffs.

By Ellen Peirson-Hagger

Opening her late-summer set in Gunnersbury Park, west London, PJ Harvey sang: “Wyman, am I worthy?/Speak your wordle to me.” A pink haze had settled across the sky just before she appeared onstage to the sound of birdsong, church bells, and electronic fuzz. In the lyric – which comes from “Prayer at the Gate”, the opening track of her most recent record I Inside the Old Year Dying – Harvey sings in the dialect of her native Dorset. Wyman-Elvis is a Christ-like figure, literally an all-wise warrior, who appears throughout the album, and “wordle” is the world. For the next hour and a half, as the sky darkens and Harvey and her four-piece band perform underneath a low, red-tinged moon, they conjure their own wordle, one of riddles and disquieting enchantment.

Harvey is singing from the perspective of nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles, the fictional character whose story she tells in Orlam , her second collection of poetry, which was published in 2022. She developed the book under the mentorship of the Scottish poet and two-time TS Eliot Prize winner Don Paterson, and learned the dialect (which she remembers hearing as a child from the older people in her Dorset village) by studying William Barnes’s 1886 A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect .

The world she then built through verse – of Ira’s coming of age in the superstitious rural community of Underwhelem, overlooked by “bedraggled angels” (sheep) and Orlam, a lamb’s eyeball that acts as her protector – forms the basis of the songs on I Inside , which was released in July last year. The collection’s incantatory rhyming poems have an innate song-like quality. Take “A Badder Charm”, the final stanza of which reads:

Pick at hate as ’twere a scab Till my usurpers ’neath the grab Wi’ eyes out-pecked an’ gut-strings splayed; The lamb-christ’s sacrifice repaid

For the album, Harvey worked with theatre sound designers to locate scratchy found recordings, which she fed through analogue equipment, giving them a further layer of hiss. Onstage, samples of children and hedgerow creatures fizz underneath the band’s tight guitars and percussion. In both settings, Harvey’s strange folk lyrics combine with the airy music to conjure a mood that feels supernatural and yet wholly rooted in a rural England of a time gone by.

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Morning call.

Harvey is one of our most adventurous living musicians. In interviews she has often underlined her wish never to repeat herself; she refuses to make music that sounds at all similar to what she has made before. “Often we would jettison a sound because it was too familiar to us,” she said on the American radio network NPR about the making of I Inside. “That gets harder the more work that you’ve made, because there’s more to avoid.” And Harvey has made that task particularly difficult by working with the same two co-producers, John Parish (who at Gunnersbury Park adds backing vocals and guitar, which at one point he strums with a paintbrush) and Flood (real name Mark Ellis), for the best part of 30 years.

Yet these sustained collaborations have resulted in remarkably wide-ranging music. Since releasing her debut record, Dry , in 1992, Harvey has continually usurped expectations, moving steadily from goth to trip-hopper, introverted dawdler to spokesperson on international conflict – and now to poet and reviver of a near-extinct dialect. These many guises may suggest an artist spread too thin to build a devout following, but the opposite is true. As the rapt, 20,000-strong crowd gathered at Gunnersbury Park would tell you, it is with – not in spite of – this instinct for reinvention that she has won acclaim.

Polly Jean Harvey, who was born in Bridport, Dorset, in 1969, is the only artist to have been awarded the Mercury Prize twice. She first won for her polished pop-rock album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000), a love letter to New York that features Thom Yorke of Radiohead and has sold more than a million copies worldwide. She received the award again for the rambunctious rock of Let England Shake (2011), for which she researched the history of conflict to create a treatise on England’s centuries-old role as an overseas aggressor.

It’s full of percussion and bold lyrics, its most poignant a call-and-response line that runs: “What is the glorious fruit of our land?/Its fruit is deformed children.” The desperately bleak image – a reference to the war in Afghanistan – is turned especially eerie by the childish sing-song voice with which Harvey performs it.

In the decade between her Mercury wins, she released Uh Huh Her (2004), a punk-infused record that featured an accordion interlude (played by Harvey, who took on all the album’s instruments, bar a few drum lines) and a minute-long track of seagull calls. Then came White Chalk (2007), for which she turned to the piano, lending the album a balladic, haunting quality.

While each of these records sounds very different to the others, there are occasional whispers of through-lines: “White chalk hills are all I’ve known/White chalk hills will rot my bones,” she sings on the title track of the 2007 album, which – complete with a harmonica solo from Harvey – closes the Gunnersbury Park set. The name of the soft rock of her Dorset childhood reappears on the new record. “I laugh in the leaves and merge to meesh [moss]/Just a charm in the woak [oak] with the chalky children of evermore,” she sings, “chalky” here meaning ghostly, which in turn sheds new light on Harvey’s relationship with those Dorset cliffs.

Given the sonic array of Harvey’s discography – which to date comprises ten studio albums over 31 years, plus numerous soundtracks for film and TV – Harvey’s live show is slick. After a first half dedicated to I Inside , the set becomes a marathon of greatest hits. Harvey – dressed in a streamlined white dress, with white lace-up boots and her dark hair curled – wilfully plays the part of shape-shifter at the microphone.

She dons an autoharp for “The Words That Maketh Murder”, another rousing political number from Let England Shake , before leaping – literally, across the stage – into the thunderous opening bars of her 1993 single “50ft Queenie”, from Rid of Me , which she made with the producer Steve Albini (also known for his work with Nirvana and Pixies), who died aged 61 in May.

While Harvey’s vocal parts have tended to be higher in pitch for her more recent music, in this section of the set she dips down into the lower tones she more often used at the start of her career: theset list provides an impressive display of the elasticity of her voice. On “The Desperate Kingdom of Love” (from Uh Huh Her ), which Harvey plays solo on acoustic guitar, her voice is full and rounded. Then, on the riotous “Man-Size” (1993) it drops lower, and her syllables grow more disjointed, as she instructs herself to “Douse hair with gasoline/Set it light and set it free”. She barely stops for applause before dashing into her urgent 1991 debut single “Dress”, now accented with fiddle flourishes. Comparatively, “The Garden”, from Is This Desire? (1998), is so pared-back as to take on a spectral quality, as Harvey lunges across the stage during her breathy vocal performance.

Despite these many different sounds, textures and moods, what is constant in Harvey’s music is a primal energy. Whatever she does, she does with rawness. It’s a feeling that, in its many showings – electric guitar slashes and harp flourishes, spoken-word segments and angelic choruses – somehow holds together a sense of the new and the ancient. The overall effect is one of timelessness, palpable across Harvey’s discography, and never stronger than on I Inside the Old Year Dying . In the NPR interview, Harvey said that when making it, she aimed “to have this non-linear, no-era, every-era world going on”; she wanted to find “a threshold where you’re in a sort of between worlds, a shadowland”.

Harvey’s is a very English shadowland, a place where a young girl wanders through “beech and aller, woak and birch” trees – beech, elder, oak and birch – on Maundy day, where we are instructed to worship nature above all: “Hail the hedge as it grows/Ask the hedge all it knows.” It’s a quieter politicism than on Let England Shake and less a call to attention than her earlier, punkier records. But her focus on the natural world, and her use of hyper-local folk tales now too often forgotten, is powerful. It shows that Harvey knows an artist can look back in time for inspiration and still be forward-facing in intent. And, of course, such primal verve is best live, where we encounter PJ Harvey’s shape-shifting talents up-close and resolute.

PJ Harvey’s “I Inside the Old Year Dying” is out on Partisan Records

[See also: Oasis: tribunes of the people ]

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This article appears in the 21 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Christian Comeback

Every PJ Harvey album ranked from worst to best

We examine and rank PJ Harvey's studio collections from worst to best

PJ Harvey is a musical chameleon, reinventing herself with each album, leading to early assertions that she was the ‘indie Madonna’. But the Dorset-born musician's transformations from record to record soon made comparisons to the mighty Madge seem short-sighted. The most cursory examination of her catalogue reveals early ragged indie recordings, experimentation with tone and electronics, raw and exposed 4-track and demo recordings, English folk songs, Gothic chamber pop and her recent multi-instrumental forays into the history of war.

Compiling a worst to best list for an artist who completely rewires her sound from album to album is a challenge, with many fans having very strong reasons for identifying with one iteration of her storied career over another. One thing that’s for certain is that Polly Jean Harvey is one of the greatest, most idiosyncratic artists England has ever produced. She is a national treasure and without her, the landscape of modern British music would seem a much less adventurous place.

9. Is This Desire? (1998)

With the greatest respect, we might have to get into a tussle with Ms Harvey at the first hurdle. The singer once told The Telegraph "I do think  Is This Desire?  is the best record I ever made—maybe ever will make—and I feel that that was probably the highlight of my career." In reality, doubling down on the atmospheric mood pieces based around keyboards, bass and electronics which were so successful on previous album  To Bring You My Love  often left for lumpen results (witness, the surely ironically titled  Joy ).

Assembled over the course of two long studio sessions with almost a year's gap between them, the album feels uneven and disjointed. Adding to the incoherence was Harvey’s exhaustion from the  To Bring You My Love  cycle and the emotional fallout from the collapse of a brief, stormy love affair with Nick Cave .  Is This Desire?  is a typically fearless leap into new territory, but it’s little wonder that Harvey has not returned to this sound in the 24 years hence.

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8. Uh Huh Her (2004)

After her biggest commercial success, with 2000's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, it seemed that Harvey wasn’t entirely comfortable in the position she found herself. She subsequently explained to Time Out magazine that she "wanted to get back to the earthy, rootsy, more dirty side of things" following her brush with the mainstream. Consequently,  Uh Huh Her  feels like it’s trying to antagonise and confront the listener, but more often than not, her sixth studio set comes across as a bunch of unfinished, rushed ideas (particularly strange considering there was a 4-year gap between albums).

Written during a period of enforced creative isolation, Harvey recorded and played every instrument on the album (bar drums, handled by long-time collaborator Rob Ellis), which lends the album a DIY-aesthetic that doesn’t always suit the songs. The scuzzy garage rock of  Who the Fuck?  sounds reedy and thin, a pale imitation of the acerbic music she made her name with. The Desperate Kingdom of Love, however,   is essential.

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7. The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016)

There’s a common theme with the placing of these first three albums in this countdown; all three came off the back of very successful and critically acclaimed albums in Harvey’s career. The concept of her ninth album is intriguing, with Harvey drawing inspiration from time spent with photographer/filmmaker Seamus Murphy in poverty-stricken areas in Washington D.C., Kosovo and Afghanistan. As a result, like its predecessor, it’s an album that looks outwards rather than inwards, with Harvey adopting an observational lyrical approach rather than personal. This approach is fine in theory, except it’s not entirely clear what Harvey is trying to say on  The Hope Six Demolition Project,  with its fractious vignettes never managing to find a solid conceptual whole. Thematic musical motifs such as saxophone squalls, call-and-response choruses and male vocals add some sense of an overarching theme, but they never converge to create anything cohesive. But maybe that’s the point: maybe confusion is the only logical reaction to the things that Harvey saw, as she endeavours to make sense out of things that simply don’t make sense.

6. Dry (1992)

Harvey’s seething, acerbic debut,  Dry  has lost little of the impact it had when unleashed on an unsuspecting public back in March 1992. PJ Harvey (very much a band at this point alongside drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan) arrived fully formed, even if the recordings sounded a little rough around the edges. The music on Dry twisted and convulsed in reaction to Harvey’s withering lyrics, particularly on the confrontational Plants and Rags  and  Happy and Bleeding,  switching from desire to violence on a dime. Singles  Dress  and  Sheela-Na-Gig  added a playful quality whilst being no less abrasive, these two future classics committed to tape when Harvey was just 22. In short, PJ Harvey entered the musical landscape with one of the most daring debuts in recent memory. Critics and fans responded in kind, with NME ranking Dry among its all-time greatest 100 albums just one year after its release and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain famously hailing it as one of his favourite records.

5. Rid of Me (1993)

Following a label bidding war which resulted in the trio signing to Island, Harvey hand-picked Steve Albini to record her second album, determined to keep things raw, ragged and edgy whilst bringing out the harsher aspects that might have been tempered on  Dry.  It was a match made in heaven, the dynamics of the title track immediately benefitting from Albini’s recording techniques.  Booked into a secluded Minnesota studio for two weeks in the middle of winter, the band and producer were completely isolated from the outside world, resulting in an intensity that is captured on tape. (Albini would revisit the studio in February '93 to record In Utero with Nirvana.) Released just 14 months after  Dry, Rid of Me  improved on almost every aspect of Harvey's debut, but it showed other sides to the musician too, with  Missed  being perhaps her most tender moment up to this point. Rid of Me is an astounding piece of art , but what Harvey would go on to do as a solo artist was something no-one could have prepared for.

4. Let England Shake

On her eighth album, Harvey inhabits the spirit of war correspondent, ploughing hours of work into researching the history of conflict. The key to  Let England Shake  is that at no point does Harvey tell us what to feel, but we inevitably come to our own conclusions. The opening cry of  ‘Goddam’ Europeans!’  on the excellent  The Last Living Rose  hides many different shades of subtext, especially in a post-Brexit Britain. Harvey adopted autoharp on several songs in order to keep her compositions fresh, an approach that works wonders on  The Words That Maketh Murder  and  All and Everyone.  She also adopted a different style of singing, affecting a haunted warbling ghostly cry which is particularly effective on  England. Let England Shake  was voted the best album of the year in 16 different publications at the end of 2011 and it won Harvey her second Mercury Prize (to this day, she remains the only artist to have won two). Harvey would continue the conflict narrative on her next album  The Hope Six Demolition Project,  but  Let England Shake  is her most provocative and assured work on the subject.

3. Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000)

Stories from the City, Stories for them Sea  is   PJ Harvey’s love letter to a New York that no longer exists, capturing as it does the hustle and bustle of The Big Apple pre 9/11. Harvey perfectly captures the confusion and chaos of the city on opening song  Big Exit,  but elsewhere you get a sense that her nine month escape to New York was reconditioning for the soul. Several songs seem to depict a romantic relationship ( Good Fortune, Beautiful Feeling,  the wonderful  You Said Something ) with the Manhattan skyline being as intrinsic a character as Harvey’s lover. After the harsh, disturbing sounds she conjured for  To Bring You My Love  and  Is This Desire?,  Harvey wanted to create something lush, sumptuous and beautiful, and this album remains her most commercially accessible to date. It’s also one of her best.

2. White Chalk (2007)

Harvey’s seventh studio album is a Victoriana gothic masterpiece, her most haunting, chilling and quiet album to date. Composed mainly around piano, an instrument Harvey had never played before, the melodies are eerie lullabies, simple ditties that sound timeless. Most of the songs   could have been composed at the turn of the 20th century, let alone the turn of the 21st. Harvey sounds broken, a destitute Miss Havisham on the likes of  The Devil, When Under Ether  and  The Piano, while the array of voices that conclude  Silence is simply one of the most chilling and beautiful things she has ever recorded. Highlights are plentiful but  White Chalk  is at its best when consumed as a whole, like one deep, dark look into a woman’s psyche. Easily Harvey’s most under-rated album, it’s about time  White Chalk  was re-appraised.

1. To Bring You My Love (1995)

PJ Harvey’s first major re-invention also proved to be her most successful and alluring. Aiming to write her own versions of the blues standards and Captain Beefheart songs she had loved for years, Harvey re-emerged in the public eye with what she called her “Joan Crawford on Acid” look smeared on her face.  The biblical lyrical references giving a sense of the grandiose,  To Bring You My Love  interweaves a seductive blend of mood and melodrama. Within this framework, Harvey sings of crossing desert plains, borders and oceans and laying with the devil whilst cursing God above.  To Bring You My Love  feels dangerous, malevolent and often downright disturbing. Even the big MTV hit  Down by the Water  revolves round a sinister whispered refrain: "Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water / Come back here man, gimme my daughter."

The live shows changed too, with Harvey often emerging in elegant ball gowns, made up to the nines and with theatrical props in tow, a far cry from the raw and ragged Steve Albini authenticity of the  Rid of Me  era. Essentially, To Bring You My Love  is the moment that this most compelling artist became whatever she wanted to be. 

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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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