Orlam

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Often at the writing stage. Color, usually. There might even be a scene, and I’ll draw the scene to help me find my way into a poem. If something is moving into song, it’ll have color or a shape. So there’s those visual elements at the writing stage. But then, once the album is recorded, the songs present their own visuals. They just do. And I let that guide me. But if I’d asked my grandmother this she would have felt like the world was probably always been frightening. I remember talking about when televisions and telephones first appeared and she was sort of terrified at what was happening. It’s all contextual, isn’t it?” Orlam follows Ira and the inhabitants of UNDERWHELEM month by month through the last year of her childhood innocence. The result is a poemsequence of light and shadow – suffused with hints of violence, sexual confusion and perversion, the oppression of family, but also ecstatic moments in sunlit clearings, song and bawdy humour. The broad theme is ultimately one of love – carried by Ira’s personal Christ, the constantly bleeding soldier-ghost Wyman-Elvis, who bears ‘The Word’: Love Me Tender. PJ Harvey comments: “Having spent six years working onOrlamwith my friend, mentor and editor DonPaterson, I am very happy to publish this book of poetry with Picador. Picador feels absolutely the right home for it, and it’s an honour to be in the company of poets like Jacob Polley, Denise Riley and Carol Ann Duffy.”

Conjuring with imagery of her youth growing up on a farm, and of ancient West Country rituals, Orlam is written in Dorset dialect, the first book to use the language in a century. 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.The characters: the birth of Irla and Abel and their naming are muscular; dark; deep folk poetry. She’s bard-like, storyteller - but doesn’t always deliver poetry

PJ Harvey in A Dog Called Money, the film she made with Seamus Murphy in 2019. Photograph: Pulse Films/Allstar She knows about the importance of endings in life and in poetry: “When I’ve read the ending of a great poem, I catch my breath… In my own poems, I don’t want to tell people what to feel. I want to open the doorway so they can find out for themselves. It can be hard to know when a poem is finished. But once finished, it’s finished – it’s of its time and place. And I will have the desire – always – to move forward and to do something else.” 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.

I think I had to inhabit different parts of myself [for some songs]. Not all of the songs I feel able to play anymore, as much as I love them, because I feel that I’m now an older woman that couldn’t sing those words with any conviction. But “50ft Queenie” I can, because that’s a character that I can imagine and inhabit. 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?

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 appreciated the dirty words in the Dorset dialect in Orlam, too, like “munter,” which you wrote in a footnote meant “fugly.”The book has a character named Wyman-Elvis who sings “Love Me Tender.” What does Elvis Presley mean to you? That said, lovers of language, and fans of folk horror will find Orlam a rare treasure. The way Harvey works with dialect, nursery rhyme, scripture, folklore and song is alchemical.

For Ira, Gore Woods are a place of liberation. Ill-fitting in life, she “yearns ... to un-gurrel”, and there she may do so. It is to the woods she escapes after her assault, and through the months that follow the trees are companions and protectors. In their care, she sheds her girlhood, its restrictions and dangers, and transforms into a freer, truer self, a “not-girl/ not-boy. Bride of his Word”. And what is that word, we wonder: tenderness, music, love, scratching (as the poem calls writing)? The broad theme is ultimately one of love - carried by Ira's personal Christ, the constantly bleeding soldier-ghost Wyman-Elvis, who bears 'The Word': Love Me Tender.When a song contains just a few words, I often find there’s a dissociative, almost mantra-like thing that happens for me. Language becomes only sound. The words aren’t narrative, but there is still meaning. I don’t know— Whatever the technical merit, whatever the story telling, whoever the author is, the most important feeling at the close of a piece of writing is grief – grief at leaving the company of the characters, grief at the sudden absence of the narrator’s voice, grief at the end of the protagonist’s challenge to our own settled pleasant valley Sunday view of the world. Let England Shake” was the first time. I think prior to that I had been, as my younger self, very particular about wanting to keep things exactly as I’d written them. But, as I’ve got older, I’ve started to relax more. I began to realize that giving the players more freedom really enhanced the energy in the songs. On “The Hope Six Demolition Project,” there were sometimes up to ten players improvising with each other in a small space. The songs I bring in have their chord structure, they have their chord progression, they have their melody. But, on top of that, there’s a lot of room. I’ve really begun to enjoy that. You have to be extremely vulnerable, because you will offer ideas that aren’t good. “Should we try this?” “No, it’s terrible.” Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, and no problem was insurmountable because somebody else would always have an idea.