Series of dreams

In a time when rock musicians seem more willing than ever to compromise their work for a cheap ringtone, iPod or Nike buck, PJ Harvey is one of a small group of wilful individualists who protects her art with a vigilant heart. Never one afraid to mutate, in 2007, 17 years into a career that has seen her alternate bold, brash statements (Dry, To Bring You My Love, Stories From The City) with knurled and knotty visions (Rid Of Me, Is This Desire?, Uh Huh Her), she took a step back, dismantled the apparatus of her sound and rethought her entire musical approach.

The result was White Chalk, released this autumn, an unearthly, uncanny record that sets waifish, almost Elizabethan melodies against austere folk and a neo-classical chamber music composed of ghostly piano chords and various string driven things; 11 songs so saturated with atmosphere they’re akin to turn-of-the-century daguerreotypes, or Charles Van Schaick’s compelling portrait photographs in Michael Lesy’s book Wisconsin Death Trip.
The album was written very much under the influence of her old friend, Bad Seeds musical director Mick Harvey, who furnished the singer with compilations of music by Arvo Part, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Erik Satie, Handel, Bach and the medieval composer William Lawes. And three months after its release, PJ professes herself as pleased with the record as she was the day it was mastered.
“It’s not always with a piece of work that it feels like you achieve everything that you’ve set out to do,” she says, “but I did feel that with this. It’s quite a rare thing to have that happen.”
Can she determine what the lucky circumstances were, so that she might perhaps recreate them in the future?
“Unfortunately no, or else I’d do it every single record. But I do think it partly comes down to the hand of fate, in the way that one’s life comes together, but also the people you choose to work with, the songs being right, the instruments that come under your hands. Everything just seemed to happen at a fortuitous time. You can’t make that happen, it just comes together.”
Part of the process was a shift in her writing methods. Harvey composed the new songs mostly on piano instead of guitar, and pitched her vocals in a higher, almost pre-pubescent range. Having forced herself to operate in unfamiliar territory, her instincts were attuned, vulnerable even, to more esoteric influences.
“Well, I think particularly with instruments that I’m unfamiliar with, I can’t use my intellect to play that instrument because I don’t know how to apply it,” she admits. “And so it does all become about emotional response, and that’s often very naïve and child-like, and I use that to my advantage. I’ll often purposefully go to instruments that I don’t know anything about just to access that place.”
This child-like approach, particularly in the vocal department, is not unlike the spooky little girl la-la-la refrains of the Rosemary’s Baby soundtrack. Songs like ‘The Devil’ or ‘Dear Darkness’ could accompany any remake of Polanski’s psychological horror classic, not least because there’s always the suggestion that Rosemary might have imagined the whole satanic scenario, a wry comment on the literal bodily possession of pregnancy.
“I’d like to get that soundtrack,” Harvey says. “It’s been so long since I’ve watched that film. I’d love to hear that child-like voice, because with this album I was constantly reminding myself to access that voice, I wanted the album to be told that way. And also it helped me to find this completely new way of singing, it put such a different emotion on the words. I wanted my voice to be very unaffected. I think often in the past I’ve affected my voice in certain ways to take on certain characters or do particularly gruff vocals, or particularly falsetto, and I didn’t particularly want to do anything this time. (laughs) I just wanted it to be pure and unaffected, and the voice on the record is very much what my voice is like.”
Truth be told, if you’re a long-time PJ fan, you might have seen this album coming. In many ways, White Chalk is the attic-dwelling twin to 1998’s Is This Desire. And if Uh Huh Her was something of an orphanage for waifs and stray songs, the little girl in ‘Pocket Knife’ seems to have gotten the new album all to herself.
“I love that description, that’s exactly how I feel about Uh Huh Her,” she says. “There were a few voices there. I think another thing with ‘Pocket Knife’ was that it could read like it was a very traditional folk song in the way that it’s a young girl singing to her mother, that’s quite a traditional folk method of storytelling, and I carried that through to this latest album definitely, that sort of narrative. But also I could hear this purer voice coming through on ‘The Darkest Days Of Me And Him’, very gentle, very tender, and also the melody. And a song like ‘The Desperate Kingdom Of Love’ was also a paving of the way.”
This time out, Harvey has eschewed promoting the album with a full band tour, preferring to play scattered solo piano shows, resplendant in what can only be described as Bronte sister chic. One wonders how much thought she puts into presenting the material, the visual aesthetic, the artwork, that dress?
“It comes together quite naturally,” she says. “Always the music is the first to happen. When the music has taken shape and I know what it’s doing – ’cos it takes quite a while for me to find where a particular project is going – quite quickly imagery attaches itself. That’s how I operate really. It always comes from what the music needs.
“Having said that though, a lot of songs have become much more visual these days than they ever have. A lot of songs on this record, I can’t really describe it better than saying they were like short films in my head, and I sort of see the moving images, and then just write the song as if I was writing a short script or short story and then animating it, or casting the actors playing in the film, so I could see the whole atmosphere of the song as I was working on it. They were very atmospheric, although they were often in colour.”
It’s also important to note that although White Chalk often feels like a record full of visitations and possessions and seances and mediums channeling the voices of dead girls who expired in childbirth or of consumption or ennui or plain old murder, the melodies are strangely airy and exultant.
“I think what keeps me still wanting to play this record, is that strange off-set between exactly what you just described,” Harvey says. “A sort of… the darkness of some of the lyrics and yet the joy and exuberance of some of the music. I really like that push and pull you get between the dark subject matter and the beautiful melodies that are flying around in there, which are quite uplifting, so I never feel particularly dragged down by the record. I always feel quite uplifted really, quite comforted.”
That’s the funny thing about musicians and writers and painters who operate in dark territory. They’re usually the most fun to go for a drink with.
“Also, one doesn’t have to be suffering to show suffering, you can orchestrate that. And I think in some ways when you’re not suffering yourself, you can present it in a much clearer way because you have that perspective, stepping back and looking at it. But yeah, I’d agree with you that a lot of the people I find funniest to be around are people whose work can be very dark. It doesn’t mean that they’re dark people at all, it just means they have a certain sensitivity or a certain insight in being able to present that.
“And I think that it’s incredibly moving, for me anyway. I’m almost exclusively drawn to music that could be construed as being quite dark, and yet I find that is the music that is most passionate, or makes me feel most passionate, and I think it’s probably because it’s a big part of everyone’s life, suffering or defeat in some way or another.
“I read a wonderful quote by Leonard Cohen not long ago where he was talking about how sad songs mean so much to people because everybody suffers defeat in their lives in some way, whether it’s they didn’t get the job they wanted, or when you’re younger you imagine all these things about how your life’s going to turn out and ultimately that doesn’t happen to anybody, and so a sad song is incredibly touching because it connects us all to that sense of loss in some way.”
Leonard is of course an infamously early riser, operating in the pre-dawn hours when it seems as though there’s a semi permeable wall between the dream-state and lucidity. White Chalk occupies a similarly liminal space: songs about the proximity between life and death, madness and inspiration, the conscious and the subconscious.
“That’s very interesting that you picked up on that. I’m not somebody like Leonard who rises at 4.30 to start writing at 6.30, but I do always find my most creative side in the morning. But also when I am writing, the nearest state of being I could compare it to is the dream state, when you’re coming out of the dream, and you wake. I’m a very deep dreamer, I mean I dream every single night, two or three very vivid dreams which I can remember very easily, some of those dreams become songs actually. But when I’m writing just lyrically with a pen and paper or whether I’m at a piano or a guitar, the state of mind becomes such that it is very similar to that feeling of being between unconsciousness and consciousness, really no sense of being in the body at all, but just completely open to being informed.”

White Chalk is out now on Universal. PJ Harvey plays the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on December 19