THE INQUISITION

Are you bored by rock at the moment? Yes, really. Not rock in general, but the sound of my playing the guitar. I found it so uninspiring. I’ve done it for a long time, and I became so excited with instruments I didn’t know how to play, like the piano or the harp or the zither. Suddenly the gates flew open. I’m sure I’ll go back to the guitar at some point and it won’t feel tired, because I’ve had a rest.

This album made me worry about you—it’s very unsettling. Was it emotionally hard to make? If I’m feeling a bit dark, the album can feel dark and unsettling, and if I’m feeling happy, it can feel incredibly uplifting and comforting. No, it wasn’t difficult to make, because sometimes the songs have nothing to do with me; it’s not a diary. It does perplex me that people don’t grant songwriters the same distance they grant novelists who write in the first person. I’m not interested in people knowing anything about me.

Did you think right from the start that you’d be making records long-term? No, it took a long time. Since a very young age, I knew I would be involved with creativity and performance, but I didn’t know how. I at no time considered that I could live by writing songs. I thought I might be an art teacher. I made my first record firmly believing that nobody would buy it and I’d have to go back to school. It wasn’t until after To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire? that I actually thought, “Okay, this is what I’m doing with my life.”

“I’m not interested in people knowing anything about me.”

PJ Harvey

Mystery has always been important to your music. Is that harder to maintain these days because of the Internet? I’ve never thought about it. I don’t own a computer. I’m still rather old-fashioned. I tend to look things up in a giant encyclopedia or a dictionary. I’m a very tactile person. I like the feel and smell of things. I have quite basic animal instincts in that way. I don’t respond to machines and man-made plasticky things.

The village of Abbotsbury in Polly Jean Harvey’s home county of Dorset, England, is just north of the Jurassic Coast: ⁹⁵ miles of beach and cliff face spanning 185 million years of shifting geology. It’s a good place to meet and talk about White Chalk, her radically different seventh album, a haunting record that doesn’t seem of this era. Wearing a white blouse and a black leather jacket in the dark corner of a local pub, Harvey is neither the Victorian waif pictured on the cover of White Chalk nor the hair-raising banshee of her earlier records, but a reserved ³⁸-year-old who speaks the way she pours her tea: very carefully.

You were living in Los Angeles for a while, but this place couldn’t be more different. I get a bit restless being in one place for any length of time. It’s very unhealthy for the creative process. I haven’t been in L. A. for a couple years. I’m already thinking about moving again—I might go somewhere next year and see what that brings.

Are you ever entirely happy with an album? I think that’s only happened three times: this album, Is This Desire?, and To Bring You My Love. I felt those three records absolutely achieved my vision at the time. Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea [winner of the Mercury Prize in ²⁰⁰¹] was an experiment—I wanted to make a record of great pop songs I could dance about to. But I didn’t find my soul was engaged in that type of songwriting.

White Chalk uses piano instead of guitar, and even your voice sounds different. Were your trademark sounds beginning to feel like a trap? I don’t know if I would describe it as a trap, but I try not to repeat myself. I’m just not interested in doing things that are comfortable. I can write PJ Harvey albums until the cows come home, but that doesn’t interest me. I had to write ⁵⁰ or ⁶⁰ songs to get ¹¹ good ones that sounded different. I’d rather write a not particularly strong record that sounded different than a bunch of strong songs in the same old way.

Do you always have a few possible future directions in your head? Oh yeah. At any one time I have maybe ⁵⁰ different albums in my head. My only frustration comes from having to choose very carefully what I do, because I’ll never get everything done in my lifetime. I write so many songs I really like, but they’re nothing new, and I don’t feel that the world needs any more of the same. Maybe after I’ve died, they’ll release them all. While I’m around, I have quite good quality control.

BY DORIAN LYNSKEY