Whether this tortured soul is truly wrapped in bitterness, sickened by the sordid failings of men, or just snidely reacting to the greater absurdity of mankind, one thing is for certain – no one snarls “fuck you” with more eloquence than PJ Harvey.
Departing from the glossy, pre-9/11 Manhattan draped posh, Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, the latest record from this multi-talent is a lo-fi demo that cuts much deeper into Miss Polly’s veins. Uh Huh Her, Harvey’s seventh album, takes her back to darker motifs, and subsequently, the tinkered isolation found in her home tucked away in the remote English countryside. Rather than calling on Thom Yorke for another eerie foreshadowing duet, this time she sets out on a minimalists journey while writing, performing and recording the entire album on her own. The laborious project may not ultimately become her signature work, as that’s still saved for the mid-90s masterpiece To Bring You My Love, but Harvey proves still to be an ever-evolving artist.
Of course, an intricate career suspended on risks, means more analyzing, critiquing and dissecting her lyrics and work. So is she the Chanel glasses and Kate Spade bag socialite swaggering through Times Square? Or is she the unkempt rocker riding shotgun in the beat up Malibu? And does she have to be either or? Maybe that’s the cat and mouse game of a true artist, to leave those of us on the outside constantly trying to pin her down. I suppose regardless of the answer, chances are she’d respond with that snarled eloquence.
To shed a little bit of light on the work and life of Polly Jean, she recently gave her thoughts on the album, her processes and awkwardly being the center of our attention.
Creating such intimate, powerful work, where do you find inspiration as a writer?
I think as a person and as a writer, I thrive on extremes. And I feel inspired by extremes in life. That has often taken me to various parts of the globe searching for something that’s gonna throw me into the new, and into the now, and taken me away from where I was born, where I grew up, and everything English that I know. So I’ve often done that. And there are many places that I’d like to go to still in the future. With the last record, [Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea] for instance, I did spend some time in New York, which is almost the complete opposite to my home in Dorset [England] – which is very quiet, and very removed, and surrounded by wonderful nature and scenery. So it was almost the opposite to that. And…now, I find myself here in Los Angeles as an opposite to New York almost. It’s a move that way, but further, and it’s inspired me in different ways again. It made me look at things in a different light. Next stop Russia…that’s what I say.
Was the entire album done this time at home?
This record was recorded mostly at my home, in Dorset. Most of the songs reached an almost completed level there. And then I decided to then transfer these original 8 track and 4 track tapes to 24 track machine. And I did that in the neighboring county of Devon to where I live in Dorset, so it was just a half hour drive everyday for myself. And again, I think that the beauty of recording it there was that it maintained the quality or feeling of the home recordings we already had, because it was still very remote, nothing anywhere, no shops, no houses, just a house on a hill. So in some ways it left the canvas completely clean to paint my own picture. There were no outside influences going in at that time when finishing the record other than, this is just what I’m doing. There were no outside distractions. And I was free to concentrate entirely on continuing the atmospheres that were captured on the home recordings.
Did the remote home setting prove to be more difficult?
This was a very difficult record to make. Probably because I chose to produce it myself. Meaning that I didn’t have the luxury of somebody else to shoulder my doubt or worries. So I shouldered them all myself (laughs) and it was a completely draining, disorienting, exasperating, invigorating, exhilarating experience all wrapped up into one. And I would do it again. I would go back in there and do it again, but it was one of the hardest pieces of work I’ve ever done. The only other hardest piece of work I ever did was when I produced a record for somebody else. I think producing is really, really hard. And I now have complete respect and admiration for the producers I work with so much more. Well I did before, but now I realize the extent of what they do. And both times I produced records – this one for myself and [2001’s Funny Cry Happy Gift] for my friend, Tiffany Anders – nearly killed me (laughs).
In addition to self-producing the album, you also play practically every note yourself. So how did you decide who to bring in for that last bit of outside support?
The other people that I chose to work with me on this record – that was a very difficult process actually, because I knew I wasn’t competent enough as a drummer to play the drums. I played drums on a couple of songs, but they’re very easy songs to play on, but I knew I needed a drummer, because I wanted the songs to have that extra dynamic to them. There was no question as to who that would be. It was Rob Ellis, who I’ve worked with since the first album. And we’ve worked together for so long that we don’t even need to communicate about what we’re looking for in music. We’re just on the same wavelength completely. So that was not a question. I toyed with the idea of bringing in other players, but then again, when I decided to produce it myself , I thought, “well why not go the whole way and play everything myself.” So in the end I played all the instruments, apart from the drums. And because, then, this record seemed to be taking me down this very intimate, homemade kind of feel, I chose to have as my engineer, Head, who I’ve worked [for a long time], and knows me, is my friend, is the kind of person that I don’t have to communicate with for them to understand me or what I’m wanting. Once I’d gotten the nature of what I wanted to make, here in my head, it was very easy to choose just those two people to work with, as the minimum amount of people, other than myself, I needed people that would not in any way disrupt my own direction.
Now that you’ve experienced all angles of the recording process, how important is the role of a producer?
The role of a producer in a recording is a very, very important one. I’ve worked with two or three producers in my time and they have an enormous impact on the way a record turns out. Obviously, a lot of it is with me, I’m thinking of producers I’ve worked with in the past which is Flood, Steve Albini, and then with Mick Harvey on the last album, Stories. Having a producer is having someone to bounce off of, so if you are unsure of something you can really ask their opinion, or if you are tired one day, you can lean on them, just say, “Look, can you steer the ship today because I’m exhausted and I can’t think straight.” But they’re a sounding board for your ideas, they are a suggester of ideas that you never would have thought of yourself, an eye opener when you can’t see for mist. So they are a very large influence. And not only that, but different producers have very much their different sounds. Flood has a sound that I can recognize. [I can tell] he’s produced something before I’ve read that he had or anything. Brian Eno is another one. Daniel Renoir. You can hear, “Oh, that’s a Daniel Renoir production.”
And I’ve always, since I started making records, which was twelve years ago, my ambition was to one day feel confident enough to produce my own album without anyone else’s help. And this was the first time I felt that I had reached that position, that I felt confident enough in myself as a human being that I could carry out my ideas and hopes and wishes for a record. I did have quite a role in the engineering of the record as well, because many of the songs were recorded at my home on my 4 track or my 8 track, both of which are quite simple machines. I’m somebody who likes using very simple machinery, nothing particularly very technical. I like the beauty of simplicity, so most of the recording I had taken to a point where they were finished, apart from the drums, basically. And then I took that into the studio, transferred it onto a 24 track machine and worked on top of it, adding drums, maybe redoing some vocals if I wasn’t happy with the sound. Rewrote a couple of songs. Two of the songs were started from scratch, because it’s very difficult for a drummer to play on top of things that are already played, particularly if they’re done without a click. A lot of the songs weren’t, they were just sort of free-floating, and poor Rob Ellis would have to try and free float with me on this thing that was already recorded. So there were a couple of times where that didn’t work out, and we had to start from scratch, but most of the songs were already almost completed by myself at home and then the finishing touches were done in the studio.
Was it a more enjoyable experience doing it all yourself?
I couldn’t say that this record was an enjoyable experience. I think it was a journey that I learned an enormous amount from. There were enjoyable moments certainly. When a song starts to work, when it starts to work it’s magic and its finished, those times are magical and so exciting and life-affirming. So those times are very enjoyable. But if I was to percentage that, it might happen 2% of the time. And 98% of the time it can be just, constantly hard work really. And I enjoy that…I enjoy being completely occupied by work, so it was a mixture. When I look back on it now, I would say it was a really difficult, hard, taxing time. And yet, I’m so glad I did it…so glad. And I came out with something that I feel was as good as I could have made it at that time.
The album artwork is made up of a collection of self-portraits. Was that done to further reinforce the self-disclosure and intimacy of the record?
For a long time, I’ve wanted to have an album’s artwork that was purely pictures of me, me, me, me and me (laughs). No, since I was at art college, and I think it’s quite an art college obsession, of one’s self, and examining one’s inner self. I remember when I was at art college I was casting myself in plaster. I think it’s something that everyone in art college goes through, so since then I have always regularly taken pictures of myself in the mirror, I guess to document the changes over the years, and you can see yourself getting older and you can remember exactly that moment in time when you took that picture and remember how you were feeling. So it was sort of a tradition I started when I was at art college. When I was thinking about the artwork for this record – years before I thought I would just like to have this whole collection of my self-portraits for artwork, that would be really important to me. A document of my journey to this point.
And, like I was explaining, about how I’ve only just felt at the point in my life where I could produce myself and trust in that, produce my own record and make it entirely myself, then this felt absolutely the right record to document my journey to now. I’ve made it in a very simple way, that was something that I discovered making it that left to my own devices and my own production, I choose to make things sound simple, lo-fi, just not like how I even thought I might do. I thought that producing my own record, I might kind of, make them more sparkly, brush them up a bit, and I found that every time I tried to do that, I just took it all away again. I didn’t like it. Everything was like, “get off, no, get away from the songs.” I discovered that even when it comes to producing a record, they basically sound like my demos do, which is sparse, homespun, raw and sort of messed up. Not quite right, something not quite right about it. And that’s what I discovered with this, is that actually that is how I like to hear things. I actually didn’t realize that before – I thought it was just the way I made my demos, and I put down that strange soundingness of them to the fact that they were not finished. But then this whole record has ended up sounding a bit like that and it’s a very homemade-sounding record.
And so then again the artwork being a mishmash of things that have been made over that last twenty years, some of the pictures are quite old, it felt entirely appropriate for it. Having said that, I chose as my assembler of my pieces, Marie, who I’ve worked with, again, for the last, well since I was eighteen – seventeen, eighteen. So she is part of my life and part of my journey and she felt like the person that I could safely hand into the lap all these ideas I had for the artwork and knowing that she knew me inside out as a person she could assemble it in a way that she felt presented the images best, because I think that’s something that I didn’t want to be, the producer of the artwork, totally. I felt that I did need an outside opinion to make it work for other people to view.
What was the time period in which Uh Huh Her was written?
The time period that this album was written over was very large, really. I write quite a lot of the times, so I end up with quite a backlog of songs. Then when I come to record an album I just select which songs feel right according to how I’m feeling, what kind of record I want to make, what songs are interesting me the most at that moment. So some songs for this new record were pulled from being 2 years old, some songs were written a couple of months before I started recording, so it’s quite a mixture of all different times in my life. So, you know, two years ago I might have been living somewhere entirely differently to where I am now, but I like the fact that songs coming from different eras then have very, very different qualities. So I think on this record in particular, there’s a lot of very different moods going on, but the common thread being that they were all finally finished off in the same environment and maybe brought up to date with the additions that I made. But these songs came from over a couple of years of writing, really.
How do you know when a song is finished?
Basically, when the song is working its magic on you, you know that it’s complete and doesn’t need anything extra. Having said that, there were songs that were already working that magic on me, and for some reason I thought, “I can’t just leave it like that,” because there would only be three things on it, you know, the keyboard, a voice and a strange plinky sound in the background or something. And I thought, “Well, I must try other things,” and so there are a few songs where I tried putting everything on it, and then I just took it all away again just to leave it as it first was. And so, yes, you do know when a song is finished because it moves you in some way – it makes you excited or it makes you laugh or it makes you feel like you’ve gone right inside yourself. A song is finished when it stands up on its own as well, when it stands outside of you and it becomes something in its own right. It doesn’t have to be attached to you anymore, it doesn’t need an umbilical cord to you, it just suddenly floats off on its own and “oh, there it is, it’s done, it’s a thing and it’s finished.”
Do you ultimately have a favorite song or lyric?
The album is an album, and I choose not to talk about the songs separately from each other. I choose not to talk about the lyrics to the songs. The album is this body of work that is just out there now, out of my hands. It’s for people to take what they need from it. I feel that I’ve done my role now and I could explain what the songs mean for me, but that’s just one point of view. I think, in some ways, the songs are quite separate from me and in the way that I like to listen to my favorite albums and project my own feelings and experiences onto those songs, I’d like that to be the case [with this album], that other people can have them now. They’re not mine anymore. I’ve got my own opinion, but I wouldn’t want to influence other people with it.
Do you have a preference between writing, recording and performing live?
If I had to put in order of preference writing, recording or performing, I think without a shadow of a doubt I would say performing, because that is for me where the music makes sense. For me, music is something that is intangible, and I like the beauty of the fact that it’s moving in time and you can’t nail it down, you can’t pin it down. And I always think that songs are at their most beautiful when they’re performed live, and then it just passes by you on the air and it’s gone, and you have one of those sensations of “that was a beautiful moment in time and it passed through me and it’s gone.” And sometimes when you’re just driving around you have a sensation like that, from just being overwhelmed by something beautiful. And then that feeling, that lovely taste in your mouth, is just gone. And that’s why music is endlessly fascinating and untamable to me. So that is why the performance of music would come first.
But also because it is such an enjoyable thing for me and to see the enjoyment that it can give, very directly. When you make a record you don’t actually see the reaction of people when they’re listening to that record or what it does for them. But when you’re playing in front of people that are visibly getting lost in the moment—and you are too—it’s a really uplifting and life affirming experience, I think. And can be for everyone. I know that if I’ve gone to see a live performance and it’s been an incredible one, I feel changed afterwards. I feel like I want to change my life, I want to make my life take on a different path in some way, because that person I saw perform inspired me so much and opened up my heart to all these possibilities that I never had before. So that’s why performance is at the top of my list of what music is about, really. And I don’t like the word performance, just the happening of music at that moment of time rather than playing a recorded piece of music. So then second on my list would be writing. Again, because it’s something that happens in a moment in time. When an idea is forming, it seems to come from nowhere and it seems to pass through you. And you miss catching it and it’s gone. If you catch an idea—a bit like with a butterfly net or something—and you catch it, then it kind of moves through you and changes and becomes something else. And all that is so exciting, as a writer, because you’re moving with it in time. So this idea is that you’re moving with it, making it happen, shaping it, and then the time’s gone and it’s finished and then you’ll never write that piece again. That quality of life and death of a piece.
Whereas recording would come last for me because I find it a very painful experience, very difficult, very draining. I lose all my energy, my whole…everything is channeled so I find it hard to concentrate on anything else. It’s racking in the sense that you have to keep questioning yourself over and over again: “Is this right?” “Is this the best it could be?” “Was this right?” And then the fact that you finally arrive at something that you think you’re happy with—and you think, because you’re never quite 100% sure, or I’m not—then you have to, at some point, stamp that in time and say “Okay, that’s the best I can do for now” and forever live with that piece, you don’t get to change it again [laughs]. So, yeah, that would come the last of the things to me. I’m notoriously bad at making final decisions on something being as good as it can be, that can be very difficult.
So are you looking forward to playing the songs from Uh Huh Her in front of a live audience?
I really am looking forward to playing this record live. But just playing live, I love the thrill of performing and it’s where the songs make more sense, so I am really looking forward to that. I’m also looking forward to the fact that I’m trying out some new players that I haven’t tried before. I’m keeping it quite a small band, either three or four-piece. I’m not quite sure the way it’s gonna take shape yet, but I am very excited about the prospect of trying new instrumentation, new combinations of instruments, than what I’ve done before.
