A few years ago, there was a moment—a relatively brief moment within her three-and-a-half-decade career—when PJ Harvey was ready to leave music behind forever. The feeling first began gnawing at Harvey when she was deep in the songwriting process for her 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project, a weighty exploration of the inequality and suffering caused by American warmongering. “I went through feelings of huge doubt, that maybe I just wasn’t as good as I used to be as a songwriter,” says Harvey. “I just found that I’d lost the joy that I’d had when I was younger, without even consciously noticing it.”
Next came the tour for that album, which edged Harvey further into creative limbo. “I do have quite a strong work ethic,” she says. “So I just kept pushing through it because I thought, well, it’ll pass. But tours are really physically demanding, and it was a long tour. As my physical energy waned, so too did my sense of direction and purpose. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing anymore.” The day-to-day challenges of touring also ended up prompting more existential questions. “You’re tipping into your fifties, and looking at your life, and wondering if you are meeting your potential? Are you happy? Is there anything you need to change about the remaining time that you have left? I think I was going through all of that.”
It’s surprising to hear Harvey be this candid—in part, due to the fact she rarely gives interviews. Despite being arguably the most celebrated British musician of her generation—Harvey has two Mercury Prizes, seven Grammy nominations, and two best-selling poetry books under her belt—you get the sense that the press attention and the accolades aren’t why she does it. The story of how she rekindled her creative flame began, in part, by her renewed focus on the smaller things in life. “It’s so beautiful down here,” she says, cheerily, of the weather in Dorset, when we connect on a balmy June afternoon. “Sunny, but not too hot. Where are you?” London, I answer, deep in the bowels of an office building. “I bet it’s really muggy up there, isn’t it,” she says, before hesitating, as if afraid of sounding impolite—when I confirm it is very muggy, she lets out a long, generous laugh in return.
Harvey’s chameleonic guises over the decades—and the mystery that comes from being firmly press-avoidant—mean it’s hard to know what to expect. Will it be the flurry of tentacled hair from her sophomore record Rid of Me, or the lacquered red lips and bright blue eyeshadow of her To Bring You My Love era? Will it be the iconic black dress and gold handbag slung over her shoulder on the Stories From the City cover, or the Ann Demuelemeester high priestess garb she wore throughout the Let England Shake tour? None of the above, of course: She’s just Polly, the girl from rural Dorset who has, by and large, stayed in rural Dorset, and is probably happier talking about her surroundings in nature than the deeper meaning behind her latest record. In fact, she’s most at ease when not having to take herself too seriously. “I feel a lot freer now,” she says of this new chapter in her career. “I think that comes with getting older—I’ve started to take away those boundaries that maybe I used to have between things.”
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