KLFM

PJ HARVEY / I Inside the Old Year Dying

I very much wanted to avoid tipping into predictable folk music, which these words and this subject matter would have lent itself to so well, so I went the opposite direction. Other than the main instrument and the voice, I really wanted everything to be quite unidentifiable and strange, because of that need to create this magical, mystical unknown universe that I wanted the words to inhabit. It was a very hard thing to do. So often, we would jettison a sound because it was too familiar to us. And Flood and John Parish, who I worked very closely with in creating the sound, we were all on the same direction: trying really hard to not sound predictable, but also not to sound like anything that we felt that we’d done together before, because we’ve worked together for 30 years now.

We’re all very interested in continuing to discover new things and create new sounds, and that gets harder the more work that you’ve made, because there’s more to avoid. But I really feel that we pushed ourselves into quite new places — certainly with my singing, I feel like I haven’t sung before like I do on this record. – Polly Jean Harvey (npr interview)

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