The Garden, a PJ Harvey Discussion Site

TheNightingale wrote:The photos seem already deleted from Josh Rogosin's Insta, Polly's team moves fast lol

Hopefully they post the session before long! I wonder what they played

back in August 1992, my old band, Thanks To Gravity, headed down to Cambridge for a show at TT the Bears. It was a Tuesday night, but we were working hard to break out of the local scene and hoped there would be a couple a&r guys. The place got packed very quickly. Really packed. It wasn’t for us. Turns out we were opening for a British phenom named Polly Harvey who was playing her first ever show in the United States. PJ Harvey. All the cool kids were there. Sweaty. Loud. It was a fun night. Yesterday, I got to see her at NPR’s tiny desk. Members of Fugazi and other DC punk gods were in attendance. it was a good set, but I mostly was enjoying the nostalgia

TheNightingale wrote:Okay I sure hope they are not shelving the session until the US dates are announced.

Which NPR employee do we need to bully so they upload it to their YouTube channel?

TheNightingale wrote:Okay I sure hope they are not shelving the session until the US dates are announced.

Which NPR employee do we need to bully so they upload it to their YouTube channel?

Polly Harvey has inhabited many characters throughout her 30-year career and always dressed the part: catsuit-rocking glam queen, high-collared Victorian wraith, mini-skirted libertine, feather-adorned warrior. Bringing the story told in her latest album, I Inside the Old Year Dying to the Tiny Desk, she stands at the microphone in a draped dress the wintry color of a gray alder tree, designed by her longtime costumier Todd Lynn. Its torn elegance perfectly suits the dual role she plays in these gently ferocious songs, which originated in her novel-in-verse, Orlam. As she lets loose her inimitable razor-sharp alto, she becomes both Ira-Abel, the child who, in the aftermath of an assault, merges with the forest around her Dorset, England, home, and of the bard whose verses keep that shepherd girl alive after her vanishing.

Harvey keeps her gestures minimal as she sets her scenes and speaks through them. Matching her voice to those of her trusted collaborators John Parish and James Johnston as they invoke the forest's ghosts — the "chalky children of evermore" — she lets the fecund imagery of her lyrics resonate. At times the crowd seems stunned into silence; after her lament for Ira-Abel, "A Noiseless Noise," concludes with the notes from her acoustic and Parish's electric guitar intertwining, she coolly waits out a gap before the applause and hoots of appreciation arrive.

This is where Harvey lives as a fully realized artist: on her own artistic plane, inviting listeners to take their time to fully join her. Ending with the heart-rendingly lonesome title track from 2007's White Chalk, she connects Ira-Abel's story to her lifelong project of expressing women's solitude, pain and resistance. Exploring how human boundaries can shatter, reassert themselves or be rendered irrelevant, these songs create a contained space that echoes far beyond itself.

an tha wrote:It's out...

https://youtu.be/pSUgrhmtXIw?si=sC8_HNqWYCD8h3Ez