Love me tender / Tender love, sings PJ Harvey on “A Child’s Question, August.” Reassessing Elvis Presley’s 1956 ballad “Love Me Tender,” Harvey is sharing something deeper on the lead single, off her upcoming album I Inside the Old Year Dying, out July 7.
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Harvey’s first album since The Hope Six Demolition Project in 2016, I Inside the Old Year Dying was produced by longtime collaborators John Parish and Flood and is a collection of songs going back six years, when Harvey finished touring for The Hope Six Demolition Project and felt she lost her connection to music.
“After many years of work, I am very happy to release this collection of new songs,” said Harvey in a statement. “It was a difficult album to make and took time to find its strongest form, but it has finally become all I hoped for it to be.”
The new songs offer “a resting space, a solace, a comfort, a balm,” adds Harvey, “which feels timely for the times we’re in.”
Following the release of The Hope Six Demolition Project, Harvey continued working, and writing, scoring the West End stage production of All About Eve in London, featuring vocals by actors Gillian Anderson and Lilly James. Along with Tim Phillips, Harvey also penned the soundtrack for the Apple+ series Bad Sisters.
Working with Scottish poet Don Paterson, Harvey released her second book of poetry, Orlam in 2022, a follow-up to her 2015 book The Hollow of the Hand with Irish filmmaker Seamus Murphy. The collaboration resulted in their 2019 documentary A Dog Called Money, which chronicled the making of The Hope Six Demolition Project.
For Harvey, two things sparked I Inside the Old Year Dying, including the advice she was given from British director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Hunger), who told her to “remember what she loves about words, images and music and to put away the concept of writing an album.” Then there was the simple act of sitting at a piano or with a guitar and playing songs by Bob Dylan, Nina Simone and other artists she admired.
The result was something more intimate in the 12 tracks of I Inside the Old Year Dying. “The studio was set up for live play, and that’s all we did,” said Harvey. “The importance of this is hard to overstate. If ‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’ is a very tactile, human record, that is partly because just about everything on it is rooted in improvisation: spontaneous performances and ideas, recorded at the moment of their creation.
“I think the album is about searching, looking — the intensity of first love, and seeking meaning,” she continued. “Not that there has to be a message, but the feeling I get from the record is one of love. It’s tinged with sadness and loss, but it’s loving. I think that’s what makes it feel so welcoming, so open.”
I Inside the Old Year Dying track list:
- “Prayer at the Gate”
- “Autumn Term”
- “Lwonesome Tonight”
- “Seem an I”
- “The Nether-edge”
- “I Inside the Old Year Dying”
- “All Souls”
- “A Child’s Question, August”
- “I Inside the Old I Dying”
- “August”
- “A Child’s Question, July”
- “A Noiseless Noise”
Photo: Joseph Okpako/WireImage
