‘Lwonesome Tonight’: Jesus, Elvis, life and death wrapped up in a PJ Harvey song
Throughout her career, PJ Harvey has always approached her work as a poet just as much as she does as a musician. Her ten albums are laced with thought-provoking lyricism covering a range of topics such as womanhood, war, and the natural world, and every line is rich with vivid detail. Of course, the musical aspect of her craft bolsters her mastery of language, but her lyricism is so powerful in its own right that it is easy to enjoy when observed on the page rather than sung.
The greatest proof of this is evidenced in the fact that her tenth album, 2023’s I Inside the Old Year Dying, was preceded by the publication of an epic poem, Orlam. Written entirely in the Dorset dialect, the region from which Harvey hails, this was her second published collection, but was the first to hold a direct link to a record of hers, with several sections of the poem being reworked into songs on the album.
The record’s heavy emphasis on improvisation gives opportunity for the poetry to help give structure and form to the songs, which are some of the sparsest and most haunting of Harvey’s career. With plenty of references to spiritualism and cultural figures, a typically broad range of subjects are covered throughout the record, but there’s one song in particular that is decorated with so much hidden meaning and is open to many interpretations that it stands out as being one of Harvey’s unsung masterpieces.
‘Lwonesome Tonight’ is pulled from Orlam and transformed into a maze-like composition that eschews form and structure, and explores themes of devoting your life to someone by using various unconnected concepts in a non-linear fashion. The use of the dialect is also powerful and makes it instantly possible to connect it to Harvey’s own personal identity as she speaks in a stream-of-consciousness fashion.
Within the brief runtime of ‘Lwonesome Tonight’, several disparate themes are woven into a tapestry, with each stanza being an intricately detailed piece of patchwork that seems not to fit with the rest on first glance. However, the further one dives into the words, the more these references to Elvis Presley, Jesus Christ, and the English countryside all begin to reveal their connections, with Harvey using double and triple meanings and the jumping between local dialect and standardised English providing more clarity.
In an interview with NPR, Harvey cleared things up by stating where these multiple meanings came from. “You’ve got things like Elvis, who was also known as ‘The King’, appearing on Maundy Day, which is a religious festival celebrating the last supper. So, we’ve got Christ, we’ve got Elvis, we’ve got a king — do you see what I mean?” While it may seem convoluted, everything Harvey does is done with such purpose that you have to really dig deep and examine every fine detail in order to fully appreciate her intentions.
“We can bring lots of threads in, but the beauty of poetry is that you can have those layers existing all at the same time,” she continued. “It can mean a lot of things, depending on what the reader or the listener wants to pull out of it and make theirs. I very specifically wanted to set out to do that.” Lines such as “are you Elvis? Are you God? / Jesus sent to win my trust? / ‘Love Me Tender’ are his words / as I’ve loved you, so you must” don’t feel as ambiguous as they flirt with these two separate ideas of worship, yet the references to nature in “hark the greening of the Earth” and the “zingen of the birds” are much more rooted in tangible connections.
Harvey’s ability to play with these separate meanings and somehow make them coalesce perfectly is indicative of her genius, and while I Inside the Old Year Dying may not be as revered as some of her earlier works, it’s certainly packed with some of her most meaningful and thoughtful poetry.
