PJ Harvey releases new single ‘I Inside The Old I Dying’
Double Mercury Prize-winner PJ Harvey has released her new single ‘I Inside The Old I Dying’. The song is taken from her forthcoming album of the same name.
Speaking of the new single, Harvey said: “This delicate and beautiful song eluded us until the very last day in the studio. Over the previous five weeks we had tried so many times to capture it and failed, and/but then John reinvented the feel of the guitar pattern. As he was demonstrating it in the control room, Flood handed me a microphone and pressed record whilst I sat next to John trying to work out how to sing to it. The result somehow captures the ethereal and melancholic longing I was looking for.”
She continued: “In the lyric everyone is waiting for the saviour to reappear – everyone and everything anticipates the arrival of this figure of love and transformation. There is a sense of sexual longing and awakening and of moving from one realm into another – from child to adult, from life to death and the eternal.”
‘I Inside The Old I Dying’ arrives alongside an animated video by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña. The directors say of the film: “We envisioned the video as a short story about love, death, and resurrection. We imagined that the video can be seen as a little fairy tale and also as an intimate ritual. We wanted to keep the animation in a state of scenic and material rawness, as if the elements we see are not characters or props, but artefacts and talismans that are part of a ceremony,” they added.
Harvey’s new album was written over a three-week period, and she previously explained it was inspired by her experience of falling out of love with music in 2017. A conversation with director Steve McQueen proved to be critical in the development of the LP. He told the musician to ignore the “process of writing an album” and go back to basics by focusing on the “words, images and music” which stayed in her mind during the making of I Inside The Old I Dying.
Additionally, the singer-songwriter has announced details of a tour of the United Kingdom and Europe. In total, Harvey will visit 13 major cities and play two shows in each location. The run of dates begins in Dublin on September 22nd.
The LP is released on July 7th through Partisan Records.
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