Listen to PJ Harvey sing folk classic ‘Run On’
PJ Harvey has recently shared the full soundtrack for the new AppleTV+ show Bad Sisters. Harvey created the soundtrack with composer Tim Phillips, producing an eclectic mix of original music, television scores, and covers.
We’ve already looked at Harvey’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Who By Fire’, which serves as the show’s theme, but now we get to hear Harvey take on another legendary song. This time, it’s the traditional American folk tune ‘Run On’, which has a long and rich history within the wider world of music.
Whether it’s titled ‘God’s Gonna Cut You Down’, ‘Sermon’, or ‘Run On’, the song has been floating around the canon of American popular music since the 1940s. It became a civil rights anthem thanks to a 1956 recording from Odetta, and the song has passed through the hands of everyone from Elvis Presley and Tom Jones to Johnny Cash and Moby. Now, it’s Harvey’s turn to take on the judgment of the almighty.
“I loved working with Tim, who was well prepared and knew exactly what he needed from me in order to create the sound he was hearing in his head,” Harvey explained. “My job was to get it all done, and spent a full day providing him with all manner of curious and other-worldly vocal expressions. I thoroughly enjoyed it and had a full vocal workout. I think it is magical how Tim has used our created instrument, affectionately known as ‘The Pollytron,’ in order to access the perfect emotional soundscape for this unique series.”
According to Phillips, Harvey’s voice is all over the show’s score. Literally, her voice was sampled and morphed to create different sounds. “Bad Sisters needed to have its roots in an earthy, feminine place and also to show heart, humour, mystery, and suspense. We decided that central to this should be the use of PJ’s vocals, so we devised a novel method of working: We created a vast sample library of her singing all sorts of different things such as howls, whoops, cackles, whispers, scales of notes, quarter tone note bends, vocal slides between notes, and specially assembled melodic lines of public domain Irish poetry.”
“We built it into a massive sample instrument so her voice would be available on demand for the scoring of the production,” Phillips adds. “It was then put through a variety of sonic treatments to turn her voice into a very flexible sonic texture, sometimes heard singing words, sometimes as an instrument in the ensemble.”
Check out Harvey’s take on ‘Run On’ down below.
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