PJ Harvey Sets First U.S. Live Appearance in Six Years

Kory Grow
·2 min read
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PJ-Harvey-Six-Years - Credit: Steve Gullick*
PJ-Harvey-Six-Years - Credit: Steve Gullick*

PJ Harvey will make her first U.S. appearance in six years next month when she reads poetry from her recent novel in verse, Orlam, and performs songs from her latest album, this year’s I Inside the Old Year Dying, in Brooklyn. The event, titled “I Inside the Old Year Dying: Poetry, Conversation, Music,” will take place at the Warsaw on Nov. 7. Tickets go on sale Friday via Ticketmaster.

The artist, who has been touring in support of the album in Europe, will perform several songs alongside bandmates John Parish and James Johnston. She’ll also participate in a conversation with The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich.

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Harvey is planning a more extensive tour of the U.S. next autumn. After her last tour, which concluded in 2017, Harvey said she was unsure if she wanted to tour or even make music again. “I had to ask myself: ‘Is this still the thing that feels best to put my energies into, and is it the best contribution I have to give?'” she told Vulture. “And I think the answer is yes. I think that’s been shown to me during rehearsals and during the making of the new album, where I felt sort of in the place I should be and doing the thing I can do best in this world.”

She has also booked a curated outdoor concert in London next August in Gunnersbury Park, where she’ll perform alongside Big Thief, Tirzah, and Shida Shahabi.

She wrote Orlam and the new album, which are musical interpretations of some of the poems in the book, all in the Dorset dialect, native to the rural area of England where she grew up. Some of the language is archaic, but she told Rolling Stone last year she still heard a lot of it growing up. “There were certain phrases that you’d hear,” she said. “A phrase I remember that I used in the book was ‘Seeming I.’ We would say, ‘Well, it seems to me that this person is …’ But instead of saying ‘It seems to me,’ they go, ‘Seeming I.’ … Still in use would be words like ‘t’other,’ for ‘the other’ and ‘b’aint’; instead of saying, ‘he isn’t’ or ‘it isn’t,’ you’d go, ‘b’aint.’ Meaning that ‘it ain’t’ — it ‘be ain’t’ — if you see what I’m mean.”

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