Quote

I think you have to be very careful getting the balance right if you're going to talk about grand themes like war, death and nationhood. You need to use the right language or don't do it at all.

PJ Harvey

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PJ Harvey
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: October 9
Composer
Guitarist
Musician
Recording Artist
Saxophonist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Corscombe
Dorset
Polly Jean Harvey
Needs
Talk
Going
Getting
Think
Language
Nationhood
Thinking
Use
Themes
Like
War
Grand
Death
Theme
Need
Careful
Right
Balance

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There's a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doing, that requires quite a lot of study and quite a lot of hard work as well.
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Like I have to pretend like I'm a male rapper, that I got stacks and we're in the club, and what do I want to say. And then, when writing Rare I could just be PJ.
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I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels.
PJ Harvey
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I studied art just short of the level where you can earn a degree.
PJ Harvey
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In the same way, I write some of my more difficult pieces when I'm at very happy stages in my life.
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If you want to be good at anything, you have to work hard at it. It doesn't just fall from the sky. I work every day at trying to improve my writing, and I really enjoy it. Nothing fascinates me more than putting words together, and seeing how a collection of words can produce quite a profound effect.
PJ Harvey
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Some things lend themselves well to songs, some things don't, and I'm learning that a lot at the moment. It's still a relatively new way of writing. It's only really the last five to 10 years that I've taken my writing seriously in this way, as something I can keep working toward. I think I feel myself much more before as simply a songwriter.
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The first song I heard from me was Meek Mill [I Don't Know], it was his first single before he went (to jail). I remember the first time I heard it was like eleven thirty at night, and I was like, Yo, this is crazy! And, I was smiling from ear to ear.
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I had a chip on my shoulders 'cause I felt like I was being overlooked.
PJ Harvey
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I'm doing quite a lot of painting on stones - little funny fish and animals.
PJ Harvey
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I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.
PJ Harvey
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I think it does surprise me a bit when people have a very fixed idea of what I'm like, based upon the work that I do, which is something that is very separate.
PJ Harvey
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Folk music was to strengthen and unify people, whether it was through an uprising and rebellion or whether is was through hard work, bringing in crops. But it was to strengthen each other and that's still what music is about today.
PJ Harvey
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Obviously, the emotions I want to convey through music are streamed through the way I interpret life.
PJ Harvey
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I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.
PJ Harvey
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With songs I almost see the images, see the action, and then all I have to do is describe it. It's almost like watching a scene from a film, and that's what I go about trying to catch in a song.
PJ Harvey
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It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent.
PJ Harvey
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Ideas for songs can come from something as simple as a photograph and letting my imagination run wild on an old photograph that I found, or to a film that I have seen or to just most of the time, just daily walking through life and keeping your eyes open.
PJ Harvey
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Most of the stuff that I do talk about, about being counted out and being an underdog, 'cause that's what I feel like I am.
PJ Harvey
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I like to be around things that I find inspiring.
PJ Harvey