Zitat des Tages von P. J. Harvey:
I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.
In order to make my solo shows as interesting as possible, I moved songs onto very different instruments so that I was moving instruments quite a lot during the set.
People have a tendency to see country life through rose-colored glasses.
It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent. Therefore I keep reaching for instruments I don't particularly know how to play, and then I become excited.
My mom is a sculptress.
Well, I don't really concern myself too much with what other people make of my work.
I think I'm a songwriter. I grab an instrument to make my body a song, but I'm not a player as such, maybe a little more on guitar, but certainly not piano.
I tried to use words that were dealing with the emotional quality that any human being could recognize in the way that they felt about their country. It's to do with the world we live in. That world is a brutal one and full of war. It's also full of many wonderful things and love and hope.
My father is actually a quarry man - he deals in stone. He also at one point had a lot of sheep, he owned a sheep farm, but primarily the family business was in stone.
There's so much you can do with laying words on a bed of music. You can completely change their meaning with the type of music or the way they're sung.
Making me into a role model is placing too much importance on what I see as a work in progress.
My mother and father are very involved with music. It's completely part of their soul. They have an incredible record collection, all vinyl, of some of the best artists, in my eyes, that you can come across.
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.
There is nothing more boring than doing singing exercises.
People like Howlin' Wolf, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Captain Beefheart - all of these artists were what I grew up listening to every day of my life. And there's a very healthy music scene in the west country of England, where I grew up.
I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age.
I'd want to read the stories that I'd written, I'd want to show the drawings that I made. That was just purely natural. So I knew I wanted to go into the arts in some way and that I'd want to show that work in some way.
I don't think that much anymore in terms of 'write a record, record a record, tour a record,' because in my own mind, things have changed, in that I'm just an ongoing artist. I'm not quite sure what the next project needs to be until it presents himself, and then I know. I just follow dutifully while I'm being led.
As I grew older, I actually was prepared to go into fine arts school and do a degree. That was what I was actually settled upon when I was offered a record deal.
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.
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.
I decide immediately if I like a person and if I do, then I'm myself, and if I don't, then I give nothing.
I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels.
I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.
Maybe I'm just purely lucky. If I've come up against obstacles I've always found another way around it.