Friday, June 12, 2009

I can’t keep up…with Flavorwire

While I wasn’t paying attention, Flavorwire ran another one of my interviews, this one with long-time PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish. He was a really good interview, warm, funny, thoughtful, etc…and seems to me that the piece makes a good companion to a PJ Harvey interview I did a year or so ago.

Here’s Parish talking about writing for Polly:

Parish says that writing for Harvey is different from writing for himself, in a subtle, hard-to-define way. “I guess when I was thinking of things for Polly it meant that I would write much more dynamic music than I would write for myself. Because I think as a singer she is so much more amenable to perform over something that’s much more dense and much more abstract and much more ferocious than something I would be able to sing over.”

He added, “I approach it almost more as though I would approach writing music for a film, where I’m thinking, okay, it’s got to have really strong rising melodies, it’s got to have a very definite atmosphere. Because that’s what Polly expects and kind of thrives on. If I send her something with a really strong atmosphere, she’ll respond to that and she’ll come back with something that enhances it.”


Read the rest here


And here’s Ms. Harvey on the strange and hauntingly beautiful White Chalk.

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