PJ Harvey’s 2011 album – Let England Shake – was recorded in a 19th Century church in Dorset, on a cliff-top overlooking the sea. Why did she decide to record her album in a church, what kind of difference gives it to the music? There is so many space in the world, it’s not that strange to choose another to environment. Read on to find out how much space affects music.
A soundcloud of her latest album ‘Let England Shake’
PJ Harvey on her new recorded album:
I was looking outwards a lot more. I think a lot of my work has often been about the interior, the emotional, what happens inside oneself. And this time I’ve been just looking out, so it’s not only to do with taking a look at England but taking a look at the world and what happening in current world affairs. But always trying to come from the human point of view, because I don’t feel qualified to sing from a political standpoint… I sing as a human being affected by the politics, and that for me is a more successful way … because I so often feel that with a lot of protest music, I’m being preached to, and I don’t want that.
PJ Harvey went for the church so did the Cowboy Junkies, the space gave PJ Harveys’ music a message, but more artists use strange spaces to record their albums. Katie Melua, by example, ‘Concert Under the Sea’, recorded at the bottom of an oil platform pillar; hundreds of meters under the ocean. Then there’s A Silver Mt. Zion their album ‘Horses in the Sky’ was recored by a bonfire, and you can actually hear it. Jackson Browne, armed with an album’s worth of new songs, recorded onstage, backstage, in hotel rooms and, last but not loeast, on a tour bus. You can even here the bus engine revving in places on ‘Nothing But Time’.
A lot of good music happens when the artist lays down the tracks in a place that is out of the ordinary, adding to the dynamic of the recordings. Then the space can give the music an other dimension.
