PJ Harvey interview on the official website of writer, Laura Hird

“I read a wonderful quote by Leonard Cohen not long ago where he was talking about how sad songs mean so much to people because everybody suffers defeat in their lives in some way, whether it’s they didn’t get the job they wanted, or when you’re younger you imagine all these things about how your life’s going to turn out and ultimately that doesn’t happen to anybody, and so a sad song is incredibly touching because it connects us all to that sense of loss in some way.”

Leonard is of course an infamously early riser, operating in the pre-dawn hours when it seems as though there’s a semi permeable wall between the dream-state and lucidity. ‘White Chalk’ occupies a similarly liminal space: songs about the proximity between life and death, madness and inspiration, the conscious and the subconscious.

“That’s very interesting that you picked up on that. I’m not somebody like Leonard who rises at 4.30 to start writing at 6.30, but I do always find my most creative side in the morning. But also when I am writing, the nearest state of being I could compare it to is the dream state, when you’re coming out of the dream, and you wake. I’m a very deep dreamer, I mean I dream every night, two or three very vivid dreams which I can remember very easily, some of those dreams become songs actually. But when I’m writing just lyrically with a pen and paper or whether I’m at a piano or a guitar, the state of mind becomes such that it is very similar to that feeling of being between unconsciousness and consciousness, really no sense of being in the body at all, but just completely open to being informed.”