“I Inside the Old Year Dying” by PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey is a multi-faceted entertainer from England, though she is primarily recognized as a musician. With a discography dating back to 1991, her music career has had sort of a strange trajectory. That is to say that, leading up to “I Inside the Old Year Dying”, which is Harvey’s 10th studio LP, she just topped the UK Albums Chart for the first time with the project that preceded this, that being The Hope Six Demolition Project.
However, the earlier albums in her catalog sold better than that one. Also, The Hope Six Demolition Project was released way back in 2016. So with Partisan Records making “I Inside the Old Year Dying” public on 7 July 2023, that marks seven years and the longest gap between any of PJ’s studio albums.
But in that regard, the poetess has clarified that this particular project “was a difficult album to make”, one which required “many years of work” in order to complete.
So what we’re dealing with here is the title track to that album. This song was written by PJ Harvey, and she produced it with fellow British musicians Flood and John Parish, both of whom are heavily involved in the album at large.
The Lyrics of “I Inside the Old Year Dying”
As noted earlier, PJ is multi-faceted, with music only being one of her talents. For instance she’s also a writer/poet who recently had an entire, 300+ page epic poem published through Picador UK. That book, which is titled Orlam (2022), revolves around what the author described as “a year in the life of a 9-year-old in a rural part of the west of England, in a non-specific area”.
The project served as the inspiration behind “I Inside the Old Year Dying”. So as it currently stands, the only reasonable explanations we have concerning the lyrics of this terse piece are provided by a tenured Genius scholar by the name of abuddhazaki who obviously has some familiarity with that text. But to note, the annotations provided by said scholar have yet to be officially reviewed as of this writing.
The reason the lyrics are challenging to understand otherwise is that besides being based on a specific text, Orlam is set in Dorset, a part of England that has its own distinguishable dialect which this song appears to heavily utilize.
In other words, according to abuddhazaki some of the lyrics are words derived from that dialect. For instance, in the first verse, “zun” equals sun, “leery” means famished, and “stares” are starlings, which are a type of bird (as is the “lark” that is referenced).
So with those understandings in mind, the verse seems to paint the picture of a locality, marked noticeably by the presence of birds, which may be suffering from something like a drought or famine.
“The sun’s a feeble lamp
O’er leery land
Stares a’ chat in code
Lark a meagre note”
The second verse also proceeds to paint a bleak picture, perhaps illustrating some of the ill effects said drought or famine is having on the people (though the “drush” or ‘thrush’ mentioned is an STD). And as far as the “UNDERWHELEM” which the singer gives a shoutout to, that’s the name of the village in which Orlam is set and presumably where all of this is transpiring.
So apparently the poem, which once again is quite lengthy, deals at least in part with an era in which the villagers suffered so.
So in all honesty, it’s questionable how much a listener who hasn’t read the book can appreciate this song from a lyrical perspective. But it does make the text more generally interesting, knowing that it deals with subject matter such as the anguish, seemingly from different angles, of an entire village.
