PJ Harvey – Voyager
PJ Harvey returns three years after the release of her Grammy-nominated album I Inside the Old Year Dying with a glimpse into her next artistic chapter. Her striking new track “Voyager” is out now via Partisan Records.
“Voyager” had already been taking shape as part of Harvey’s next album, when renowned English physicist Professor Brian Cox invited her to write a song for his ongoing ‘Emergence’ tour. Recorded with a full orchestra at Miraval Studios in Provence, “Voyager” takes its name from the NASA probes launched in 1977 – containing Carl Sagan’s famed ‘Voyager Golden Record’ – still travelling through interstellar space nearly 50 years on. The music highlights the interplay between swelling string arrangements and pulsing synthesiser signals stretching out into the cosmos: icy, ethereal, and pensive, yet threaded with an unmistakable humanity. Across it, Harvey contemplates our small, fragile place in the universe; a ‘pale-blue dot’, a flake of snow, dust in a sunbeam, and finds in that vastness a quiet plea to choose light and to choose love.
Discussing the track, PJ Harvey shared:
“I was excited for the challenge to compose a song in the ‘voice’ of Voyager 2. I have long been fascinated by the spacecraft and its journey, and asked myself what it might say to us if it could? This was an inspiring route to take to develop the song.
The song had already started life as part of the ongoing work towards my new album, so when Professor Brian Cox invited me to write a piece for his new show, I sent him the voice memo of this song to see if it resonated. It immediately made him think of the Voyager craft and the sound of its signal being sent back to Earth. With these ideas as my starting point I let the song develop, and discussed an orchestral accompaniment with Dario Marianelli.
I’m very happy with the end result, and it’s wonderful to hear the orchestral score bring such expansiveness to my music. I thoroughly enjoyed researching the history and journey of Voyager 1 & 2, and was glad to be able to quote the great Carl Sagan within the song, and his famous description of our fragile and beautiful ‘pale blue dot’.”
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