PJ Harvey is sending a message from deep space. The British singer-songwriter has unveiled “Voyager,” a sweeping new track inspired by NASA’s legendary Voyager probes, which were launched in 1977 and continue their journeys nearly five decades later.
Originally conceived during sessions for Harvey’s next album – details of which have yet to be announced – “Voyager” took on a new life after physicist Professor Brian Cox invited the musician to contribute a song to his live Emergence stage show, which hits the U.K. later this year. The track was later recorded with a full orchestra at Miraval Studios in Provence, France.
Lyrically, the track also references the late astronomer Carl Sagan, whose 1994 book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image of Earth taken from the edge of the solar system, by NASA’s Voyager 1. In it, Sagan described the planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Harvey shared in a statement: “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,” she continued. “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’.”
Harvey’s most recent studio album arrived in the form of 2023’s I Inside the Old Year Dying, her tenth full-length effort to date. It marked her first release with independent label Partisan Records after three decades with Island Records and followed 2016’s Grammy-nominated The Hope Six Demolition Project.
The record also earned a nomination for the Mercury Prize, adding to her long history with the award; the Dorset musician has been nominated several times overall and has won twice, for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2001) and Let England Shake (2011). She remains the only artist to have received the award on two separate occasions.
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