With her new single, Polly Jean Harvey is going all Cosmos on us. It’s been three years since Harvey, one of our all-time great alt-rockers, released her most recent album I Inside The Old Year Dying. Since then, Harvey has released music for the stage and screen, but not for herself. That changes with the release of “Voyager,” the new song that Harvey wrote from the perspective of the NASA probe Voyager 2.
The Voyager 2, launches in 1977, spent years exploring the outer reaches of the Solar System before floating beyond its boundaries, billions of miles from home. It’s the craft containing Carl Sagan’s famed Golden Record, an audio-visual disc designed to show some of the shining lights of Earthly culture to any alien civilizations who might intercept it. On the song, Harvey sings over modular synths and soft orchestral swells, imagining a Major Tom inner life for Voyager 2: “Voyager, look back at a pale-blue dot/ All we don’t know/ A flake of snow.”
Per the Bandcamp description for “Voyager,” the song is the “first signal from PJ Harvey’s next artistic chapter.” Harvey was already working on the track when the physicist Brian Cox (not the actor from Succession) asked her to write a song for his Emergence tour, a series of lectures around the world. Cox actually plays Juno synth bass on the track. Here’s what Harvey says about it:
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.”
Check it out below.
“Voyager” is out now on Partisan.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source stereogum.com ’
