When you think of Polly Jean Harvey, you most likely picture the iconic singer songwriter standing in a dim spotlight, head dropped, legs spread, guitar slung low; crooning her way through a dark tale or two. Or else else she’s in full sun, head thrown back, a roaring rock goddess in front of the crowd… Such is the dichotomy of Polly Jean.

Deemed somewhat of a loner in rock n roll circles; nonetheless for the past fifteen or so years PJ Harvey has made plenty of friends when it comes to rocking out in front of a crowd. She’s carved a career as the quintessential girl rocker, who can easily wail out her anguish and her joy to an audience, with only her guitar and her ever present camera for pals.

Well make room in that picture; for with her new album, White Chalk, Harvey has unleashed an all together different animal – and made a new friend in the process… the piano…

Harvey admits that the choice to make White Chalk a piano driven album was never a conscious one – she’s simply found a new love – and like anyone with a new partner – she was wanting to show them off…

“I was very in love with playing the piano for quite a while,” says the slow talking Harvey “and a lot of the songs evolved out of that love. It’s a very new sound for me and therefore it was very exciting and the songs naturally followed that thing I was most in love with, so it wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision but the songs just took me there.”

She soon discovered that playing piano dictated a very different song writing process :
“Something about the piano and the emotion that comes off of that lends an entirely different atmosphere. I find the whole album much more filmic, almost like a painting rather than just music and playing the piano, so many melodies come off.

“Just the nature, of playing it is so utterly different. It’s a percussion instrument you’re pushing it, I’ve been very used to pulling things to me. The melodies that spring off make me sing in a very different register and again I think this whole combination led me towards a totally different, unusual, peculiar sound which takes a while for the ear to find a reference point to.”

Whilst Harvey admits the piano lent itself to a whole new area of experimentation within her sound – lyrically she’s drawn inspiration from the usual sources – her life and what’s going on in the world around her… Indeed for Harvey writing songs is almost a compulsion.
“I draw my inspiration from living. I think I would, I know I would, need to and want to write words and sing and play music whether it was ever heard by anybody or not. It’s really all I want to do. I never really know what‘s going to happen I just do it and inspiration comes from just being alive and listening.”

She continues: ”Really the lyrics come from just reflecting what’s going on around me and not just in my immediate vicinity but in the whole vicinity of being a human being on the planet.”

So almost a cathartic confessional experience?
“If people use the word confessional record I prefer to say expressional – really just human being expression. I’m a very private person and I wouldn’t choose to display myself in a personal way through a piece of work, although of course moods and emotions all filter though me, but I do very often cast characters when I’m writing. I almost see them, I imagine myself in all sorts of positions as these characters, Sometimes I’ll cast myself in that role of my own film or I allot a character to that role and I explore and describe what they, my heroes and heroines are thinking and feeling. It’s almost like making little short scenes of films in my head and sometimes I wonder what the difference is anyway between reality and the imagination, being awake and being asleep, to me they’re all the same really.”

She confesses: “Sometimes the songs just write themselves they almost feel like they have nothing to do with me. In some ways now the album feels like that, it’s its own piece, it stands up on its own on the table I can just look at it from over here. My songs, my little films or my short stories, I haven’t lived them all, I couldn’t possibly.”

Even though the songs sometimes “write themseles” Harvey admits the new album did present some challenges for her – simply because of her own high standards…
“I very passionately did not want to repeat myself and I’ve talked about what I was trying to achieve and I felt that to get me there and to not let me lose sight of those goals I would need to have people that were good at keeping me on that path.

To that end she found producers Flood (aka Mark Ellis) and John Parish – who had worked with her on To Bring You My Love.
“We made this record in Flood’s home studio in London called The Bedroom and we chose to work there primarily for practical reasons. John and Flood are both fathers to young children and it was the best proximity for us all to be in for them to be able to see their children regularly and I felt very at home in Flood’s tiny little room, it was really just like being in my friend’s house and very basic, we were all in just one room, no separation apart from sign boards and that made me feel very comfortable.”

So how does Harvey think the album stands up to her previous efforts?
She ponders: “To a certain extent records are informed by each other and grow out of each other but I do see all of my work as one body of work really, in some ways it seems that they are inseparable from each other. If I were a painter I’d would quite happily exhibit all of these pieces of work in one room together, hang them next to each other, I’d even be quite interested in hanging one piece from Is This Desire next to one piece from White Chalk and I think they’d all get along very well. If there’s any relation to each other, like I said I just try not to tread the same ground so I’d hope that they don’t repeat each other too much. Sometimes I achieve that better than others. I think there have been times where I have written the same song but slightly different over and over and then as one becomes more informed, as you move through life, I think I’ve probably got better at not doing that, at least I hope I have.”

PJ Harvey’s White Chalk is out on September 29 through Universal.