Tales of the City
(Last year Polly Harvey moved to New York. She partied. Then she made a new album)
Andrew Mueller

Dorset is as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get in a country as small as England. A placid, rural patchwork of yellow, brown, and green farm paddocks huddled by the cliff edges of the English Channel, it is where singer/songwriter Polly Harvey lives in a seaside village outside the tiny town of Bridport.

It's early August, and Harvey has ventured into Bridport to meet with press arriving from London. It's tempting to wonder whether this represents her willingness to come just so far. It would certainly be in keeping a reputation for being difficult that has dogged her ever since she broke out with her punkish debut, Dry, in 1992, a forbidding figure in black with severely scraped-back hair. "Oh, no," Harvey says, when something of the sort is suggested. "I just thought the country air would do you good."

She doesn't seem to be joking, though she is laughing. With a lithe, rangy body swaddled in tight-fitting red, supporting a head slightly too small for the features arranged on it, Harvey is striking. But as she banters amicably with the hotel owner, she apologizes for looking "a mess." The 30-year-old singer is in the early stages of promoting her band PJ Harvey's sixth album, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. Yesterday it was Hamburg, today Bridport, tomorrow-"I've got it written down somewhere." Which means that over the last few days she has repeated the following phrase about 50 times: "Stories is not the New York album. It's definitely not."

But with half the record written during a six-month sabbatical in New York City in 1999, and lyrics that name-check Brooklyn, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Empire State Building, it is going to be considered Polly Harvey's New York album whether she likes it or not.

Harvey acquired a taste for the city while spending a month there filming the role of Mary Magdalene in Hal Hartley's The Book of Life in 1998. Unlike in Dorset, she was out every night dancing, seeing bands, and attending poetry slams. "I really wanted to absorb everything and sink into the artistic life," she says. But despite the album's raw, reductive - and occasionally, distinctly Patti Smith - like rock'n'roll stylings, Harvey says she was merely looking for new stimuli. "In New York, you get information thrown at you all day," she says.

The move was also partly inspired by a "minor or major breakdown" she experienced in the five years between releasing 1993's 4-Track Demos and 1998's largly ambient Is This Desire? "I was seriously struggling to stay afloat," she says. "To Bring You My Love was the real bottom of the barrel, and I can hear it in the music. I was going down fast. I couldn't function anymore." It was, she claims, a result of trying too hard to be what she thought others wanted, of buying into the idea that artists should lead willfully self-destructive lives of melodrama. "Which," she says now, "is complete rubbish." This afternoon, Harvey emphasizes her newfound balance, citing the birth of a friend's child and the death of another friend as recent personal epiphanies. "They make you think about what is important. You get this heightened perspective, and life can become a lot simpler."

Stories certainly sounds better for her current contentment. It is less angry than its predecessors. ("We float," the closing track - an explicit recollection of Harvey's lost years - fades out on a promise to "take life as it comes.") She even flirts with a hitherto uncharacteristic Liz Phair-ish playfulness on the exuberant "This Is Love," which opens with the line "I can't believe life's so complex / When I just want to sit here and watch you undress." Though some of the songs - which feature original PJ Harvey drummer Rob Ellis and Bad Seeds multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey - pack the same pugnacity of Dry and 1993's Rid of Me, many are blessed with downright pretty melodies - especially "This Mess We're In," a duet with Radiohead's Thom Yorke.

Though Stories is undoubtedly Harvey's most accessible album yet, its tunefulness should not be mistaken for a scaling-down of her trademark intensity. Steve Albini, who produced Rid of Me, believes that however Harvey presents herself, a few things will never change. "She's always true to herself," he says. "Other people may put on the persona, but when someone does that for effect, it's transparent. She's a great, impassioned artist, and that's how I'll always think of her."

"I have had to think, over these last few years, whether this is really what I want to do," Harvey says, "and the answer is yes, which is a really nice feeling. I feel like I'm fulfilling my purpose on this earth, if I have one."