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Washington Post Reporter Describes “Unwittingly” Contributing to PJ Harvey's New Song

Washington Post Reporter Describes “Unwittingly” Contributing to PJ Harvey's New Song

Washington Post Reporter Describes “Unwittingly” Contributing to PJ Harvey's New Song

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Washington Post Reporter Describes "Unwittingly" Contributing to PJ Harvey's New Song

This morning, PJ Harvey released the video for “The Community of Hope,” a track from her new album The Hope Six Demolition Project. The song and video are influenced by Harvey’s observations of underdeveloped neighborhoods in Washington D.C. Today, Washington Post reporter Paul Schwartzman published an account of unwittingly chaffeuring Harvey around the city two years ago, and providing some of the inspiration for the song. He also appears in the video. Read his account here.

Schwartzman said he was initially contacted by Seamus Murphy, the photographer/filmmaker who collaborated with Harvey on The Hope Six Demolition Project. Murphy was looking for someone to drive him and a woman described as a “musician/poet” around the city’s “roughest neighborhoods.” They drove around the city, with Schwartzman pointing out noteworthy sights. “The woman was in the back, quiet and inscrutable, gazing out the window and writing in a journal,” Schwartzman writes.

At one point, Schwartzman pointed out a corner, saying “They’re gonna put a Walmart here.” That line ended up becoming the coda to “The Community of Hope.”  (Ironically, the prediction never came true: Walmart backed out on its plans to put a store in the neighborhood, Schwartzman reports.)

He didn’t realize who Harvey was until later Googling her. “Unwittingly, I had chauffeured a critically acclaimed British rock star whose honors included not one but two Mercury Prizes, Britain’s best-album award, the last one for 2011’s Let England Shake,” he writes. Amusingly, the father of Schwartzman’s daughter’s best friend is Brendan Canty, the former drummer of Fugazi—another band he wasn’t familiar with until looking them up. “Brendan smiled patiently when I confessed my ignorance,” he wrote. “He laughed when I told him I had spent three hours in a car with PJ Harvey without having any clue who she was.”

Twenty months after that first tour, Murphy asked if Schwartzman could drive him around again—only this time, he would be filmed. Schwartzman ended up appearing in video. That’s him you see and hear at the beginning.

The song recently attracted criticism from D.C. politicians. A campaign treasurer for former mayor Vince Gray, who is running for a city council seat, said “PJ Harvey is to music what Piers Morgan is to cable news.” The Community of Hope, a D.C. nonprofit, also wrote Harvey an open letter criticizing her “incomplete” picture of the city. “By calling out this picture of poverty in terms of streets and buildings and not the humans who live here, have you not reduced their dignity?” the letter reads. “Have you not trashed the place that, for better or worse, is home to people who are working to make it better, who take pride in their accomplishments.”

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