Never one to play by the rules, iconic British musician PJ Harvey has released a brand new song out of the blue. Three years on from her tenth album, the highly acclaimed I Inside The Old Year Dying, Harvey was apparently working on the track for her as-yet-unannounced forthcoming album when Professor Brian Cox, the renowned English physicist and media personality, invited her to write a song for Emergence, his current touring show.
And so she did. "Voyager" is an incredibly ambitious track that was recorded with a full orchestra at Miraval Studios in Provence and takes its name from the probes NASA launched in 1977 that are still traveling through space to this day and contain two copies of Carl Sagan's Voyager Golden Record. The grandiosity of the music—all swirling synths and epic strings—reflects its inspiration. This might be music made by humans, but it stretches to the far reaches of humanity and lasts eons beyond its four-minute runtime.
Commenting on the song in a statement, Harvey said: “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’.”
You can watch the video for "Voyager" below.
