PJ Harvey has returned with new music, the first since her 2023 album, I Inside The Old Year Dying. The starry single, “Voyager”, is named after a pair of NASA probes, which were launched in 1977 and are still navigating space as I write this.
The song began as Harvey was working on a new album. Then the English physicist Brian Cox asked the singer to compose a piece of music for his new tour, Emergence. When Cox heard the demo, he said it reminded him of the sound of Voyager’s “signal being sent back to Earth.”
Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
Voyager’s journey inspired Harvey. Then what might it say to us, she wondered. On the track, Harvey’s glitching voice penetrates pulsing synths and suspenseful orchestration. It feels like an attempt to communicate, to search, to find answers within a vast cosmic abyss.
Long years, far place,
Dark nights, dark days.
Frozen, silent,
Bearing Earth-songs.
Force fields, high winds,
Cold moons, bright rings.
Hear my signal,
Will you follow?
‘Pale Blue Dot‘
Voyager, look back,
At a pale-blue dot.
All we don’t know,
A flake of snow.
Echoing the astronomer Carl Sagan, Harvey also mentions the Pale Blue Dot, referring to Sagan’s book, which itself was inspired by a 1990 photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1. The humbling photograph was taken when the spacecraft was roughly four billion miles away from Earth, capturing our planet as a miniature point of light.
Though humans often consider ourselves to be at the center of nature, the Pale Blue Dot reminds us of our utter smallness.
Moreover, Sagan wrote in his book, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Dust in a sunbeam, blue dot,
So far, so cold.
Kindness, care for…
Our shelter… tender.
Photo by Per Ole Hagen/Redferns