Time & Perspective Quote by P. J. Harvey

Harvey frames experimentation less as a quirky creative choice than as a physiological need: "It's so much in me" and "inherent" position novelty as compulsion, not strategy. That matters because it rejects the tidy myth of the musician as a master technician. Her engine is deliberately the opposite: the moment of reaching for an instrument she "doesn't particularly know how to play". In a culture that fetishizes virtuosity and polish, she elevates beginnerhood as a tool.

The subtext is about power and risk. Picking up the wrong instrument is a controlled collapse of expertise, a way to destabilize habits before they harden into style. "Then I become excited" is the tell; excitement arrives not from proficiency but from friction. She’s describing a feedback loop where uncertainty generates energy, and energy generates work. Creativity here isn’t inspiration striking; it’s a system designed to keep surprise available.

There’s also an ethical stance hiding in the phrasing. "It forces me to hear things in new ways" suggests humility: the world, and sound, get the final say. The instrument pushes back, and that resistance becomes information. By the time she reaches "say things in a new way", the goal isn’t novelty for its own sake; it’s communication. New tools reorder perception, and reordered perception makes old feelings legible again.

Contextually, this tracks with Harvey’s career-long refusal to become a fixed brand. Each reinvention reads less like a pivot and more like an ongoing refusal to let competence become a cage.