PJ Harvey - The Glorious Land

Polly Jean Harvey (born 9 October 1969) is an English musician and singer-songwriter. Growing up, her parents were both fans of American blues music. Their record collection exposed Harvey not only to the blues but also to Captain Beefheart. Both the blues and Beefheart would become major influences on Harvey’s own musical style.

Harvey is primarily a vocalist and guitarist, but is also proficient with a wide range of instruments including piano, organ, bass, saxophone, and autoharp.
She began her professional career in the early 1990s by forming a band she named PJ Harvey.

She recorded her first two albums with this trio, and when they broke up she continued as a solo artist. Since 1995 she has recorded her albums with various musicians including John Parish, Rob Ellis, Mick Harvey, and Eric Drew Feldman
Musically, Harvey dislikes repeating herself, resulting in albums that can sound different from one to the next.

She has experimented with such diverse musical styles as rock, pop, electronica, and folk. She is also known for changing her appearance from album to album by altering her mode of dress or hairstyle. Each look is then incorporated into the album's artwork, music videos, and live performances.

Among the accolades she has received have been the 2001 Mercury Prize (for 2000's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea), seven BRIT Award nominations, five Grammy Award nominations and two further Mercury Prize nominations. Rolling Stone named her 1992's Best New Artist and Best Singer Songwriter and 1995's Artist of the Year, and placed two of her albums (Rid of Me, To Bring You My Love) on its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

She was also rated the number one female rock artist by Q magazine in a 2002 reader poll and was awarded Outstanding Contribution To Music at the 2011 NME Awards.

Let England Shake is the eighth studio album by PJ Harvey. It was released on 14 February 2011 in the UK. The album was written over a period of two-and-a-half years, and recorded in a five-week period at a church in Dorset in April and May 2010. The album entered the UK album charts at #8, her second release to debut within the top ten in the United Kingdom, and the first since Rid of Me in 1993. The album also entered at #32 on the Billboard 200 with sales of around 18,000, making it her second highest-charting album in the US after Uh Huh Her peaked at #29 in 2004.

The album was released to widespread critical acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 88, based on 37 reviews, which indicates "Universal Acclaim".NME stated, "Francis Ford Coppola can lay claim to the war movie. Ernest Hemingway the war novel. Polly Jean Harvey, a 41-year-old from Dorset, has claimed the war album", and gave the record a very rare 10/10 rating. Spin rated 9/10 , praised its "bloody and forceful" sound, while Q praised its "remarkable lyrics" and "ethereal music" and gave it top marks. Mojo called it an "uncannily timely piece of work", with the artist at "her most powerful".

"The Glorious Land" is the second single from her eighth studio album, Let England Shake. Dealing with the United Kingdom's involvement in the Afghan War, its accompanying music video, directed by Seamus Murphy, is the fourth part of a twelve music-film project documenting Let England Shake.