Love, unlike its often mistaken twin sex, is a selfless act that requires participants to give of themselves with the belief that their contribution will be matched equally, though not always identically. We have all found ourselves in this situation—infatuation, interaction, appraisal and perhaps love. Rock love is what happens when two people (it is usually two, but there are many cases of polyamory) meet and their intermingling produces a thick bisque of music. Lennon and McCartney, Simon and Garfunkel, the Gallagher brothers, Jagger and Richards, St. Hubbins and Tufnel are just a few. Add to that list Richard and Linda Thompson, Carly Simon and James Taylor, Ike and Tina Turner, and The White Stripes—though these unions often lead to great songs about breakups and recriminations. PJ Harvey and John Parish also have that intense love of music and their relationship has spawned dozens of tracks over the years like small, boisterous children. When they speak, they speak in lyrical terms and their conversations have memorable intensity and play.

Harvey and Parish met through a mutual musician friend in 1987. Parish soon brought her in to his band Automatic Dlamini and she acted as lead singer on their second album, never released but much bootlegged. Though their late-’80s union did not produce any official recordings, it did produce a personal and professional relationship that has spanned decades. Parish has long acted as Harvey's musical compatriot, sharing musical inspiration and intuition which has led to two albums, 1996’s Dance Hall at Louse Point and this year's A Woman A Man Walked By. Parish has also acted as producer (with Flood) on Harvey’s 1995 To Bring You My Love, as well as being a multi-instrumentalist on several of her albums. Parish acts as a combination muse, peer and foil to Harvey (and others; Parish has also performed on and produced albums for such artists as Eels and 16 Horsepower). His own career includes several soundtracks for film, solo albums and band projects.

Harvey, famously shy but bold and forceful on her albums and during performance,  is the alter ego of Parish, reserved and shy on stage, seemingly most comfortable when wrapped around a guitar. Together they meld to make a complete entity that is one fluid motion and one complete thought. A Woman A Man Walked By is a series of conversations that have been held for the last decade between the two collaborators since their first album. Where Dance Hall offered some reserve, the new album takes a more scattered approach, but one which has devastating effect. The listener cannot help but be riveted by such lines as, “He had chicken liver balls, he had chicken liver spleen/ he had chicken liver heart, made of chicken liver parts/ lily-livered little parts, lily-livered little parts.”

In a wide-ranging interview Parish comes across as the consummate British gentleman, more of a conversationalist than interviewee. It is easy to see how working with him would be a process that would open one up to exploration and musical growth.

We saw you at South by Southwest in March and the performance was the highlight of the festival. Bringing the album to stage must have been challenging, but first let’s talk about the process of creating the album. You are responsible for all the music and Polly wrote most of the lyrics. I know it was a fairly long process putting this album together.

All the music came first, and then I would write and record pretty complete arrangements. In some cases, [I would] completely finished instrumentals pieces I could put on a CD and send to Polly. She’d live with them for a while until she got some lyrics she was happy with, and she would record those on top of the CD that I sen. We'd listen to what we had at the end and, when we felt we had songs that we were happy with, then we would go into the studio and actually put the things together.

The idea, then, is that you write the music need to express all your emotions, express all your thoughts about it without words, and then she adds words to them. Were there times where you contradicted each other?

We certainly didn’t work on every single idea. There were some ideas that one or the other of us felt wasn’t working for some reason and if that was the case we just didn’t pursue that idea, we didn’t want to compromise any stage or talk the other one into something that one of us wasn’t completely happy with. There were certainly one or two lyrics that didn’t work for me, but it wasn’t necessarily that they contradicted the emotion that I’d put into the music; it was more that I just didn’t feel that they were the best we could do. I know Polly felt the same about some of the bits of music I wrote. She liked them, but didn’t think that it was different enough from something else that we maybe had done before. That was the thing we are really striving to do, is to make something different, something unique that doesn’t repeat all the ideas.