Steven Wilson: The SDE interview

Steven Wilson’s eight solo album, The Overview, is out on Friday. A return to progressive rock, the record features just two long tracks (the first 23 mins, the second 18 mins). Wilson has chosen to boldly go where no man has gone before and write and record a space-themed album that explores the ‘Overview effect’ (which he explains below). I spoke to Steven recently about the album, the film that has been made to accompany the music and his upcoming tour.

SDE: It’s release week for your new album, The Overview. I can’t believe the amount of playbacks, travel and promotion that you have to do these days for a new record.

Steven Wilson: With every album, it seems to be a little bit more than the last time. It has been crazy, this one, yeah.

Is that all driven by the record label?

No. Basically, the problem we had with this record was there’s no singles, so there’s no content being released up front. So you have to find other ways to get people talking about the record. The idea for the film and the screenings all came out of that. And of course, once you’ve done that, you want to do it as much as possible. I mean, it’s working. The buzz seems to be pretty good

Do you think that means it’s harder to reach a new audience? You’re more likely to be mining your existing fanbase?

I don’t think so. I don’t think the rules, those old rules, apply anymore… you know, releasing a single, etc. I think these days, anything you can do that makes you stand out from the sheer amount of music that is coming out, every single day, is going to attract people in your direction. So I don’t think it’s just a fan thing. I mean, I’ve had ‘album of the month’ in Rolling Stone, ‘album of the month’ in Mojo. That’s fairly mainstream, and I think the reason they’re giving me album of the month is because the album does stand out from everything else that they’re getting across their desk, all the time.

Could you tell us about the themes and the ideas behind, The Overview?

The album is based on a phenomenon called the Overview Effect, which is something that astronauts experience when they first go into space and they look back at the Earth. Most reports say that these people, when they experience this, have this very profound cognitive shift, and they understand just how small, fragile and beautiful the Earth is, in relation to the cosmos, and therefore, by extension, just how small and insignificant the human species is.

People have a very extreme range of reactions to it, from elation to depression. William Shatner, Captain Kirk himself, when he went out into space and looked back at the Earth, he said all he saw was death and nothingness! So it’s a very difficult thing to predict how people will respond to that amount of perspective. And I think that’s, that’s the word, really; I could have called the album ‘Pespective’ I think we get so self-obsessed with the little soap operas of our everyday life, and forget sometimes just how tiny we are in proportion to to the universe.

So it became an album about the human race and our position in relation to the universe, and to me, it suggested something in the long form. That was where the idea for just doing the two long tracks came from. It didn’t seem to me, I could deal with something like that in 10 separate songs. So the idea for having just these two very extended pieces is a direct consequence of the concept, really.

What triggered the idea originally?

When I finished The Harmony Codex [from 2023], I realised there wasn’t going to be a tour. I’d left it too late to book a tour because it didn’t know how people were going to connect with that record. It was my first album after COVID, my first album after The Future Bites [2021] – which I think was very divisive amongst my fans – and by the time I realised The Harmony Codex had gone down pretty well, I went to my agent and said, “Can we book a tour?” And he said, “Yeah, I can get you into venues in 2025”. So at that point, I thought, well, I might as well make another record, in the meantime, although I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I just set up a few meetings with people. And one of those meetings was with Alex Milas, who runs an organisation called Space Rocks, an organisation dedicated to bringing together the worlds of Astronomy and Science and Music. He’s been very successful in setting up these kind of events, family events, and things like that and so I thought maybe I could create a piece of music for something… Some kind of exhibition, something that Alex would be doing; a collaboration where I created the music. So I sat down with Alex, and we had a couple of lunches and during one of those lunches, he asked me if I had heard of this phenomenon called The Overview Effect. And at that point, literally within moments, I had the whole thing appear in my head, the concept, the title, the fact that it was going to be long form, I was off! So the whole notion of doing something as a collaboration got left behind as I dashed off to sketch out this new record.

Have you always had an interest in sci-fi and space?

Just as much as the average person. I remember – and I’m sure you do too – going out on a warm summer’s evening in the UK, with your mates and just gazing up at the stars. Nobody does that anymore – certainly not kids. They’ll be gazing down into their phone. Now, I don’t want to get into a sort of, isn’t modern life horrible, thing, but there’s no question to me that things have changed. We devour science fiction movies, but what we don’t really do is go out to the back garden and look up – at least I haven’t. And, also living in London, also, you don’t see that much. But I went out into the Atacama Desert in Chile a few weeks ago, and that was the most extraordinary thing. You just look up at the sky in the desert, and you see the whole Milky Way laid out in front of you. And I had my own kind of mini Overview experience doing that. It was awe inspiring. There are trillions of stars and trillions of planets and trillions of galaxies and human beings are very good at believing ourselves to be somehow the centre of the universe. And of course, nothing, could be further from reality.

Would you go up into space if you were given the opportunity, and someone offered you a free ride?

I think I would find it very hard to say no. I have a terrible fear of flying… I have to be heavily sedated to even get on an airplane! So the idea of getting into a tin can with a million gallons of rocket fuel propelling it into the nothingness actually terrifies me. But given the opportunity, I don’t think I could say, no. What an extraordinary, once a lifetime opportunity. I mean, it’s hypothetical, anyway – it’s not happening –  but I think yes is the answer. I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t do it.

You’ve worked with [XTC’s] Andy Partridge, again, on this record. He’s contributed lyrics to ‘Objects Outlive Us’ from the first part of the record. Did you brief him to write something specific?

Yes. I had an idea… I wanted a scene. I think of the tracks as having scenes, a cinema-for-the-ears, kind of thing. So I imagined this one scene in the first half of the record, that would contrast the everyday lives of ordinary people, these little soap operas that go on every day of our lives with the most massive cosmic phenomena you can imagine: stars dying, black holes imploding, you name it, to create that idea of the great and the small, to create this idea of perspective. And Andy, for me, along with Ray Davies, is the greatest at observational songwriting. He writes about ordinary people – and I don’t mean that sound patronising – but you know what I mean, ordinary people living their their ordinary lives in small town… I think he writes about that better than anyone. So I called him up and I said, “Andy, I’ve got a challenge for you…” and he proved my point in a way, by writing something that was exactly on the nail.

Even though it’s a concept album, it doesn’t appear to have a linear narrative, as such, like perhaps Hand.Cannot.Erase [2015]. Is that right, or is this a story that does have a beginning and an end?

There are a series of scenes, and you’re starting out on Earth. So the first scene, you meet an alien, and the alien basically says to you, “Did you forget about us?” Did you forget to look up? Did you forget that there’s this whole universe out there? And then the next scene, ‘The Buddha of the Modern Age’, is this kind of litany of all the ways the human race have fucked up the planet. And then we journey out into space and get the Andy [Partridge] part, with the little soap operas juxtaposing the sort of small town England with the cosmic phenomenon. And then we kind of journey out to space in the track called ‘Ark’, which is kind of self explanatory. So there is a sense of a journey starting on Earth and essentially ending up on the other side of the universe. But I think you’re right in the sense that – without wishing to go into the realms of complete pretension – it’s a kind of prosaic meditation on space and our place in it. The first side is more about humanity’s place in in the cosmos, and the second side is more about the science, but it’s not even as simple as that, because there are elements of both in both. I do feel that there is a sense of journey, obviously, in the music itself, but also, I think lyrically; the fact you start off on Earth with the alien, and you end up literally floating on the other side of the universe, the very end of the record.

What was the thinking behind the two tracks? You could have broken it down to the 14 sub-tracks that are listed on the album but it seems you wanted people not to be able to flick around too much?

It’s funny, because there is going to be a sort of a ‘disconnected’ version that’s going to be available on Spotify and the like, mainly because I don’t want people to be taking pieces out, putting them in a playlist, and then you might get this kind of ugly thing where the track just ends, it just sort of cuts off, so I’ve created versions of each section which have proper beginnings and endings, but that’s only really for streaming [you can actually buy this version on CD, for one week only].

But in terms of the two tracks, there’s two things to say about that. Firstly, if I’d written 10 separate pieces of music, there wouldn’t have been as much thematic unity. Because there’s a particular sequence of notes and a bassline that goes with it, that runs right through all of the first side, for example. Now you wouldn’t necessarily be aware of that when you’re listening to it, but there are these little melodic motifs and this bass line that reoccur in many different contexts throughout that first piece. Now I like to think subconsciously that when you listen to it, even though you’re not aware of that, it makes it feel very cohesive as a listening experience, because I’m exploring the same melodic motif in many different ways; different time signatures, different contexts. Your brain will be aware of that even if your consciousness isn’t, If you like. So that’s the first thing to say.

The second thing is that I wanted this to be like a movie, and I wanted it to feel like a series of interconnecting scenes, so each scene would end with a doorway that kind of led you into the next scene. Of course, that is the foundation of a lot of what people think of as the progressive rock epic, and I’ve always felt that the best examples of long progressive rock epics actually have a relatively small amount of music material. I think of a track like ‘Echoes’ by Pink Floyd, for example. So you’re kind of exploring a very small amount of music material across a very long piece in many different ways, in the same way that in a movie, you have the same characters in every scene, you’re just kind of taking them through this emotional trajectory where their moods are their emotions are changing. They’re happy in one scene, and then something happens, and they’re angry or melancholy… To me, it’s a bit like that. When you write a long piece of music, you’re allowing your characters to develop. You’re not starting with a blank page with every scene. But you’re right, I like to think some of the individual pieces could stand up, certainly ‘Objects, Meanwhile’ and ‘Beautiful Infinity’ could stand up as self-contained pieces of music.

At the IMAX playback in London you were referencing digital devices and people constantly staring down into their phones. Obviously, technology, the internet and all of that has been an evergreen theme of yours, over the years, but how does it relate to the new record other than what you were mentioning earlier about people not looking up but constantly looking down?

I mean that certainly is a big part of it, yeah. I mean, my whole thing, maybe even going back to albums like Fear of Blank Planet [2007] with Porcupine Tree, is this idea that somehow technology, in an incredibly short period of time, has changed the course of human evolution in in a way that nothing before ever did. Industrial Revolution, you name it, whatever great technological leap forward you can refer to in the history of the human species, nothing, I don’t think, has had the same impact on the way that we engage with each other and with the world and with the universe, as smartphones, digital devices and the internet. I don’t think anything has changed humans, this human species, as much in such an incredibly short period of time. We’re talking about basically the last three decades, maybe even less. You only have to look around at the world to see the evidence of that. How often these days when you get on a tube train do you see people just reading a book? And I’m including myself, by the way, I’m not excluding myself from this. And I’m not even trying to say that this is necessarily all bad, because there are wonderful things about the technology that we have available to us, but there’s no question, we’ve opened Pandora’s Box and I don’t think, that we quite understand the longterm implications yet, particularly on our kids, on the younger generation, because it’s happened so quickly

Do you think the world would be a better place if you could press a button and un-invent the smartphone?

It’s a very good question. I mean, there are things I love about my smartphone. I love the fact that, when I go somewhere I haven’t been before. I no longer have to plan my route. I don’t get lost, turn up three hours late because I took the wrong turning. That’s amazing, isn’t it? You know, being connected with people that I probably wouldn’t have been… but I think there’s something inherent here, which is that one of the things I think that gives us value is to struggle, sometimes, to have to have a goal, to have a task, to have something to overcome, to achieve. This also leads into the whole discussion about artificial intelligence now too, doesn’t it? That existential crisis that if you no longer have to struggle to achieve anything, what are we for?

And I think we’ve probably talked about this before, Paul, because I know this is something very close to your heart, too. When were you and I were discovering music, it was a journey to go on, to find the music, and sometimes that journey would take years, to discover the music and the records. You know, traveling around record shops, ordering expensive American imports, saving up your pocket money, buying the record, taking it home, not liking it the first time you heard it, but forcing yourself to listen to it until you liked it, because you’d spent all that time and money and invested all that time and effort. And of course, all that now has gone out the window. The whole of the music history of music is available instantly, and it’s just as easy to dismiss. So there is something about that struggle to find things of value, and if it’s too easy, and of course digital technology makes it incredibly easy, then I don’t think we engage with it as deeply, and we don’t appreciate it as much. And consequently, that does have an effect, I think, on our long term sense of value and mental health, perhaps as well, which is, I think, what these kids are going through.

We had MP3s, we had the iTunes download store, digital downloads and now we’ve got streaming, which seems to be here for the longterm.

It’s hard to imagine any other scenario. I think there will always be a little bit of a swing of the pendulum back in the opposite direction; we’ve seen that in the growth of vinyl particularly, and I think it’s the poor old CD that kind of gets lost somewhere in the middle, because it’s neither one thing or the other. I still love CDs, but with the generation of young people now, while I can imagine them bonding with vinyl as a concept, I can’t imagine them bonding with CD as a concept. But I think vinyl will prevail. The other thing, of course, that will probably continue to rise, albeit on a very small incremental level, is the market for audiophile releases, spatial audio, high resolution stereo. Ultimately, convenience will kind of always win over qualitative experience, but there is always a minority that want that quality of experience. They’re looking for something a little bit deeper, more soulful, whatever you want to call it. And part of that is obviously also the presence of something physical, to your catchphrase, ‘Holding The Music In Your Hands’. There will always be people that will hanker after that. It will be a minority, and it will be a niche, but I think it will be a substantial enough one to sustain. So that’s good, good news, at least.

You’ve commissioned an album-length film, to go with the audio of The Overview, which I saw in IMAX in London the other week. Was doing the film always part of the idea when you sat down with Alex?

When I first sat down with Alex, I imagined it would be some kind of multimedia project where we would have a film and we’d have a piece of music, but it was more from the point of view that I would be sound tracking a visual thing. And of course, that got turned on its head a little bit, because I went off and made this record and forgot all about the visual side of it.

But then around July last year, when I was kind of pretty much finished with with recording the record, I played it to Jim and Michael at Virgin and Fiction, and the whole conversation came up. What are we going to do? Normally I’d commission three or four videos, as we did with with The Harmony Codex and The Future Bites, and you’d have three or four songs released at monthly intervals leading up to the release of the album. And I’m like, I don’t really want that. And then I thought, maybe I should take all the money I would have used to commission three or four different videos. Let’s just give it all to Miles Skarin and say, make a 42 minute pop video for want of a better word. Obviously, it’s a bit more than a pop video, but that was the genesis of the of the movie.

You’ve got a big tour coming up this year and you’ve got a some catching up to do because you didn’t tour the last couple of records. You also have the challenge of accommodating this new conceptual piece. How are you going to approach all that? What can people can expect when they come to see you play live?

The second half of the show is going to be a performance of The Overview from beginning to end with the film. So that’s the other thing about the film, in the spirit of being pragmatic, I thought, we can also use it as part of the show. The first half of the show will be a voyage through my back catalogue, and I love this idea of having some kind of conceptual continuity, so I’m going through my catalogue and picking songs that, for me, resonate somehow with The Overview concept. That could be something to do with lyrics or the feeling of the music, to try and create a very satisfying arc to the show. It’s going to be a long show, two-and-a-half hours, with an interval. I’ve got my fantastic band; they’ve all come back to me. I’ve got different guitar player this time, Randy who who played on the Porcupine Tree tour. But it’s going to be very interesting… a lot has changed. I haven’t toured solo since pre-COVID.

And when you play multiple nights at the same venue, are you going to do your usual thing of changing the song selections around for the first half?

Yes, is the simple answer. We’re learning a lot more repertoire than will be part of the core show, so that we can change things up. I’m going to have a few special guests, particularly on those nights in London. I’m playing four nights in London [at the Palladium] which is crazy. I mean, I’m I’m going to struggle to make the repertoire completely different every night over four nights. So there will inevitably be a lot of repetition. But there will also be some some guests at those shows, at least.

The album comes out on Friday. Your last three records have all gone top 5, so they have all been very successful albums in the UK. We have spoken about this before, but what your commercial expectations? Are you hoping for a number one record? I imagine you probably are, but how important is that to you at this moment in time?

I’m always hoping for a number one record, but, you know what can happen…On Thursday this week, suddenly, Taylor Swift will drop a new album. Anything can happen. But it would be really nice although how much does it really mean these days to have a number one when in week two, you’re 157… Which is probably what’s going to happen: I’ll go top five, and then the following week I’ll be nowhere to be seen, because, an artist like me, my fan base, they all pre-order it, which is amazing. So you have an incredible first week because your loyal fans go and buy, but sustaining sales over a longer period is obviously very hard. Now, it would be lovely to have a number one, because, like you, we grew up with the romance of the chart rundown – the charts, didn’t we? It doesn’t mean anything like what it used to but it, you know, it would be wonderful to say I’d had a number one record. We’ll see.

You’re going to be busy for the rest of the year, but are you thinking about the next record already?

No, I’m thinking about the tour. I mean, that’s the thing for me. At this point with The Harmony Codex, I didn’t have a tour in the works, so I was already thinking, “what am I going to do next?” This time around, I know exactly what I’m going to do next: I’m going to be on tour for the rest of the year. It’s a lot of work to prepare everything, to rehearse everything to get back in the saddle, in that sense. So I’m really only thinking about that, although I have some remix projects coming in, which is, which is always fun as well and obviously the podcast [The Album Years] with Tim [Bowness] because that’s aspect of my career that seems to have established itself.

Thanks to Steven Wilson who was talking to Paul Sinclair for SDE. The Overview is released on Friday 21 March via Fiction Records.

Steven Wilson UK-only shop exclusive: The Overview ‘Disconnected CD’ available for one week only

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