In the world of Progressive Rock/Metal, Steven Wilson is king. In addition to being the mastermind behind one of today's greatest acts, Porcupine Tree, he is also involved with several side projects, including Blackfield and no-man. When not focusing on his own material, he produces/mixes albums by other notable acts, including Opeth and Anathema, as well as remasters classic records by genre pioneers like King Crimson, Jethro Tull, and Caravan. In preparation for his upcoming second solo album, Grace for Drowning, Wilson recently held a listening party of the album in NYC, and it was there that I was able to hear the record and speak to its creator.
Hey, Steven. How are you doing?
I’m doing all right, man. How bout you?
Pretty well. It’s a real pleasure to be able to chat with you for a bit today. I’ve been a fan of yours for over a decade, and Grace for Drowning is incredible. You’ve outdone yourself.
Oh, well, thank you.
So where did the title come from?
It’s funny—somebody asked me the other day if it had anything to do with Jeff Buckley because Grace was his album and he drowned (laughs). That’s a complete coincidence, though. The title comes from stories of people who’ve had near death experiences, particularly with drowning. They say that when you’re drowning, and after the struggling, there’s a period where you almost get into a state of calm. Or grace, like a peace comes over you. Apparently when you die from extreme cold as well, the same kind of thing happens. And I like that as a kind of metaphor for life. Without getting too pretentious, in a way, I feel like we’re all drowning. Life is such an intense experience these days and it feels like we’re all drowning to a certain extent in the stress and speed of modern life. I feel like as I’ve gotten older I’ve reached this point of almost a state of grace and I don’t really care anymore. I don’t care what people think about my music or if I dress right for other people.
Yeah
I mean, when you’re 20, you care about those things. You really care what other people think about you and you care if you look right or if you’re dropping the right names or listening to the right music. I don’t care anymore, and I think it’s something that’s happened maybe gradually between the age of 30 and what I am now. It’s almost like reaching a state of peace, but I’m still drowning, obviously. We all are. It’s that kind of sense of grace of not caring anymore, and this album really reflects that whole vibe for me.
How would you say this album differs from your first solo record, Insurgentes?
Fundamentally, it differs in one main way. The root of Insurgentes was very much the 80s and the music that was around me as I was growing up. The interesting music was largely so-called “post-punk” and “new wave,” and I’m talking about artists like Joy Division, The Cure, Cocteau Twins, and Talking Heads. Those kinds of bands that I liked and were actually releasing albums while I was discovering music. And I really listened to a lot of that music when I started Insurgentes and so much of the root of that album is the 80s. The root of Grace for Drowning is 70s. That’s the music that I had to go back and discover as a teenager through my parents’ record collection, my best friend’s record collection, and my big brother’s record collection. I discovered this extraordinary period in music, particularly the first five years of the 1970s, and I think you can hear that in the record.
I agree. I mean, I started high school listening to Thick As A Brick and Lamb Lies Down, and I haven’t stopped since.
There you go! Those kinds of albums. There’s something magical about the era, and in a way this album is—well, I don’t want to say homage and make it seem like a retro thing. It’s not, but certainly the sound pallet is very much drawn from that era. The mellotrons and the close-mic’d drum kit, among other things.
And you split the album into two volumes, Deform to Form a Star and Like Dust I Have Cleared From My Eye.
Two 40 minute albums, yeah.
I wonder if each should be taken as its own suite, like The Incident, or if they’re two halves of a greater whole. For example, “Raider Prelude” is on the first volume and “Raider II” is on the second, somewhat implying that it’s all one piece.
Well they’re all cut from the same cloth in the sense that they come from the same sessions, so they’re not supposed to musically sound that different. I think the second record is a little bit more experimental and a little more dark, perhaps. More demanding. Ultimately, the idea was not necessarily to make any great statement about them being musically different, but really to make a statement about what I suppose you might call the attention span of most listeners these days. And not just these days; I think generally speaking there is an optimum length for a listening experience, and I think it’s no coincidence that so many classic albums come from the vinyl era and so few come from the CD era.
I agree.
With the CD era, albums tended to balloon out to 50, 60, 70, or even 80 minutes. I mean, my album is 80+ minutes, but I didn’t want to release an 80 minute CD or something so maximized in that way. Instead, I came up with the idea of splitting it into two separate listening experiences, if you’d like. So the idea isn’t really to do it as you’ve done today and listen to it all at once, back to back. You should spend some time getting to know one album and then spend time on the other. They were recording simultaneously and they are brother and sister in that sense, but they’re certainly not intended to be listened to in one intense, pulverizing experience. There’s a lot going on, too; it’s not like it’s simple music. There’s so much going on that you’ll miss if you aren’t fully engaged with the music.
Is that part of the reason why you say it’s your “biggest project to date”?
There’s many reasons why I say it’s my biggest project. I think it’s my biggest because it has the largest amount of musical forces involved on it. There’s everything on this record—from woodwinds to choirs to strings to mellotrons to pianos to guitars to jazz players to rock players. In that sense, the amount of ingredients in this record is greater than before. The pallet is bigger than ever before. In other ways, it’s my biggest project in the sense that it’s the first time I’ve ever committed to going out and touring a solo record. It’s my way of saying, “look, this record is really important to me and I want you to take it seriously.” Not to say that Insurgentes wasn’t important to me, but I think that I feel so strongly that this record is the best thing I’ve ever done and I didn’t want to dismiss it as a side project. And it’s also probably the project I’ve spent the most time on. People that think I’m very prolific and that I’m a workaholic, but actually this is the first new music I’ve released in two years. The last Blackfield album [Welcome To My DNA] was written by Aviv and so this is the first new music I’ve written and released since The Incident.
Can you speak a bit about the musicians you’ve used this time? I know Jordan Rudess [Dream Theater] and Steve Hackett [Genesis] appear.
Yeah, they’re the big names on it. Really, most of the people I’ve used aren’t well known. I used a lot of jazz musicians on this album. One thing I was very conscious of when I was making this record was that what I love about the records we talked about, from the early 70s, was that very often, they had musicians playing rock music when they weren’t really rock musicians. Particularly, there were a lot of jazz musicians. If you listen to things like the first King Crimson album, for example, you’re listening to jazz musicians playing rock. And it’s a funny thing that jazz is almost the element that has been written out of the history of Progressive Rock. If you listen to any music that’s been made under the name of Progressive Rock in the last 30 years, it’s conspicuous by one thing: the complete absence of the jazz influences.
Yeah, you’re right.
I’m thinking of Progressive Metal and Neo-Prog. There’s no jazz in that; it’s very clinical. And I include some of my own music in that category. What I’ve realized as I’ve been remixing some of those old records is that how much jazz is an important part of what makes that music special. Listen to Jethro Tull or King Crimson. There’s a lot of jazz in that music, and Grace for Drowning was almost like an attempt to get back to that jazz aspect in Progressive Rock. For that reason, I went around and deliberately found jazz musicians that were not normally acquainted with playing rock music. The drummer, Nic France, is a very underground UK jazz musician. He was instructed to basically solo the whole time, which is what jazz drummers effectively do. The jazz drummer is usually the leader in that he or she creates a dialogue with the soloist, and that’s very different from the rock drummer who will basically just hold a groove. Um, who else have we got? We have Theo Travis, the sax and flute player, who I’ve worked with several times over the years. There’s a guitar player named Mike Outram who comes from the UK jazz scene, and he also played on Insurgentes. We have Tony Levin and Nick Beggs on bass, and Pat Mastelotto on drums on a few tracks. Jordan is on keyboards of course and I do a lot of it myself. It’s not really a big group of musicians.
It’s sort of an All Star cast if you know you’re Prog Rock.
Yeah, if you know what you’re looking for.
You’re right about the 70s and jazz, though. You had Return to Forever and Mahavishnu Orchestra, to name two, and there are really no bands around today that recall that stuff.
The only band I can actually think of that does have a strong jazz element in them is The Mars Volta. I love them, and I think their fusion of Latin, Hardcore, Jazz, Progressive, and Psychedelic music is really fresh. Of course, I’m approaching it from a very different, almost more classically way, whereas they approach it from a more hardcore way. They’re one of the exceptions, though, really. You don’t hear jazz as an influence in rock music at all, which I think is a shame. I think jazz music is what really kicked off the whole explosion of innovation and experimentation in the early 70s. You had a lot of rock musicians who were listening to jazz musicians and were suddenly liberated by it. They were liberated by the fact that you didn’t have to write a three minute pop tune. Jazz was about spirituality and freedom of expression, and it created a wonderful kind of hotbed of sound for a relatively short period of time. Only five or six years, really, until Punk came along, and then it went back to Rock ‘N’ Roll and R&B and the basics.
Absolutely. As I was listening to “Raider II,” I sensed a direct influence of King Crimson’s third LP, Lizard. Of course I don’t mean to insinuate plagiarism, but the opening melody, for example, is quite similar to “Cirkus.”
There’s a lot from Lizard and a lot from King Crimson in general. When I started the record, I was totally immersed in manipulating those records. When I was growing up, there were three bands: King Crimson, Pink Floyd, and Tangerine Dream. I love being able to go into the Crimson catalogue and go inside the music and try to understand more about how it was made and what it was I loved about it. And it isn’t necessarily what I thought I loved about it. It all kept coming back to me—this idea of using jazz musicians. Lizard is all about that; it’s basically a Robert Fripp solo record using local UK based jazz musicians of the time. People like Keith Tippett on piano, for example, and a lot of horn players, like Marc Charig. Lizard is a great example to me of how jazz and rock music created something magical, and so it’s definitely in my music. You’re not wrong; it’s in my DNA (laughs).
Ah, I thought so. So, there’s a lot of pharmaceutical imagery in your music. I’m thinking of Voyage 34, Fear of a Blank Planet, and certainly Grace for Drowning. I wonder where that inspiration comes from.
I’m fascinated by it. I mean, I’m fascinated by serial killers, too, but I’m obviously not a serial killer. I’m fascinated by drug culture but I don’t take drugs.
Not to sound too obsessed with Porcupine Tree, but I actually wrote a term paper in college on the serial killer idea within In Absentia.
Oh, cool. Okay. I mean, it’s a totally valid question, but I think that sometimes people make the mistake of thinking that if you write about drugs, you be a heavy drug user.
Well you wouldn’t get anything done if you were.
Well, yeah, that’s another thing. I’ve always bee fascinated by drug culture, particular with the impact it’s having on younger people. And not just the illegal drugs, either. The whole idea of prescription drug culture and the idea of parents not having to take responsibility for their kids because they can use the “get out” clause of “he has attention deficit disorder.” I never heard of ADD until about ten years ago; it certainly didn’t exist when I was a kid. Back then, it was just that your kid was out of control. Now, it’s very easy for parents to go to the doctor and for kids to be labeled with ADD and to be prescribed pills. I think that’s too easy now, and to answer your question, it does come up a lot because I’m fascinated with things that I don’t understand. I don’t understand serial killers and what makes them tick. It’s that kind of obsession with wanting to get to the bottom of that, and it’s the same with drug culture. I don’t understand it, and so it fascinates me so I write a lot of songs about it.
That makes sense. I know you don’t really want to talk about Porcupine Tree right now, but I have to ask you about my favorite song of yours, “Heartattack In A Layby.” Frankly, I think it’s a work of genius, and I wonder what made you write it.
Oh, well thank you. It’s one of my favorites of mine, too. I think that for me, one of the things that’s always been the most heartbreaking about the human condition is the idea of regret. Regret for not having said what you should’ve said at the time or done what you should’ve done. Regret for not following your instincts and married the right person when you had the chance. All of that stuff. I think it’s terribly sad human quality, and “Heartattack In A Layby” is about regret. It’s all about a guy basically dying in a Layby and thinking about the way he’s left home the day before, the night before, the week before, or whenever. That incredibly potent sense of regret for not resolving this argument or row or whatever it was. I just thought it was a really beautiful image. Actually, when I started writing the song, it was about a man who’d been shot and he was lying in a Layby. But the I thought that what’s even more potent, in a way, is this idea that he’s having a heart attack and he doesn’t even realize that he’s dying. It was just that idea, really, and it’s definitely one of my favorite songs of them all, too. I’m glad you like it.
I love it. You’ve often said that you’ve always wanted the music of Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, and your solo work to have a distinct visual aid. You’ve said that all the great bands have this distinct aesthetic, and you’ve found your artistic collaborator in Lasse Hoile. What attracts you to the kinds of imagery that Lasse creates for your music?
I think it suits the music, and it’s very hard to find a visual counterpart to music that works so well. It took me ten years to find him. When I did find him, or should I say he found me since he submitted his work to me, it was amazing because his art was almost like what I’d always had in my mind. I’ve always thought in terms of visuals, anyway. The first thing I think when I finish a song is not “how can I make this music better?”, it’s “how would this be visually represented?” I’ve always felt this strong connection with cinema and music. Visuals and music. It was import for me to find someone who could almost intuitively create the visuals that I had in my mind. That’s something that only ever happens two or three times in a lifetime, to find someone so connected to you like that. For example, I can explain to him the meaning of a song like “Heartattack In A Layby” and he’ll go away and come back with something and I’ll say, “That’s exactly it!” Normally, with anybody else, I’d say, “That’s not quite what I had in mind,” but with Lasse, he always hits the nail on the head. We share a very common love of European cinema and of Art house cinema, which helps. We’re always saying, “Hey, you know that scene from that French movie from 1963?,” and so we kind of have similar reference points that make it easy to establish what direction to go in. On this project, for me, he’s been absolutely invaluable; he’s been my main collaborator on Grace for Drowning.
That’s great, Steven, and I agree that the visuals perfectly complement the music. Again, congrats on Grace for Drowning. It’s an incredible record. Thanks for inviting me to hear the record and speak with you today. Take care.
Thanks for coming out, Jordan.
For more on Steven Wilson, check out this preview of Grace for Drowning, as well as the following articles:
*Review of The Incident
*Review of Blackfiend/Anathema at Philadelphia's TLA
*Review of Welcome To My DNA
For more information on how to preorder Grace for Drowning, click here.
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