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Feb 20, 2025 Web Exclusive By Stephen Humphries Photography by Kevin Westenberg

As a boy, Steven Wilson listened to the transportive sounds of The Dark Side of the Moon. Now, he wants to transport listeners to the far side of the universe.

Wilson’s new album, The Overview, is about space. The sheer enormity of it. And mankind’s place within it.

“I didn’t intend to make another record as soon as this, because The Harmony Codex is only barely a year ago,” Wilson tells Under the Radar in a video call from his London home. “I didn’t really think I was going to dive straight into making another record.”

The spark was hearing about what happens to astronauts the first time they gaze back at Earth: a luminescent lifeboat floating in a vast expanse of darkness. Each astronaut has a subjective reaction. They call it the overview effect. Viewing our home from orbit makes many space travelers wonder why humans are in perpetual conflict, says philosopher Frank White, who coined the term.

“They’re talking about that change in awareness, that change in world view,” White said in a NASA podcast. “It’s a beautiful planet, it’s alive, it’s always changing. And yet on the surface, there’s so much strife and I’d like for the beauty and harmony of what I’m seeing to be realized on the surface.”

Wilson set out to emulate that consciousness shift in musical form. The Overview consists of just two epic tracks. Side A, “Objects Outlive Us,” lasts 23 minutes. Side B, “The Overview,” is 18 minutes long. No, there won’t be a single.

The lyrics of “Objects Outlive Us” contrast vignettes of everyday life on Earth with epochal cosmic phenomena in the universe. On “The Overview,” Wilson sings from the perspective of an astronaut: “Snow is falling but it can’t be seen from here / And back on Earth, my loving wife’s been dead for years / I see myself in relation to it all / What seemed important now like dust inside the squall.”

The album starts in our galaxy and zooms increasingly further out into deep space. It’s an aural journey. Wilson whisks the listener past the Jupiter moons of Ganymede and Calisto, ventures through the outer solar system—wave hello to the Voyager 1 probe as you overtake it—and crosses over into the Milky Way. From there, he guides us through the Virgo Supercluster of galaxies. That’s 65.23 million light years from Earth. Hope you packed a lunch. Finally, Wilson’s cosmic trip enters the Eridanus Supervoid. It’s maw of nothingness, almost entirely devoid of matter, that would take 1.8 billion light years to traverse. Probably not great for AT&T cellular service.

Longtime fans will know that Wilson bristles at the notion of musical genre. His eight solo albums plus numerous musical collaborations—including Porcupine Tree, for which he is best-known—have incorporated elements of pop, metal, jazz, electronica, folk, psychedelic, disco, shoegaze, trip-hop, and prog. (Mercifully, he hasn’t felt the inclination to try his hand at reggae.) For The Overview, however, Wilson felt the conceptual theme lent itself to progressive rock.

The Overview showcases Wilson’s instinctive knack for nagging melodies, dynamic arrangements, and surprising production ideas. Yet he’s careful to avoid predictable prog tropes. So, no mellotron. The music is stratified and full-bodied but it’s neither florid nor pompous. Some passages boast the momentum of a Falcon 9 rocket courtesy of muscular drummers Russell Holzman and Craig Blundell. There’s a gamma-ray burst keyboard solo by Adam Holzman. Randy McStine delivers a guitar soliloquy that arcs as gracefully as a solar flare. For the album’s ambient coda, Theo Travis’s sparse and serene saxophone drifts like an untethered astronaut. For all the virtuosity, there’s zero showboating. That aesthetic carries over to Hajo Müller’s minimalist artwork. It avoids anything like ELO’s flying saucer, let alone the ostentatious sci-fi of ELP album covers.

This album is truly far out.

In an interview that has been edited for length and clarity, Steven Wilson talked about making The Overview (out on Fiction Records, March 14), why he’s a fan of Mount Eerie, his future ambitions, and what to expect from his 2025 shows in Europe and the Americas.

Stephen Humphries (Under the Radar): The album title refers to what astronauts call “the overview effect.” Can you explain what it is, how you learned about it, and how it inspired this album?

I don’t like to repeat anything I’ve done again. So it’s like, “What could I do that would be different again?” I wasn’t necessarily thinking in terms of making another record. I was thinking in terms of maybe getting involved in a film project or something else like that. A very good friend of mine, Alex Milas, runs an organization called Space Rocks. They have a big presence. Space Rocks is an organization dedicated to bringing together the worlds of astronomy and music. They’ve had people like Brian May heavily involved, but also they’ve done events with other musicians that are interested in space. Alex is a very good friend and I sat down with him at the beginning of last year and I said, “Well, maybe this is the time for us to do something together. Maybe I can create a piece of music or something.”

We had lunch together and we started talking…and we got into the subject of the overview effect, which is a recognized phenomenon. [It] is basically something that happens when astronauts first go into space and they see the Earth from space for the first time. Apparently they go through some kind of cognitive transformation whereby their whole perspective on life changes in that instant.… That leads to this idea, which is really the core of what the album is about, perspective. I went home and I was kind of buzzing with this idea of the overview effect. Well, that’s interesting because a lot of people, I think, have stopped looking up. In fact, the album starts with this little scene of meeting an alien on the moor. The alien says to the human being, “Did you forget about me?” Basically, the point is—and this is where it does tie back into a lot of my other albums—we spend a lot of time looking down into these things [Wilson holds up a cellphone] and we no longer look up with curiosity about what’s out there. Because we’re so busy worrying about how many Likes and how many followers our latest post has got.

The point is that when we look up, there is an awful lot out there. The Earth that we live on, that we think we curate, and we think that we own, has been here for 4 billion years. We’ve been here for 300,000. We’ve been here for the last two seconds of a 24 hour day. We’ve been here for 0.007% of the time the Earth has existed. Our sun is one of 1,000,000,000,000 billion stars in the universe, and it’s not even a particularly big one. So when you start looking into these numbers, it becomes absolutely mind blowing. You start to realize just how absurd the way that we behave is and the things that we get obsessed with. All of those notions of time and space kind of fade into nothingness when you realize just how insignificant we are.

But, at the same time, I think that’s actually quite a beautiful thing. I don’t want people to think that I’m trying to give them some massive downer about how insignificant we are and how pointless our life is because, actually, it is pointless and it is futile. But it’s also a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful random gift. I think if people understood just how random and actually ultimately insignificant it is, they might enjoy the ride a bit more. As human beings, we invent all these absurd things like religion and politics. We divert ourselves and social media from this incredible gift. I think this is where the continuity comes in terms of this album in my catalog. Essentially, that’s what all my albums have been about. This is a more cosmic way, I suppose, of looking at the same thing that I was looking at on The Future Bites or on Hand.Cannot.Erase.

I was watching an interview Joe Rogan did with Brian Cox, who’s from the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester. And he basically said, the existence of humanity is so unlikely as to be an aberration. For this planet obviously to be in just the right space—not too close to the sun, or too far—to have the right kind of gases and not just to have single-celled organisms, but to have sentient beings is quite remarkable. So from that perspective, you could say that humanity is special because it’s so rare for that to exist in the universe.

I think we are an incredible accident of stars.… There are so many galaxies out there, so many planets, so many stars out there. Inevitably the law of probability says there would be something like us. But that’s the point, isn’t it? This comes back to that idea. We’re occupying a tiny, tiny microscopic little window of this time the Earth is going to be here. It’s been here for billions of years before we came along. It will continue to be here billions of years after we go. This little time window that we’re here on Earth—human beings—is infinitely small compared to the cosmos.

All of the things that matter to us, the music we love, the people…they’re incredibly beautiful. I think even more so because they are ultimately futile. That’s one of the wonderful things about the human species. We have the ability to to really be passionate and to love. And yeah, I mean, it’s an incredible thing. Although [The Overview] is about the nihilistic depths of space, ultimately it is still a story about the human race.

Why do you think you’re asking these bigger questions now, in 2025?

Why does anything capture our imagination at any given moment in our lives? I don’t know. I’ve always been interested in space, astronomy as a kind of amateur. Maybe because I’ve written several albums that are very much about planet Earth and human beings and the way we engage with each other. I thought maybe it was time to write an album about something bigger than us.

So maybe that’s just me having my own existential crisis. You know, of wanting to have more of a sense of perspective in my own life. But like I say, it’s fascinating. I’d forgotten just how many stars there were in the universe. I’d forgotten just how many suns there are and stars there are. I’d forgotten just how many galaxies and just how big the universe is. And just simple things like, you know, it would take 647 million years just to travel to the next nearest star.

The fact that there are more stars out there than there are grains of sand on this planet is just mind boggling. That’s hard to wrap your head around.

We can only kind of measure things based on our own kind of scales of miles and minutes and hours. Those things are completely inadequate to actually measure things in a kind of cosmic way. There was a brilliant comedy radio show, and it became a TV show, based on books written by Douglas Adams called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I’ve read all of Adams’s books.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he wrote about the ultimate punishment for human beings—worse than execution, worse than going to prison—was to be put into a machine called the Total Perspective Vortex. It was something that only took a second, but in that second you were shown exactly where you were in relation to the universe. And apparently the brain couldn’t handle it. It turned that person into a vegetable. It was kind of a jokey thing, but actually there is something about that. It’s like it’s almost too much to take on board. Sometimes I wonder if that’s one of the reasons why we retreat into things like social media and religion, because we can’t we can’t really handle—in the words of Jack Nicholson—we can’t handle the truth.

The Overview features a lyrical assist from Andy Partridge of XTC fame. He previously contributed to To the Bone. Explain why you approached him for this and what he brought to this album.

The first side of the album is basically about human beings and our relationship to space. And the second side of the record is really about space itself, and it is more scientific. But that first side of the record, it begins with a scene of meeting an alien on the moor and it transitions into a kind of apocalyptic section about the destruction of the Earth. Then it goes into this section where I wanted to have a scene—I think of this album as having scenes—where there would be a juxtaposition, a contrast between the very minor little soap operas that keep us all preoccupied on Earth, with incredible cosmic phenomena. I wanted to juxtapose little soap operas of husbands cheating on their wives, nurses in care homes, a young guy working in a car showroom, with black holes imploding on the other side of the cosmos. To create that contrast between the small trivial things on Earth with the extraordinary, enormous cosmic phenomena going on all the time in the universe, that we’re completely unaware of. Things happening millions of light years away.

I thought to myself, “Who does small town England soap operas better than anyone else?” Ray Davies [of The Kinks] maybe, but also Andy Partridge. Those two are the kings of those things. I rang up Andy and I said, “I’ve got a mission for you. I want you to write some small town soap operas like you’re very good at. But I want you to draw a parallel between that and the most enormous cosmic phenomena.” Of course, he did it brilliantly. I wanted Andy to really home in on what he does so well, which is write about particularly in a very English way. He writes about small town England. In fact, at the time I was making this record, I just finished remixing [XTC’s] The Big Express, which has that track “The Everyday Story of Small Town.” It has some of the most divine little England observational lyric writing that you could ever hope to come across.

When you embarked upon writing The Overview, was it with the idea that you were going to create two long tracks, a Side A and a Side B of an LP? A case of form following function?

When I realized that this was something I was going to write about, it did suggest to me, the long form. I couldn’t imagine writing a bunch of shorter songs about this. And once I had the first piece, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great just to have another piece that would be like a companion?”

I’ve talked about doing something along those lines before. But I never actually got around to just doing an album with just two long pieces on it, which was a very progressive rock thing to do as well, which is something that my fans would probably love, just the concept of it. Some of my fans anyway. It felt like a challenge. I think it suits the format, suits the subject matter. This is grand scale storytelling. This is two short movies, one on each side of a record. And it’s epic in all senses of the word.

What are some of the touchstones for other bands, artists, albums embedded within your musical DNA that you think influenced the music of The Overview?

I don’t think there was any. I think the biggest influences on this album probably would be more likely to come from the world of movies. 2001 [: A Space Odyssey] was a very strong touchstone for this record because 2001 is still the movie that makes space look scary. We’ve had so many movies since then, and I’m not only talking about your Star Wars movies, but just generally movies that give the impression that the human beings have somehow conquered space and that it’s this place where we have adventures. It isn’t. It’s this fucking enormous place that we’ve barely touched. And by the way, it’s also a place of death and nothingness. I come back to Kubrick’s 2001 because that’s the movie that makes you understand that. It was a very strong touchstone for me, I think, in terms of atmosphere to the feeling of journeying to the other side of the cosmos and the kind of temporal and the temporal considerations involved in that—the distance.

Music wise, I’m not really aware of being influenced. I think the biggest influence on my catalog now is what I’ve done before since I don’t want to repeat it, you know? But also, there’s obviously things that people will recognize, “that’s a Steven Wilson trope.” I just can’t hide those. But so in some senses, my own back catalog becomes my biggest…I don’t mean that to sound arrogant because it’s almost like a negative thing. I want to avoid repeating myself.

Which is why I asked what’s embedded in your musical DNA, rather than a conscious influence.

Sure. I did an interview with an Italian magazine a couple of days ago, and he was asking me about one section and he said, “That’s very Blade Runner.” And of course, absolutely, I’m sure, because that is an album and a movie, by the way, that are completely in my DNA, just like Pink Floyd are always in my DNA and will always come out. So I’m sure people will hear those things, but it’s not something I’m conscious of when I’m doing it, if that makes sense.

I don’t think you hear, in the album, a lot of things where you think, “That sounds much like this artist or that artist.” It definitely sounds very Steven Wilson.

I like to think that having made now however many albums it is—if you combine all my [projects], 30 albums or something—I have got to a point where I’ve earned the right to be considered to have my own musical world, my own musical sound. Of course, nothing comes from a vacuum. Very often we talk about bands like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin as having come from nowhere. Of course, all of those bands wore their influences on their sleeves. You know, the first few albums, particularly. The Beatles knocking off old American rock and roll pastiches. Led Zeppelin knocking off Chicago blues. But I think time, time and personality tends to transcend these influences over time, and you become your own trope—if I can use that expression—or you become your own set of tropes.

On this album, you’ve got some reliable stalwarts that you’ve worked with for many years. Craig Blundell on Drums. Adam Holzman on keyboards, and Randy McStine, and I’m guessing Theo Travis playing the uplifting sax at the end of the second track, right?

Correct. Yeah. Theo plays the soprano sax on the closing [suite], which is called “Permanence.”

Russell Holzman, son of Adam Holzman, recorded drums for the record, right?

Yeah, he’s on the first side. Crazy good!

Is there anyone else we haven’t mentioned who’s on the record?

Rotem [Steven’s wife] is on it. Niko [Tsonev] plays one solo. He plays one solo that I couldn’t get what I wanted from either myself or Randy. So I reached out to Niko and had him play the first solo on the second side.

As a composer, how much do you map out what you’d like them to play? And how much do you give them leeway to compose themselves and improvise?

That’s a difficult question to answer. What I would say is that I want to be surprised. So there’s no point inviting someone else to play on your record if you’re not open to being surprised by what they’ll give you. Just do it yourself. I mean, okay, that is sometimes a technical consideration. Can you play what you want, what you imagined in your mind? Are you capable of actually playing that? And in my case, no, quite often. But actually that’s not why I collaborate with musicians. So when I asked Randy, for example—the big solo at the end of “Objects Out Live Us,” which is a glorious kind of two minutes long extended piece of storytelling, in a way, through a solo—I didn’t tell him what I wanted. What I said was, “I want you to reinvent the idea of the classic rock epic guitar solo.” What I meant by that is, I don’t want “Comfortably Numb.” No, disrespect to “Comfortably Numb”—it’s the greatest guitar solo of all time. But we all know that. I don’t want that, but I want you to give me something that has a similar sense of drama and gravitas, but I want it to sound like it could only exist now. I want you to reinvent that notion of the classic rock solo now. He sent me lots of different versions and I said, “No, no, no, no, no. Yes.” So in that sense, I’m not telling him what to play, but I’m giving him a general guideline, a general framework, and I’m saying try some things. I don’t know what I want until I hear it.

There’s an alternate version of a completely different approach, which is going to be a bonus track on the deluxe [edition]. But the one that we landed with is quite an unusual sound and quite an unusual musical vocabulary he’s drawing on. It’s not a pentatonic blues solo. It’s very Randy. Randy is a young kid. He’s grown up in a completely different generation. He’s absorbed lots of different influences over the years, and I think that’s why I loved working with him on this record. And it was basically to be surprised.

So the answer to your question: To be surprised, but to also be able to be the captain of the ship.

Are there any lead guitar parts from you on this album?

Well, yeah, a little bit, but not like a solo, literally. Phrases and things. Actually, the one solo I did play, I cut out. It’s part of a bonus track on the deluxe [edition] called “Unused Objects,” which is about 12 minutes of pieces cut out of “Objects [Will Outlive Us].” So, no, the big solos are played by Randy. I kind of bore myself as a soloist.

You’ve worked with a lot of great bass players in the past, from Colin Edwin to Guy Pratt to Nick Beggs. On this album, you play the bass yourself. What are the qualities of your bass playing that you love and that were very suited to The Overview?

I didn’t have a master plan about it. I sat down and I started to make the record. I do love playing bass. I’m a frustrated bass player. I think I’ve said before, I play bass like a lot of guitar players play bass, which is I don’t really play a bass like a bass player. So I’m always looking for melodies and I’m looking for things that are higher up the neck, not necessarily so low. So I’m not playing the bass in a supportive role a lot of the time and pushing it to the forefront. There’s one section that comes about 10 minutes into the first side, which is this big, fuzzy distorted bass riff.

It’s like Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris meets The Cure’s Simon Gallup.

Yeah. And I played it on an acoustic bass, would you believe.

Really?

So I’m endorsed by Takamine, the acoustic guitar company. They offered to send me some guitars. And I said, “Look, you’ve given me so many acoustic guitars. I really don’t need any more. But if you’ve got anything else?” They said, “Well, we’ve got this acoustic bass.” I said, “Yeah, great, send that over.” So they sent me over this acoustic bass. And of course it’s a completely different sort of dynamic to playing an electric bass. It’s much more elastic and springy sounding. You get the rattle in the spring and the vibration of the strings. I started playing that riff and I put it through an amp and I got this amazing sound. I’m like, “This is great fun!” Actually a lot of this record was kind of written, in a way, on the bass.

That approach of using an acoustic bass reminds me of your solo on the track “Follower” on The Future Bites, which you played on an acoustic guitar, which I didn’t realize at the time.

Yeah, I like doing things like that.

Are you playing through an amp or you playing it directly to a computer?

In that case it was through both. One thing I do a lot is I will play an instrument through an amp simulator or plug in, but then I will route that out into the room through a speaker and mic up the sound of the room and then blend the two things together. One of the problems with a lot of virtual modeling is that you don’t get that feeling of air moving. You don’t get that feeling of the sound has traveled across space to the microphone. But you can obviously compensate for that, which is exactly what I’m talking about here, where you record a DI [Direct Injection] so you have a very controlled sound. Then to make the sound feel a bit more like it’s moving air, you route that sound out to the room and you re-record the sound back through the speakers and the microphones. I have two microphones hanging from a ceiling, which I just pick up the sound of the room in, and then you blend that back in. I do that so often now it gives me the best of both worlds.

You often say that the music you create never quite matches what’s in your imagination, in your head. It’s difficult to fully translate what you’ve got in your head into an actual piece of music. So I’m wondering, with The Overview, how large or how small was the gap between the final product of the music and what you envisioned at the outset?

I’m not sure if I had a specific vision this time. I kind of let the music take me where it took me. So once I decided I was going to work on a long form piece, I mean, I definitely knew certain things. Like I thought, wouldn’t it be great to start with a single voice lost in space?

But beyond that, I think the rest of the piece kind of—I mean, I don’t want to sound pretentious here—wrote itself. But it kind of did! It kind of unfolded in a way. You know, I’ve often talked about the process of writing longer tracks. It’s almost like one idea leads to the next. So here, for example, about four minutes in, a theme is introduced. And that 19-note theme becomes the basis for almost all of the rest of the music throughout that piece. So you hear it recontextualized in many different ways throughout the piece. So, little musical motifs like that present themselves.

And then you say to yourself, or I say to myself, “That’s a nice little theme. I wonder if the next section we could carry that theme through, but kind of developed into a completely different world, a completely different little scene?” So there is this sense of one idea leading to the next, one door leads to the next. About 17 minutes and you reach that big peak and then you go, “Okay, we need to bring everyone down again here with a beautiful kind of outro with a big guitar solo.” And then I’m like, “Okay, but I don’t want to end this piece on a high. I want to remind people of the blackness and the death of space.” So you get an orchestra.

But it is kind of unfolding in a way that’s surprising to me.

That idea of a recurring musical motif is what Mike Oldfield does so well on Tubular Bells.

Yeah. I’m sure you know Oldfield’s another person that’s in my DNA. I wouldn’t have been conscious of it. But again, he’s somebody that certainly his first few albums are just two long side-long pieces. And, yes, that idea of the motif—what classical composers would call the lead motif—is evolving. Stockhausen was always very big on this. You have a little, you know, a certain sequence of notes, which becomes the basic building blocks of creating an entire structure. And it’s how many different ways can you look at that melody, that theme?

He’s a very unfashionable figure, but there’s a great Andrew Lloyd Webber album called Variations. It’s brilliant. I love that record. And he’s looking at that Paganini theme in lots of different ways. He’s like, okay, now this next piece we’re going to we’re going to approach it from the point of view that it’s a ragtime band. Then we can approach it from the point of view that it’s like jazz and it’s a prog rock band.

I own that album. Variations has got the line of the band Colosseum II with Jon Hiseman on drums, Gary Moore on guitar, and Don Airey on keys.

And [saxophonist] Barbara Thompson. But [Webber] is a very unfashionable figure, because of his musicals, so I think people overlooked that record. I think it’s a bit of a masterpiece, actually.

How do you discover new artists these days?

I think the same way that I always have, which is that people recommend things. You know, I always check out the end-of-year lists. I only discovered the artist Mk.Gee because he was popping up in a lot of end-of-year lists. I was very impressed with him. But then, you know, 99% of it I listen to and I’m like, “I don’t get why people are excited, you know?” But there’s always that 1% of things that, wow, I’m really impressed by.

I want to ask you about the albums that are on your list of 2024 favorites. Tell me about what you loved about the latest album by Mount Eerie and also the extraordinary album Endlessness by Nala Sinephro.

Let’s talk about Nala Sinephro first. What I love about this is that this is a jazz record. But this is a jazz record that could only exist in 2024 because it’s a jazz artist that’s grown up listening to— well, it sounds to me anyway—listening as much to Boards of Canada that she does than she does to Sun Ra. If that makes sense.

I think the same is true of the classical world. So you have a lot of classical composers now, like Max Richter, who are composing classical music in quite a traditional way in some senses. But at the same time, there’s something about what they do that could only be post-Radiohead or post-Aphex Twin or post-Massive Attack. I love that fact, now, that we have a generation of both classical and jazz musicians that are young—20s, 30s, teenagers even—that don’t think about jazz music or classical music as being this little island.

I miss that so much in the world of rock music. You know, there are exceptions. In fact, encouragingly, over the last 18 months, I’ve heard more than perhaps I have four or five years previous to that, some really extraordinary strange experimental metal music coming out. Oranssi Pazuzu and Blood Incantation and things like that. Very interesting. So I think things are beginning to turn now in a good way. But for a long time I felt like rock music had really allowed itself to become marginalized by becoming this little island. And conversely, I think jazz musicians, the younger generation of young musicians, were saying, “Yeah, fuck it, now we can bring in this. We can bring in that.” Her album is a great example. It’s beautiful. I think of it in the same way I think of the The Floating Points album, Promises. It’s that mixture of electronic mixed with really strong jazz sensibility.

The other record you asked me about, Mount Eerie? I again only discovered this guy [Phil Elverum] recently. He has another project called The Microphones. [They] released this amazing album called The Microphones in 2020, right in the middle of COVID, which was just one 45 minute long track. So immediately, “That’s interesting. I like that.” I think [Elverum] comes from the same tradition as people like Will Oldham [and] the guy [who created the album] Songs: Ohia, Jason Molina. Almost kind of an outsider sensibility. Sounds like he makes his records in his bedroom. Incredibly confessional lyrics. Very personal, very organic, very outside, very lo-fi.

I’ve really found myself gravitating more towards those kinds of records because I hate the sound of modern pop so much. That kind of chiseled, tweaked, teased perfection that is in every modern, mainstream, modern pop record now. To the point that it almost sounds like artificial intelligence could have created the music, and I think probably in some cases it has. So I find myself drawn more to these records that sound like they were made in incredibly primitive circumstances, very organic, not technically proficient people, but inspired people. People with ideas. People with personalities.

That’s a really good segue for me to ask about another of your favorite 2024 albums, which is the Loma album. It’s a band that Under the Radar magazine has championed. You created an Atmos mix for How Will I live without a Body? What were the qualities of that album that were so suited for a spatial surround mix?

You listen to that record, you can hear the chairs they were sitting in creaking when they’re playing the piano. One thing I said to Jonathan [Meiburg] when we were mixing the album was, “I love your allegiance to hiss, you know, tape hiss, not trying to not try to erase and filter out all hiss.” I speak as someone that spends a lot of time—I battle with myself over this—making my record sound perfect. Not to the extent that I’m talking about in modern pop, which to me is like all the personality erased. But I do spend a lot of time trying to get great sounds and great tones and clean recordings and audiophile recordings. But then I hear something like the Loma record and it’s got all the tapes and it’s got all the creaking of the chairs and—

Dogs barking.

Yeah. Dogs barking. One of the tracks ends with this sound of the sea, which Jonathan captured on his phone. And I kept saying, “Jonathan, should we turn up that traffic sound at the end?” And he said, “What traffic?” “Well, you know, the cars going past at the end.” And it turned out that what I thought was traffic was the sea, because it was so badly recorded. I loved it. But I’d completely misunderstood what it was a recording of because it was so low-fi. But Loma is a funny one because, at the same time, they are incredibly proficient, professional, gifted musicians. Jonathan is a brilliant musician and Dan [Dusczynski] is a brilliant musician. But there is a certain organic, lo-fi aesthetic which I love in their music. It’s a beautiful record.

In your previous interview with Under the Radar, you expressed an interest in returning to producing at some point. Would you be more interested in producing an upcoming act? Or would you like to do the kind of thing that Jack White did by producing Loretta Lynn, which was producing a great comeback album from an artist that’s late in their career and looking to create a great, statement piece? But they need a great producer to help them get there. Which option is more interesting to you as a hypothetical?

I’m sorry to evade the question. Of course, it would depend. If somebody gave me a tape of an artist that was completely unknown and I was really excited about it…. But at the same time, I would say I’m more tending towards the latter. I would find it fascinating to work with an artist that I perhaps grew up with. I mean, imagine being a producer for Elton [John] or someone like that. You know, if someone would come to me like that and say, “Give me a new sound. Take me into your world.” I think it would be fascinating to work with a heritage artist and try to give them a new sound.

In recent years you’ve cut back on your multitasking projects, especially now that you have a family. But I’m wondering what are the likelihood of future collaborations, whether it’s Storm Corrosion with Mikael Åkerfeldt, Blackfield, with Aviv Geffen, No-Man with Tim Bowness, or Porcupine Tree with Richard Barbieri and Gavin Harrison. Do you find yourself itching to do a collaboration again?

I like collaborating. The solo album is a collaboration in that sense. So it’s not like I’m making an album of my own in a room with no other musicians. There is a lot of collaboration involved. I really enjoyed making the last Porcupine Tree album. It was great fun. It was because I had the solo career and I felt like I was able to just let go of a lot of the control I had already. So I think I can definitely imagine going back and allowing myself to be one of the team again. That’s part of the fun. Changing scenes. You know, one moment I’m making an album on my own. The next minute I’m making music with people. The next minute I’m mixing something for somebody or I’m producing something. So that’s part of the joy of my career now is the changing of the scenes.

You’re going out on tour. What can people expect? It sounds like you’re trying to do something pretty ambitious.

I don’t know for sure what I’m going to do yet, but I’m sure it’s going to be something different to what I’ve done before. I know that it will be very visual. That’s something I’ve always loved is to create a very visual sort of show. I’m not quite sure what it’s going to be yet because I haven’t started planning it. But it’s going to be something obviously suited to the subject matter of the new record. And because this record is in the long form, I’m looking at other pieces I can bring in to kind of complement them. So, in this case, it’s a more conceptual long form kind of album. So I’m thinking about going back to some pieces a bit more like that from some of the earlier records.

You’ve just done two tours with Porcupine Tree. I imagine you can now just focus purely on your solo material for the setlist.

I think so. I don’t think it would make as much sense now that Porcupine Tree is kind of back to play as much repertoire from Porcupine Tree. I’ve got an idea of a set list. There’s no Porcupine Tree in it now. There’s three albums that have come out since I last toured. So I don’t only have The Overview to draw from, I’m going to play music from The Harmony Codex as well as back catalog. Not that I ever needed to anyway with PT, but it was because PT were inactive. It made sense for me to maybe try and bring in some of those songs, but now it’s not inactive.

What was the last concert you saw that blew your mind in terms of the pure stagecraft presentation, doing something really unusual and different with the presentation?

I didn’t get to see Taylor Swift. I saw the show on Netflix or whatever it was, the Eras show. Yeah that’s a pretty amazing show.

Imagine having that kind of budget.

Exactly, yeah. I’m not going to have that kind of budget, unfortunately. Obviously, I have to think in more modest terms in terms of what I can achieve. The technology now has come on so much. There are ways to do really amazing things that would have been completely out of the financial possibilities of an artist even five years ago. So I’m working with interesting people to create something I think would be quite visual. It’ll probably be a little bit more minimal. I’m kind of into minimalism these days. I’m not into having risers and things like that on stage. I’m going to probably have the band all on the same level. And looking at each other as something a bit more interactive. Like I said, I’m still kind of thinking about it.

Steven, it’s 2025, a quarter of the way into this current century. Twenty five years ago, you were releasing Lightbulb Sun with Porcupine Tree. Between then and now, how do you think you’ve grown, matured, and developed as an artist? What do you think you’re able to do now creatively, that you might not have been able to pull off back then?

I’m sure some fans still think the best records I made were the first few Porcupine Tree albums. I don’t, obviously, but I’m so proud of those records. But I think I got better at making records. Maybe this comes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is the older you get, I think the more you have created your own universe and you’re less influenced and less kind of attached to genre. The notion of genre, I think, for me is so irrelevant now. I know that a lot of my fans still think of me as a progressive rock artist, and they’ll probably like this album because this is very much in that tradition. But of course, there’s also so much more going on in this record. There’s moments of electronica, for example. There’s moments of pure ambience on the record. So there’s all these other things going on, and I think they all can coexist quite happily in the Steven Wilson universe. I like that. I think that’s what I’m most proud about. And the catalog, of course, I’m so proud of because eight albums now and they’re all completely different. They all have a reason to exist in my catalog. It’s not like any of them are “more of the same.” I know that that creates problems in marketing. I’m painfully aware of that. But changing with every album, I loved that. This isn’t exactly [answering] your question, but what I’m most proud of in terms of the development is to arrive at this point as an artist. There’s nothing I can’t bring into the palette.

www.stevenwilsonhq.com

Read part 1 of our 2023 interview with Steven Wilson on The Harmony Codex.

Read part 2 of our 2023 interview with Steven Wilson on The Harmony Codex.

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