Steven Wilson
Cosmic Perspectives
by Anil Prasad
Copyright © 2025 Anil Prasad.

Photo: Kevin WestenbergExistential contemplation remains a common crossroads for humanity. But with the majority of us glued to our devices and distracted by social media informed by algorithmic bias, it’s clear the collective search for meaning often takes a backseat to more superficial concerns.

That observation is one of the springboards for Steven Wilson’s latest album, The Overview. It explores the idea of the “overview effect,” a term first coined by author Frank White. It refers to the dramatic psychological impact astronauts experience when they view the Earth from orbit. White’s interviews with astronauts revealed a common theme of realizing our species’ insignificance within the context of the cosmic expanse surrounding and influencing the Earth.

Wilson extends the idea of the overview effect to our own sense of wonder and awe when experiencing the Earth’s natural beauty and phenomena. And as an atheist, he uses it to voice competing purposeful and purposeless internal dialogs about our place on this spinning globe.

Musically, The Overview features two side-long suites titled “Objects Outlive Us” and “The Overview.” It’s a 42-minute journey housed within a progressive rock framework infused with many other influences including spiritual jazz, post-rock, pop, electronic music, and noise music.

The recording includes contributions from drummer Craig Blundell, keyboardist Adam Holzman, guitarist Randy McStine, and vocalist Rotem Wilson. “Objects Outlive Us” also incorporates lyrics by XTC co-founder Andy Partridge. The release is accompanied by a film from director Miles Skarin that combines 3-D animation, photo-realistic renderings, and surrealism to reflect the album’s aural journey.

In addition to The Overview, Wilson released a new Bass Communion album in 2024 titled The Itself of Itself. The recording, which offers music cultivated and captured across a 10-year period, continues Bass Communion’s tradition of exploring the edges of ambient, drone, and noise music. He’s also working on new music for Porcupine Tree, the progressive rock band he founded in 1987, which reunited after a 12-year hiatus in 2022. In addition, he continues his ever-heightening role as a surround sound remixer, helming new incarnations of Pink Floyd at Pompeii, Ultravox’s Lament, Yes’ Fragile and Close to the Edge, as well as the New Order catalog.

Photo: Joel del Tufo

Discuss the process of how you determine the overall direction for an album, and how that led to what you pursued on The Overview.

The first thing is to find something I've not done before. It’s very important to me each time to feel like there's going to be a reason to add to my already substantial catalog. I ask myself, “Why am I releasing another record? What's going to give this record a reason to exist in the oeuvre?”

I love to have a concept or some kind of framework, not just for the album to exist within, but also for the discussion about the tour and all the artwork. Obviously, there's a very strong one this time. But those things don't come along easily.

It's nice when something this strong kind of falls into your lap. And the more you think about it and the more you work on it, the more possibilities it suggests. So, that's what happened this time. There has been a bit of serendipity involved as well.

The book Orbital by Samantha Harvey that just won the Booker Prize is about the same idea—the perspective of using space as a prism through which we observe ourselves. So, quite a lot of people are thinking about this right now.

I had the title and idea before I’d written a single note of music and that’s unusual for me. I think it’s one of the reasons why this album comes relatively hot on the heels of my last album, The Harmony Codex. I mean, 18 months is nothing these days. When you and I grew up, we expected a new record by our favorite artist every 12 months. But in the 21st century, that's no longer the case. Every three or four years is more the norm these days.

Eighteen months is a pretty quick turnaround, and that was a testament to the strength of the concept. The fact is, the concept also suggested a different approach, which was the long form. I hadn’t really done anything in the long form as a solo artist for a while. So, that was also a challenge in terms of deciding what I could do that would be different to what I’ve done in the long form before.

You’ve previously said writing a long-form piece of music can be easier than writing a concise pop song. Was that the case for The Overview?

I wouldn’t say it was easy, but it was easier. The first side of the album is 70-percent derived from a single 19-note sequence and bassline that goes with it. So, you’ll hear the same musical material interpreted like a classical form, along the lines of what Wagner would have called a leitmotif or what Stockhausen would have called a formula. It’s the idea of variations on a theme. So, you’re not having to reinvent the wheel with every piece of music you write. Essentially, you’ve established the harmonies and melodies you’re going to use, and now it’s a question of how many ways can you approach them. That’s what Mike Oldfield was very good at. He’d have two or three melodies that he’d explore in any number of different ways.

So, that was a little bit easier, because I wasn’t starting with a blank page every time I was going to write a piece of music. It was more a question of “Where does this movie or novel go next? I’ve established my characters and the scenario. Now, what’s going to happen to those characters?”

How familiar were you with Frank White’s book The Overview Effect ahead of adopting his thesis?

Not at all. I'd never heard of him until somebody said, “You know, there's this guy that came up with the term the overview effect.” Even the person that told me about it didn't know that it came from him originally. Regardless of what you call it, the overview effect has obviously, as a concept, been around since human beings have walked the Earth. It’s about that sense of awe and perspective you experience when you gaze into the Grand Canyon. I was in Chile recently in the Atacama Desert, and I had a similar kind of feeling there. We experience this at moments throughout our life in different contexts, when you realize the sheer magnitude and size of the universe, and our insignificance in relationship to it.

Photo: Joel del Tufo

Does your interest in the overview effect relate to a childhood fascination with space?

I think it comes from all our childhoods. Anybody from my generation remembers growing up with a fascination with space, including science fiction novels, space movies, television programs about space, and the night sky here in the UK. In the days before screens, we used to be out with our friends on warm summer evenings, gazing up at the sky and stars—back in the days when you could see the stars. When I grew up, you could still see a lot of stars. Nowadays, it’s hard to see any stars in the sky because there’s so much ambient light that comes from the places we live in, certainly in the towns and cities.

I also remember seeing movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind when I was young. There seemed to be generally more of an interest in space. It relates to how the album opens with this scene of meeting an alien on the moon and it saying, “Did you forget about us? You’re so busy looking down into your digital devices. You no longer look up or look around anymore. You don’t even look at your own planet.” And it is a stunningly beautiful planet, regardless of what we do to it.

Someone asked me the other day, “What you rather live on Mars?” My response was, “Mars is a planet of red dust. Earth is incredibly diverse, geographically, ecologically, and climate-wise. I think we’re missing out on a lot by focusing on our screens these days.”

Do you encourage your kids to put down their devices and look up at the sky?

All the time. It's a battle just to get them off their phones sometimes. It’s a very worrying trend in human evolution. I talked about this on The Future Bites and Fear of a Blank Planet. They both explore how human evolution has almost been thrown off its trajectory by digital devices and specifically, social media.

What about the fascist descent Western civilization has taken in recent years? How has that affected our sense of wonder as it relates to the cosmos?

There are many things that feed into this, and that’s another thing, along with AI. There’s the very existential issue of whether human beings still have a role to play. The prospect of AI and how it’s going to affect the human race—the whole Skynet thing—is a consideration. I haven’t experienced seeing the Earth from space, but my understanding is all those concerns melt away when you do. The Earth is a very beautiful place that has no human presence at all when you see it from far enough away. All the petty squabbles, including politicians, psychopaths, and sociopaths aren’t a concern from that view. But yeah, it’s a very concerning time we’re living through. It seems to get worse by the day.

You’re an atheist, but also someone who believes spirituality can co-exist within that perspective. Explore how that influenced The Overview.

I think it all comes down to the sheer numbers, which are almost inconceivably large to the point that you almost can't hold them in your mind. We’re talking about absurd distances and the whole temporal aspect as well. There are trillions of galaxies and trillions of planets in every galaxy.

If somebody from Andromeda, which is the nearest galaxy to us at 2.5 million light years away, were looking down at us now, would they be seeing you and me? No, they'd be seeing Stone Age man crawling out of caves and fashioning tools from bones.

The amount of time that light takes to reach our eye when we look up into the sky and see stars that are millions of light years away is mind-blowing. We're seeing them as they were millions of years ago. Given all of that, how can you possibly still hold the idea of God in your mind? I find it very hard to understand how someone could cling onto that idea.

I always try and look at these things in a very positive frame of mind. If you acknowledge to yourself there is no God, that life is just a blink of an eye, that the universe doesn't care about you, and that you are completely insignificant—a blip on a blip on a blip on a blip, that's actually a kind of beautiful thing. It enables you to say to yourself, “This gift of life is meaningless. So, if you don't enjoy it, it's very, very tragic.” I understand that not everyone is in a position to enjoy life, but that's the way I look at it.

Photo: Joel del Tufo

What continuum do you see from The Harmony Codex to The Overview?

Musically, it feels like the next logical step from The Harmony Codex. The Harmony Codex was me, perhaps for the first time, drawing on all the different aspects of my musical personality, without any degree of being self-conscious about it or trying too hard to think about what I was doing. I just allowed all these things to come in without being aware of any influence from the outside at all. I was just creating and bringing electronic, ambient, pop, progressive, metal, and jazz together, without being too analytical about it and second guessing what I was doing.

The Overview feels like a continuation of that approach, while embracing the long form and the idea of this as a novel rather than short stories. It’s a feature-length movie, rather than a bunch of short videos. It’s also a continuation of the same musical vocabulary and musical approach that I arrived at on The Harmony Codex. Lyrically, I think this album is looking at the same subject matter, but in a different way. If The Harmony Codex was a more earthbound way of looking at things, this is a more cosmic perspective.

This is probably the most-solo solo record I’ve made. I mapped out almost all of it, just playing by myself. I played all the bass, most of the guitar, and most of the keyboard parts myself. Right at the end, I brought in the solo voices, like Randy McStine, Adam Holzman, and Craig Blundell. But other than that, 80 percent of the album reflects me on kind of a roll.

The whole record came together in eight weeks. Once I had the concepts, it just flowed out of me, and then it was a question of creating and refining the mixes. I think the mix was the most complex part of the process. The actual creation of the compositions and recording sides were relatively painless. I wish it was always that way. It was quite an insular, solipsistic, or solitary experience for me.

When you’re in the zone, does the work become all-consuming?

No, not since I had a family. I have a strong work discipline in which I finish in time for dinner with the family every day. But that doesn't mean that the two ideas are mutually exclusive. I’d go to bed every night with a good idea of where I was going to pick up the next day.

One of the things that’s always a fear is the blank page. I sometimes think “Is this the last record I’m going to make?” Sometimes, I’m concerned there’s nothing more to say. I feel that with The Overview as well. I wonder “How can I follow this?” I’ve always managed to prove myself wrong.

Sometimes it has been painful to give birth to the next thing, and sometimes it’s surprisingly effortless. For The Overview, it veered more towards the latter. The concept was so compelling, and I had such a strong idea in my head straight away for how the first piece would unfold. I knew it would start with a single falsetto voice, lost in space. I don’t think I’ve ever started an album with a single voice before, so straight away that was different, and I was on a mission.

The idea was we’re going to meet this alien on the moor and it’s going to say to us, “What happened? Did you forget about us?” It was almost like I had a movie script in my head. The basic melody is kind of a shepard tone thing in that it constantly ascends in whole tones. The bass line ascends that way. I wanted it to capture the idea of careening ever further away from Earth into the cosmos. So, the melodic line itself had that built into it with a sense of constant motion. Everything fell into place very beautifully.

Many are focusing on the progressive rock element of The Overview, but I hear a great deal of other influences on it. Discuss bringing together so many genres under one umbrella.

Absolutely. What is progressive rock? I’m talking about the whole spectrum from Pink Floyd to Frank Zappa to Rush to Mogwai to Radiohead. What it all has in common is a will to move away from the standard pop form. They all have the idea that you can take the listener on a journey and surprise them. And very often that involves doing something over a longer period. It doesn’t always happen, but a lot of bands obviously veered towards 10-20-minute-long pieces. I think that’s the preeminent hallmark of what I think of as progressive rock. But as you hinted at, all my usual things are going on here. There’s a piece of electronic music on the record. There’s a piece of pure ambient music that finishes it. There are metal riffs. There are strong pop sensibilities. And there are moments of jazz. But I think the overall structure and sense of journey is something people would associate with the tradition of progressive rock.

Photo: Joel del Tufo

Describe the decision to work with Andy Partridge on "Objects Outlive Us.”

When I started making The Overview, I had just finished remixing XTC’s The Big Express. It has one of my favorite songs of all time, lyrically, called “The Everyday Story of Smalltown.” For me, Andy is the best at writing about ordinary people living ordinary lives in small British towns. I think of Andy and Ray Davies as the kings of that kind of observational songwriting. And that song was fresh in my mind when I decided I wanted “Objects Outlive Us” to have a song section that would contrast soap operas of everyday life—such as a husband cheating on his wife, a nurse working in a care home, and a young kid starting his first job in a car showroom—with the most massive cosmic phenomena happening, including stars and nebulas dying, and black holes imploding.

I thought about Andy because he writes those little soap operas better than anyone else I can think of. So, I rang him up and said, “I’ve got a challenge for you.” I explained the idea and he completely got it. Of course, he did a beautiful job.

Around the time of To the Bone, Andy and I wrote a song called “How Big the Space,” which is also a song that uses space metaphors. It was almost like a dry run for what we did on this record.

Partridge has suggested doing a whole album together with you. What are your thoughts about that idea?

I’d absolutely love to. Maybe him writing lyrics and me putting them to music, although he’s a brilliant melodicist. I get on really well with Andy. He’s someone who has fallen out with a lot of people, because he’s also a control freak. He knows exactly how he wants his songs to be born.

I realized early on in my career that I was essentially unproducible. Andy was previously in a situation in which major labels were putting him together with producers that rubbed him the wrong way. So, I understand completely why he was always feeling a sense of struggle to create the magical thing in the way he heard it in his head.

So, working with Andy is an obvious thing to do. I’ve also talked about doing something similar with Roland Orzabal from Tears For Fears. Maybe we’ll all get together and do it as a three-piece. That’d be amazing.

Randy McStine has emerged as an important presence live and on record for you. Describe the strengths he brings to the table.

What I love about Randy is that like me, he’s very curious about all sorts of music and absorbs all these different things. He’s very au fait with the classic rock tradition, and he’s also a brilliant sound designer.

I’ve worked with some of the best guitar players on the planet, but they weren’t always the most imaginative when it came to actual sound design. Sometimes, if you have a particular sound, it changes the way you play. And Randy completely understands that.

I always use Robin Guthrie from Cocteau Twins as an example. His sound is very much predicated on the fact that he would go through all these big echo and reverb pedals. He would play one note and that would set off this glorious cathedral of sound. So, he was into the idea of sound sculpting and exploring the sonic possibilities of guitar.

One of the things I enjoyed most about Randy’s playing on this record is his big solo at the end of the first side. I said to him, right up front, “We’re going to reinvent the notion of the classic rock guitar solo. We’re not going to do the ‘Comfortably Numb’ solo. I love that solo, but it’s been done and imitated may times. So, we’re going to have an extended solo with the same sense of drama, gravitas, and momentum, but we’re going to reinvent the melodic vocabulary and sound approach.” And that’s the sort of thing I can throw at Randy and know he’ll rise to the challenge. And that’s exactly what he delivered.

So, Randy’s extended solo at the end of the first side isn’t your traditional classic rock epic solo, but at the same time, it kind of is. So, that’s the beauty of working with someone like Randy. He’s also younger. He’s so curious about sound. He’s diverse and eclectic in his tastes. I can talk to him about anything from noise music to free jazz, yet he’s as au fait with Bill Nelson and Robert Fripp as he is with Steve Vai and David Gilmour. He’s also a brilliant technical player as well.

You’re 17 years into your solo career. Assess the distance traveled.

I love the fact that every album in the catalog is different. It's a phenomenal distance to have come. Albums like The Raven That Refused to Sing and The Future Bites couldn't be more different. But what I love about the whole catalog is it all sounds like me. And I think this is one thing I've come to understand and accept. One of the reasons why I think The Harmony Codex and The Overview feel liberating is that I can do whatever I want and it just ends up sounding like me. And I say that with the caveat that at some point that's probably been frustrating to me, but I embrace it now. So, I can make a pop record or a more conceptual rock record like this, and ultimately, it just sounds like it's part of my continuum.

That's exactly what I loved about all the artists that were big influences on me. It's one of those things you don't think you're aspiring to and then you almost don't realize it when you've arrived there without meaning to. I think in that sense, in my own little way, I dreamed one day I might create my own universe like David Bowie or Kate Bush—that notion of existing outside of genre. It almost takes a career to earn that right to say that about what you do. I feel like a lot of people are acknowledging that about me these days, which is great. That goes for even the people that maybe five years ago were still trying to put me in the prog-rock bucket. I think a lot of them have come around to the fact that I have a sound that’s in the tradition of progressive rock, but it’s also a lot more than that.

The journey is exhibit number one, and it includes the most recent albums with Bass Communion, No-Man, Porcupine Tree, and Storm Corrosion. Those are all pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.

What do you consider the highs and lows of your solo output?

Releasing The Future Bites during the COVID-19 pandemic was a low for me. It was a very difficult one to put across to the fanbase. It was essentially an electronic pop record from an artist people predominantly thought of as a rock artist. It was about marketing me as a kind of product. The whole concept was about removing the personality from promoting and releasing a record, and it was the last thing people wanted during the pandemic. They wanted to feel closer together, not alienated by a concept like The Future Bites. Artistically, I think of it as a very successful record, but in terms of promoting it, I struggled to get the ideas across from that record.

As for high points, my debut album Insurgentes is still one of my favorite records. It might still be my favorite record of all. Right now, I’m really proud of The Overview. I’m always proud of the last record I made. The Harmony Codex and The Overview feel to me like I’m reaching some kind of peak. But I’m very proud of all the records and they all have their place in the catalog.

Have you considered releasing anniversary editions of your earlier solo albums?

I could do that, but there have been deluxe editions all the way through, right from Insurgentes. So, that’s a problem. What more could I add to these albums? It’s a question of expanding the extant deluxe editions.

I’m in a position now where I could very easily stop making new music and just spend my whole life curating the back catalog, given how big it is. Thankfully, there’s always a demand for the back catalog to be reanimated. There’s no shortage of projects that could be done.

I’ve been talking about doing a Porcupine Tree live box set, because pretty much every show we played was recorded. But that would be a massive job to compile 12-15 shows that represent each phase of the band in the best possible light. It would be three-to-four months’ work. When am I going to do that? I think it’s something I will get to eventually, but it would be at a time when I take a step back from making new work. And as you see, that isn’t happening right now.

Photo: Joel del Tufo

Talk about the journey you captured on Bass Communion’s The Itself of Itself.

I hadn’t made a Bass Communion album for 12-13 years because I looked around the landscape of ambient and experimental music and thought, “There’s enough of it already. Do I really need to add to the mountain of it?” I kept coming back to the answer, “No, not really.”

And then after that period, I was approached by a couple of labels that said they’d love to do a Bass Communion album, and I told them how I felt. But I had amassed many pieces over that period. I listened to them all and felt there was enough in there that was unique that could provide a fresh or unique take on experimental, ambient music.
The Itself of Itself is quite a noisy album. I felt it was attractive to get away from the notion of nice ambient and do something a bit grittier and dirtier, using a lot of audio artifacts like tap hiss and vinyl crackle. I’ve been interested in those things for a while, but I wanted to focus on them to the point where one of the of the pieces is generated entirely from things like cassette hiss and hum. I thought it was interesting to find the beauty in ugliness. I wanted to find a balance between the two.

Does the world need the record? I don’t know, but I’m very proud of it anyway, and some people seem to appreciate it.

The other thing to say about the album is that it did feed into The Overview. There’s a lot of sound design and what I call R&D that went into Bass Communion that is very prevalent on The Overview. The first side ends with a piece of music that’s also on the last Bass Communion album. The atonal orchestral closing section of “Objects Outlive Us” is something you can hear in a different form on the Bass Communion record.

You’ve dabbled with AI, using it to assist with lyrics for your “December Skies” single from 2023. Things have shifted dramatically since, with the emergence of so-called AI artists and playlists focused on them. What are your thoughts on how things are evolving?

It has probably changed since last night, hasn’t it? That’s the point. It’s changing all the time. One of the reasons I wanted to explore it on “December Skies” is that it’s not going away. It’s only going to get stronger and more prevalent.

I think you can do one of two things as an artist. You can bury your head in the sand and pretend it doesn’t exist, or you can find a way to incorporate it into your process. It can be useful.

AI has already been with us for a long time, in the sense that there have been tools that have helped musicians make music, such as Auto-Tune, Melodyne, and Beat Detective. These are all forms of AI, the way I look at them. They make you sound better by applying software processes to your performance. There’s a sense that the new tools are just the next step in this trajectory.

Now, I understand things are very different in that we’re also talking about AI eliminating musicians from the process completely. And I think that will also happen. Generic music obeys a very strict set of parameters that doesn’t break the mold and can be made by AI. AI can generate generic techno music by the yard already. You could probably say the same for generic metal and country music.

So, this comes to my point, which is the silver lining of AI may be it forces musicians to focus on what makes them different. What are the quirks and things that AI could never dream up? I was talking about the passing of David Lynch with a friend the other day. His movies could never have been generated by AI. They are full of a kind of dream logic. I think that’s what musicians must now focus on.

The way The Overview unfolds is unpredictable. It puts elements together that one wouldn’t normally put together. In that way, it breaks with conventional parameters of making music, and that’s something AI could never come up with. So, maybe AI will force musicians, and creative people in general, to break out of the mold. The world doesn’t need any more generic music. Now, we have AI to make it for us.

That’s me trying to put a positive slant on it. When I did “December Skies,” I thought “How can I use this in a positive way?” And for that track, I used about one percent of what AI generated for it. Ninety-nine percent of what it generated was shit beyond belief. I, as a human being, still had to go through and pick out the bits that were good. So, maybe that’s another key point.

What does it say about a society in which there are segments completely disinterested in the artists, their stories, or the origins of the music, enabling AI-generated music to limitlessly permeate and prevail?

That is the doing of Spotify and to a lesser extent, social media. Essentially, what’s happened is we’ve gradually eroded the idea of the cult of personality. There are always exceptions. My kids love Billie Eilish, and she has a very strong personality, but generally speaking, I think kids don’t care about the artists anymore. That’s completely flipping it from when I was a kid. Then, it was all about the artist and the cult of personality. It was all about your loyalty to the artist. You’d wonder, “What are they going to do next? Are they going to live up to my expectations? What’s the new album going to be like?” And you didn’t know until you got the album home and listened to it. So, there was always that element of shock and surprise, and sometimes, disappointment. You’d come out on the other end and you’d love it, because you would force yourself to, because of your allegiance to the artist.

Now, why would you listen to something more than once if you didn’t like it the first time? That loyalty to the artist is gone and a lot of musicians now live and die based on whatever their next song or “Spotify drop” is. This is why we have a lot of artists who have one song with a billion streams and the rest of their catalog has just fallen off a cliff.

I think increasingly, we’re going to see more artists whose careers will be founded on the idea of a single breakout, viral hit. That’s sad to me, because I love the idea of a career trajectory and the cult of personality. I love the idea of an artist that will take you on a journey with them, confound your expectations, and surprise you by taking you places you didn’t think you wanted to go. But you go and you end up loving it anyway.

Unfortunately, the whole notion of social media, Spotify, and playlist culture has also meant the notions of an intro, instrumental breaks, or solos have disappeared from songs. It’s basically all about the lead vocal now. There’s no musical personality. There’s nowhere in modern pop in which the music is the focal point. It’s all geared towards the vocal. It’s a completely alternative way of thinking compared to how I grew up in which there are long passages of instrumental music, like on The Overview.

Is there a positive side to AI for you in terms of automating and enhancing remix work?

It hasn’t really helped me yet. The stem splitting software that can create stems from tracks where multitracks are missing is nowhere near good enough to be much use to me. A lot of music fans have seen the news stories about how the software was used for The Beatles albums, and now they think you can play any track into a piece of software and have it generate a pristine multitrack for you. That’s not true. Maybe Peter Jackson’s MAL software can do that, after rendering for weeks on a multi-billion-dollar computer system. But what’s out there now is very limited and full of nasty digital artifacts.

The other side of that coin is if that technology was available, maybe there would be no job for me as a remixer anymore. Anybody would be able to download an app onto their phone and create a multitrack from their favorite song and do their own mix. Why would you need me at that point? But there’s a long way to go with AI in terms of that.

Circling back to the beginning of our discussion on AI, I see it as an additional tool in my toolbox, but nothing more.

You’ve revisited some of your King Crimson and Yes surround mixes in recent years. What shifts in philosophy and technology drove that?

I think I’ve learned an awful lot over the 15 years or so I’ve been doing this. The primary reason to revisit those remixes is because they weren’t done in Atmos originally, but in stereo and 5.1. The music business has a big hard on for Atmos today, which is great for me. I love doing them and it’s an opportunity to revisit those mixes and tweak them.

It’s easy for fans to say, “Why have you remixed it again? Does that mean you didn’t do it properly in the first place?” But I think for King Crimson and Yes, I was a little bit less faithful to the original mixes the first time, and now I’m being more faithful to the original mixes. I’ve realized over the years that I prefer to be less revisionist. So, I go back and tweak the stereo mixes and 5.1 mixes to try and get them closer to the original mixes, and then, and only then, do I break out into Atmos.

Porcupine Tree: Richard Barbieri, Steven Wilson, and Gavin Harrison | Photo: Joel del Tufo

You have a couple of new Porcupine Tree songs in progress. What can you tell me about the new music and the future of the band?

It’s a bit too early to say, to be honest. Again, they’re different. I think a bit like my solo career, Porcupine Tree has reached a point where we don’t want to try to do anything except be ourselves. We don’t want to worry about what people expect of us—not that we ever did.

We’re enjoying the process. I love working with Gavin Harrison and Richard Barbieri. And the obvious thing for me now is that because the solo career is established, I’m much more able to be part of a democratic band in a way I wasn’t back in the day. I used to feel the need to control it more. Now, I don’t. In fact, I relish the idea of giving up control and perhaps not getting my own way all the time. I’m open to not necessarily doing things the way I would have done them myself.

I think Porcupine Tree going forward won’t be incredibly prolific. We may not tour again. But I think we’ll definitely make at least one more record. It could even be the next project, possibly. But that’s as much as I can say at the moment.

Discuss the importance of being a vegan to your life.

I see some people on social media like Moby and Billie Elish who are very proactive in sharing their veganism with fans and followers. I’ve always been slightly wary of being too preachy or holier than thou. Rather, I just want to suggest that my lifestyle is something perhaps other people should adopt. It’s better for the planet and it’s a damn sight better for the animal kingdom. So, I’ve become a little more bullish about it.

There’s a very strong vegan reference in the lyrics of the new record. It’s a brutal one. It doesn’t pull any punches. So, I’m becoming a little more forthright about my veganism.

Social media is full of people that are very belligerent when it comes to their way of life and ideals for living. I’m very wary of not being one of those people. It’s rather, suggesting alternatives and sharing them. If people ask me, I will tell them why I’m a vegan. I’ll share my experience.

Is your family also vegan?

Yes. My wife is vegan. My kids are both vegetarian and that’s through no influence from us. They’re vegetarian because their role models are. Billie Eilish, Serena Williams, Emma Watson, and Ariana Grande are all vegans. I didn’t have role models like that growing up. At least, I wasn’t aware of any. And now kids do. They have a lot of very cool role models, which is a big change since we were growing up. And that’s amazing.

So, we don’t have to force them. They chose to be vegetarian. They love animals. They understand the implications of eating meat. They understand the implications of the dairy industry, too. They may decide one day that they’re going to give that up, too.

The shift to veganism is one thing I look around at on Earth that I think is going in the right direction, rather than the wrong. Everything else looks like it’s going in the wrong direction. There are a lot more restaurants that offer vegan alternatives. There are a lot more wholly vegan and vegetarian restaurants all over the world. It has been amazing to see that happen over the last 10 years or so.

The excuses meat eaters or vegetarians have are getting less relevant by the day. By that I mean, those who say, “I could never eat that, because it doesn’t taste good or as good.” The alternatives and meat substitutes now barely taste any different. Okay, cheese still needs to be figured out, but even vegan cheeses are pretty good now. They’re almost there.

You’re 57, rapidly on your way to 60. What’s your perspective on approaching that milestone?

It’s really odd. I can barely believe I am 57, because I feel like I’m just starting to make good records, or just a bit longer than that. I’ve reflected many times on how many of the musicians we grew up with made most of their great work in their twenties. Something’s changed in that I think a lot of musicians are now really coming into their own in their forties, fifties, or even older. They’re making great music at a later stage of their life.

I feel like I’m one of those people. I feel like I’m doing my best work now. Most of the musicians I grew up admiring were coasting by the time they got to their mid-thirties. This holds true for a lot of musicians we think of from the classic rock tradition. They produce their great work in their twenties and then spend most of the rest of their career trading off that work.

I think there must be nothing worse than producing great work in your twenties and then wondering where all the magic disappeared to. I call it "Citizen Kane Syndrome." When Citizen Kane is your first movie, where do you go from there? It’s tough. It can destroy people.

The music I made in my twenties is not something I care to remember. I guess I was a bit of a slow starter. As I find myself careering to 60, I feel like I’m just getting to my peak, which is a good thing. I’m happy it’s that way.
 

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