Sometimes when a band crests and then disappears for a while, their legend only grows. My Chemical Romance is one famous, recent example; they certainly proved that with their ongoing blockbuster tour. And Porcupine Tree is comparable in their own way, as the English band's recent return has generated a tremendous buzz among their acolytes.
As chronicled in his 2022 memoir Limited Edition of One, Porcupine Tree's founding guitarist, lead vocalist and songwriter Steven Wilson, became, for various reasons, dissatisfied with the band around 2010 — just as they headlined London's Royal Albert Hall. After his solo work took precedence, the group went on hiatus in 2012 and the members moved on to other projects.
Wilson's already-eclectic solo career then blossomed with albums like 2017's To The Bone and 2021's The Future Bites. This was in addition to immersive remixing forays for classic acts like King Crimson, Roxy Music, Def Leppard, Tears For Fears, and Jethro Tull. All the while, most of Porcupine Tree's members secretly and slowly chipped away at new material for the band.
What ultimately resurrected Porcupine Tree? The pandemic deserves some credit. With tours canceled, Wilson and drummer Gavin Harrison began working and jamming again on new and archived songs, with Wilson handling guitar and bass. Keyboardist Richard Barbieri also rejoined the fold. Then, at last, excited by their renewed synergy and songwriting, the group finished Closure/Continuation, their first new album since 2009's The Incident.
The title plays into the tentative current state of the band; they're back, but for how long? And while it bears little resemblance to their metal-leaning 2000s work, it's still an adventurous collection rich with superlative playing, wide-ranging dynamics and enigmatic lyrics. And Closure/Continuation has been well-received on both sides of the Atlantic, hitting No. 1 in both Germany (Offizielle Deutsche Charts) and the Netherlands (Dutch Charts). (Only Harry Styles blocked it from hitting No. 1 on the U.K.'s Official Albums Chart.)
Just prior to the commencement of Porcupine Tree's 10-date North American tour this past Saturday in Toronto, Steven Wilson sat down for a video chat with GRAMMY.com to discuss the creative rebirth that fueled Closure/Continuation, the absence of bassist Colin Edwin and the most personal song on the album.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Some of the latest songs are from after The Incident, and some are newer. How much did the older songs change during this process?
They really didn't. For example, "Chimera's Wreck" — probably the first song we wrote on the record — is pretty much exactly the way we recorded it back in 2012.
Even to the point that the first four minutes is the original live take of myself and Gavin playing together — the acoustic guitar and the drum part, with no click, no timecode. It speeds up and slows down, and it's lovely because of that.
Obviously, I refined the lyrics a little bit over the years. I'm only speaking for myself here — I can't speak for Richard and Gavin — but it spans a period of time in which my musical tastes and preferences have shifted massively.
In my solo career, I've been through more alternative-sounding records, more conventional, classic progressive-rock records, and more pop sensibilities. I've been through all of those things, and it's all reflected on Closure/Continuation. The very last track we did was "Walk The Plank," on which I play no guitar. It's myself and Richard essentially working with electronic sounds.
I think it is interesting to note that the album has spanned that shift in my musical interests, starting off with a track like "Chimera's Wreck," which is more conventionally classic rock/progressive rock, through to a song like "Walk The Plank," which is much more electronic and streamlined. And, one might say, much more relevant and contemporary.
In that sense, we probably could never and would never make another record quite like this. You can't take 12 years to make a record every time. I know there are some artists that do, but we're not going to do that. So, this is a unique set of parameters — a unique situation for us to have made a record like this, which spans this period of time.
I was watching the video for "Rats Return." One could say it's a commentary on dictatorships and totalitarianism, and at the same time, there's this other layer where it seems to be about the tyranny of narcissism and obsession with popularity.
Yeah, but it's also about the idea that politics now is as much a social-media game as anything else.
Whatever you think about Donald Trump — personally, I f—ing hate the guy like most sane people. But one of the things I think he understands — whether he's conscious of it or not — is that the truth is irrelevant now and the power of social media is almost everything.
I suppose that process began when you go back to the age of Ronald Reagan, who was an ex-actor. It started this idea that celebrity was going to become much more important in the world of politics, and I think Trump is the ultimate example of that in action.
Truth becomes irrelevant. All that matters is maintaining some kind of celebrity profile or social-media profile. People are more impressed by that than they are by truth, and they're more impressed by that than they are by policies — things that will actually help them live their lives.
Trump is a great example of someone that can be caught out in a lie, and it almost doesn't matter. It doesn't change the passion and the support that he has from his people one iota. He's demonstrably peddling lies, and yet people still choose to believe them.
Now, going deeper than that, there's a whole parallel there with the whole world of organized religion — but I don't want to get into that! So, the video was about the idea of turning the military and politicians into social-media celebrities.
Going back to a lot of Porcupine Tree's 2000s work, a lot of your songs are about how we get dehumanized by our obsession with technology or addiction to technology. I recall the character in "Fear of a Blank Planet" who declared "Xbox is a god to me."
When I was promoting The Future Bites, I think a lot of people took "Personal Shopper" as a very negative song, and actually I was at pains to correct them saying, "No, I love shopping. This is almost like a love letter to consumerism." But of course, it's never as simple as that. There are pros and cons to everything. I am not a purist.
I think there are amazing things about the modern world — the digital world. There are horrendous things about it, too. But that's true also of the analog world, so there's nothing black and white about it at all. There are amazing things about social media. But of course, there is a very, very sinister, insidious side as well.
I've always been the kind of person that's tended to dwell on the latter. If I sense something potentially dark about the world, I'll probably write a song about that rather than the good stuff.
People had this image of me which was based purely on two things: the music and the lyrics, [plus] the official publicity material. In promo shots and things, I would never smile. Cool rock stars don't smile in publicity shots. So, the idea that I was this very morose, rather depressed individual was based on the fact that I wouldn't smile in publicity shots, and the music and lyrics.
I think one of the nice things about social media — and being able to have clips on YouTube — is that people have been able to see I'm almost the antithesis of that.
"Personal Shopper" had vocal harmonies that could be on an R&B record — and then you had Elton John. But you didn't have him singing; you had him do spoken word. So, if you're going to do something poppy, you don't do it in a typical way. Some people aren't going to know that it's Elton John.
The caveat to all of this is I am a quite willful person. I understand that I'm very good at shooting myself in the foot, and so everything I do that maybe has the potential to reach a major [commercial peak], there'll always be something that will stop it.
I embrace that about my career, and I think that one of the frustrations has always been that what I do doesn't seem to me to be particularly difficult music to enjoy. Yet a lot of people have never had the opportunity to hear it and decide whether they like it or not. So, that's always frustrating.
But [in] the music world we live in, it doesn't get any easier. It gets harder and harder and harder and harder now to get anything that is even remotely edgy or remotely uncategorizable through.
I think [in] writing the book [Limited Edition of One], I wanted to explore my motivations for making music. I wanted to explore my journey discovering music, and discovering music which was also outside of the mainstream because essentially that's been my search, always to find these things on the periphery.
That's been my fascination. And, I suppose, in my own way, I've ended up being one of those artists myself.
You founded Porcupine Tree in 1987. Richard's been there since 1993. Colin didn't come back for this one, and he had been in the band since '93 as well. Was it awkward because you had to say to him, "Well, I already did the bass parts"? How does it feel now with this core trio now as opposed to the quartet?
We have two new guest musicians in the band who are just off-the scale-brilliant.
I'm not suggesting that Colin isn't also brilliant, but we had to find a bass player that could play the way I played bass on the album, which clearly isn't Colin. We have this incredible bass player called Nate Navarro. It's exciting to have new musicians that are on such an incredible level. It's a little strange.
I think it's probably going to be stranger for the fans than it is for us. I would argue the creative core of the band always was the three of us anyway — no disrespect to Colin.
But I think that the creative core was always Gavin's interest in rhythmic complexity and polyrhythms, my songwriting, and Richard's approach to sound design. Those three things are the basis of the DNA — certainly the modern, post-In Absentia sound of Porcupine Tree.
So to us, I think it's less of a shock than it might be to some of the fans. But we'll see. We might get some real hard times from the fans on this tour.
Do you think you'd work with Colin again?
Yeah, Colin's great. But Colin has a very, very specific way of playing the bass; it's not the way I play the bass. When I pick up a bass, I play it like a guitar, so I'm doing all this stuff up the top of the neck and playing melodies and playing really aggressively.
Colin is more Bill Laswell: deep, dubby. His favorite music is reggae and dub. So, clearly it's not the project for Colin, but Colin is great. When it comes to that approach to bass playing, Colin is incredible. So, I certainly wouldn't rule it out.
What's the most personal song on the new album for you?
There's nothing autobiographical, but there are songs on the record that I think resonate with the age I'm at now. The song "Dignity" dovetails with what we've been talking about, because it's literally a song about finding a homeless person on the street. But that person used to be somebody, and there's this whole kind of backstory.
Maybe they were a big, famous pop star. Maybe they were a big success in the city. There's this whole backstory that goes with this person that you don't give a second glance to, and all the pathos that goes along with that.
That fascinates me. Unfulfilled, unrealized potential — this idea that life is a very fleeting gift and the tragedy of not making the most of that gift. I'm not religious; I don't believe there's anything else after this life. I think this is it. We've got this opportunity to do something incredible with this freak gift that we've been given of life — whether we've got 50 years, 70 years, 90, whatever it is we've got.
I think the human emotion that appeals to me the most of all is this idea of regret: not having made the choices that you feel you should have made. What a really, really terrible thing to have got to a certain point in your life, and realize you made the wrong choice somewhere.
It might have been that you had the opportunity to be with the person you were supposed to be with in romantic terms, and you didn't take the opportunity. What a terrible thing to have to acknowledge to yourself. Or, you went down the wrong career path and ended up being in a career you hated for 40 years.
To me, that's the most tragic thing to have to hear: that you spent 40 years of your life doing something you hated because of a choice you made, for what you thought was the right reason at the time, and now you realize it wasn't.
I think the one thing I can say about my life that I'm happy about is that I did make the right choice being a musician. Although I haven't become quite the success I imagined I might be when I was a kid and fell in love with the idea of this magical thing called music. I would have loved to have been Elton John or Prince — notwithstanding that I have none of the talent of those people.
But I think, ultimately, I have to look back at my life and say to myself, "You spent most of your life doing exactly what you wanted, you haven't compromised, and you've had a pretty good career and a pretty good life out of that."
And it's so tragic to me to hear the other side of the coin. People that perhaps can't say that — that have ended up in careers or marriages or in situations that they've never been happy in. That's the most tragic reflection of the human condition of all to me, and I come back to it time and time and time again in different ways. "Dignity" is the latest incarnation of that kind of song.
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