Steven Wilson has been carving out a wide-ranging career for over 35 years, finding fame as a solo artist and as the founder of eclectic rock band Porcupine Tree. His new album, The Overview, came out in March. For The Needle Drop, Tyler Roland interviewed the genre-blending musician in the midst of his current tour. The pair discussed The Overview, film scoring, Taylor Swift, his abandoned project with Porcupine Tree keyboardist Richard Barbieri, and more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tyler @ TND: You kick off these shows by playing the new record front to back – two very long, 20-minute pieces ("Objects Outlive Us" and "The Overview"). It’s not your first foray into long-form music. On a future tour, would you ever consider playing individual sections from either or both of them?

Steven Wilson: I suppose I haven't got that far in my thinking process yet. I think of [The Overview] as analogous with watching a movie or reading a book. You wouldn't normally watch pieces of a movie, or read individual chapters of a book by starting in the middle – but, having said that, we did release a couple of extracts from the album online. I don't really like that. The idea of having to take out a single, or a focus track, or whatever it is they call it these days, is always a little bit uncomfortable to me. People will always make judgments based on fifteen seconds of music.

The beautiful thing about conceptual rock music, which is something it has in common with classical music, is the ability to change from one minute to another. Would I consider playing pieces out of context? "I don't know" is the simple answer – but for all the aforementioned reasons, I would probably resist. 

If you could score any film, what would you choose? 

I can only look at my favorite films, so maybe something like Under the Skin, that Jonathan Glazer film. But the soundtrack in that is amazing! Any of David Lynch's movies would have been incredible to score. Stanley Kubrick, I always talk about Stanley Kubrick. Of course, 2001 is a great example. Here's a movie which is basically sci-fi, it's about space, it's about the future. So what does he score the movie with? 300-year-old classical music! "We’ve got this futuristic movie, let's go back to Strauss!"

I love that almost-counterintuitive way of thinking about how to score movies. Jonny Greenwood is very good at that, too. I don't know if you’ve seen the new P.T. Anderson film [One Battle After Another] yet, but finding almost the last thing you would expect to be scoring a scene – I think that's testament to the relationship between the director and the musician. 

You've taken on more of a bass-playing role on your last couple of projects, and you’ve said before that you play the bass like a guitar player. There are some moments on the new record, like in “Objects: Meanwhile”, where it goes into a crunchy “bass lead,” for lack of a better term. When you're writing bass for your music, do you focus on only the “flashy” parts, and the low-end stuff is more secondary? Or do you treat all of the bass parts with the same thought and energy as you would the rest of the record? 

I grew up in a house where my dad played Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, conceptual rock music. My mum loved disco music – things like Donna Summer [and] the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. I grew up hearing bass players like Bernard Edwards from Chic, the ultimate groovemeister. I love that idea of being in a pocket and playing a groove. Yeah, [for all of the bass parts] I apply equal importance.

If you go back through my catalog, you'll see there are lots and lots of tracks which are based on a fairly repetitive bass groove. Perhaps less so in my solo work, but certainly lots of Porcupine Tree stuff was based on repetitive bass grooves. I'm definitely being honest when I say I approach the bass like a guitar player, in the sense that I'm very happy to also play stuff right at the top of the neck, melodies and things like that. But I also love a great groove. I grew up with disco, and krautrock music, and industrial music, where it was all about the repetitive bass line, the kind of hypnotic states you can put people in through the use of repetition. I've never been a fan of the more technical side of music making. I like atmosphere, I like texture, and I like groove, and I think that’s fundamental to a lot of my music.

Why is “King Ghost” the only song from The Future Bites that you've ever played live? 

There are three albums that I have made since I was last touring: The Future Bites first, The Harmony Codex was the second, and obviously The Overview is the most recent. So we're playing all of that. The Harmony Codex is the second most recent, so we're playing a lot of that. The Future Bites – you're absolutely right. I've asked myself the same question. In fact, people in my crew are always saying, “why don't you play [TFB lead single] ‘Personal Shopper’?”

There is another reason: my current band was very much assembled with the intention of playing The Overview. I was planning a big tour around The Future Bites, which obviously got canceled because of COVID. I had put together a very different configuration of musicians to play that, because it is a more electronic record. The current band lends itself more to things like The Overview and The Harmony Codex than it does to the more electronic landscapes of The Future Bites. We could probably knuckle down and figure out how to play some [TFB] tracks, but I think my first answer was probably the closest to the truth: it's the most distant in terms of albums that I never got around to playing, so we focus on the two most recent records.

Insurgentes, your debut solo record, came out in the midst of the initial Porcupine Tree run, between Fear of a Blank Planet (2007) and The Incident (2009). Closure/Continuation [the Porcupine Tree reunion album] came out in between The Future Bites (2021) and The Harmony Codex (2023). I want to know if you personally draw any parallels between these two “fresh restarts.” 

I hadn’t really thought about it. I think the initial inspiration for my solo career was the feeling that Porcupine Tree had arrived at our quintessential sound, for better and worse. It was no coincidence that, after [The Incident], we kind of went on hiatus. Insurgentes was me saying “but I've got all these other things I want to do. All these other musical genres I love, and all these other musical approaches I love, and I want to do that.”

Now, Closure/Continuation almost comes from the opposite direction, which is: now I'm doing all these different things – wouldn't it be nice to go back to work with these guys on this archetype that we created, and see what fresh approach we could come up with?

Given how they are watershed moments in the catalog, I see them as "odd twins," for lack of a better term.

I can see why you say that. There's a sense of there being no expectation around [both albums]. People weren’t expecting Porcupine Tree to make another record. People had no precedent for what my solo record might or might not be. So that's exciting. I love the idea that every album is like a fresh journey, and a fresh approach. 

Since she just put out a new record – for The Future Bites Sessions, you did a Taylor Swift cover [of Folklore song “The Last Great American Dynasty”], and I want to know if you're considering any more cover songs down the road.

I have a very odd relationship to the idea of covers. A lot of covers I hear, I don't see the point, because they're basically very faithful. I had this series called Cover Version, where I did songs that were, firstly, not songs people would expect me to do, and secondly, I tried to completely reinvent them.

Doing the Taylor thing was a little bit of me having fun, but I also happen to think that song is incredible. There are a few tracks on [Folklore] that I would hold up as being amongst the best songs anyone's written in the 21st century.

They're kind of an anomaly for her, those two albums.

They are. I still admire what she does, but [with Folklore and Evermore] she seemed to be reaching for something a little bit more, for want of a better word, grown-up. I really love that album, Folklore, in particular. So I genuinely love the song, but I also knew it would probably upset some of the progressive rock fundamentalists.

I don't have any plans to do any covers. I think, sometimes, ideas present themselves to me.

Last year, you put out a record under your ambient side project Bass Communion [The Itself of Itself]. Porcupine Tree keyboardist Richard Barbieri is a sound designer – have you ever considered doing a Bass Communion thing with him? 

We did do a few electronic tracks together; they never came out. We had a project called Mother Sky, which we named after the Can song. We did some songs, and, do you know what, I should go back and listen to them. I can't remember too much about them, except they were more rhythmic, I think, than the Bass Communion stuff. I always enjoy working with Richard.

I think the reason why I haven't done a Bass Communion project with Richard is because Bass Communion is exploring the aspects of “me” that he does. I work with Richard in the capacity of “guitar player.” So [in Porcupine Tree] I'm the guitar player, and I'm kind of leaving all the sound design stuff to him. I become, in a way, what he is in Porcupine Tree. It's my chance to play that role [in Bass Communion]. We did do something years and years ago, where we were both mucking about with the synth. I'm going to say that was probably late ‘90s.

What is the status of No-Ma [the art pop project with Tim Bowness]? Are there any plans for a follow-up to Love You to Bits (2019)? 

“Love You to Bits” was a song that we originally started in the ‘90s. Love You to Bits was kind of like finishing off something we'd already started. So we haven't really sat down and generated any new work for the best part of 20 years [since 2008’s Schoolyard Ghosts; Wilson didn't mention that the album's other track, "Love You to Pieces", had elements written around 2013]. My problem these days is just having enough hours in the day to do everything I want to do.

Tim has a very successful solo career now, and I always help him with that. Would we make music together as No-Man again? I hope so. I really hope so. Tim is an absolute joy to work with. No plans, but let's continue to keep our fingers crossed it will happen one day. 

Steven Wilson's tour for The Overview has a few more South American dates before heading to India and beyond. Get tickets here.

10/17 Sao Paulo, BR @ Tokio Marine Hall
10/19 Santiago, CL @ Movistar
11/03 Mumbai, IN @ Nesco Center
11/05 Delhi, IN @ Gymkhana Club
11/07 Kolkata, IN @ Aquatica
11/09 Bengaluru, IN @ Bhartiya Mall
11/12 Perth, AUS @ Astor Theatre
11/13 Adelaide, AUS @ Her Majesty's Theatre
11/15 Melbourne, AUS @ Forum Theatre
11/16 Sydney, AUS @ ICC Darling Harbor
11/17 Brisbane, AUS @ QPAC Concert Hall