Reflections: Steven Wilson

photo: Hajo Mueller

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“Sometimes it’s frustrating to me that I can’t disguise myself better,” Steven Wilson says with a sort of contented, jovial shrug. Not that he hasn’t tried: Since starting his professional music career in the early ‘90s, the British songwriter has shape-shifted through seemingly every permutation of electric music—the expansive art-rock of Blackfield, the dreamy trip-hop of No-Man, the Krautrock-styled psych of Incredible Expanding Mindfuck, the ambient drone of Continuum and Bass Communion, the far-flung prog of Porcupine Tree and, most relevant to our conversation, his wildly zig-zagging solo career. 

Still, despite the shifting scenery, he ultimately can’t escape the musical tics that chase him. “It could be the way I construct a melody, the way I construct a song, certain chord voicings—a lot of these things I’m not always aware of but they are instantly recognizable to other people,” he adds with a smile, as his expertly named dog, Bowie, makes a cameo on his lap. “If I do something that I think is really different,” he says, “I’ll play it for my friends and family, and they will say, ‘It just sounds like you.’” 

Instead of running from that reality, he leaned into it with his seventh solo LP, The Harmony Codex. As opposed to a full-on, David Bowie-like reinvention— trying, as Wilson says, to “pay lip service to a certain genre or era of music,” like with the ‘70s prog nostalgia of 2013’s The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories) or the ‘80s-leaning art-pop of 2017’s To the Bone— he made a fascinating mess, summarizing basically every style he’s ever attempted. 

“I think part of that comes from having the confidence after all these years to say, ‘You know what? You can put a 10-minute ambient song on the same album as a four-minute electronic pop track and an acoustic guitar track on the same album as a piece of jazzprog—because, ultimately, they all sound like you.’”

The origins of The Harmony Codex date back to the early COVID-19 lockdown, when Wilson was forced to postpone the release of what would eventually become his 2021 album, The Future Bites, by over seven months. Stuck in limbo and unable to promote the project or tour behind those more electronic-leaning tracks, he decided—in a very unexpected move—to make some new music in the meantime. 

Well, new and sort of new. Wilson wound up reigniting Porcupine Tree for 2022’s Closure/Continuation, that band’s first album since 2009— diving back into sessions that had been sitting on the digital shelf.

“Seventy percent of that album was written between 2012 and 2014 but just put on hold while we all went on to do other things,” Wilson says. “That, in a sense, was more of a recording project than a writing project at that point.”

And he started gathering ideas for what became The Harmony Codex—chiseling out 10 ideas and experimenting with a wide array of players, including keyboardist Adam Holzman, Chapman Stick player Nick Beggs and woodwind wiz Theo Travis, through fileswapping—a strange process for a producer used to guiding his collaborators in person. 

“It became a very experimental process because I couldn’t be there with them while they were recording,” he says. “I’m using that word in the true sense, where you allow yourself to be surprised, to go out of your comfort zone, to almost give creative responsibility to someone else. There was a lot of sending out tracks, not knowing necessarily what I was going to get back.”

The end product reflects that expansive tinkering—the long process of sorting through the numerous possible overdubs and constructing the “right architecture” for each piece. The songs unfold, as Wilson says, like a series of “cinematic” vignettes: the glassy, spacious digi-pop of “Economies of Scale,” the melancholy acoustic rock of “What Life Brings,” the expansive prog epicness of “Impossible Tightrope,” the unnerving trip-hop atmosphere of “Actual Brutal Facts.” The shifts are thrilling, but the biggest surprise could be the level of autobiography in the sleek “Time Is Running Out,” which draws on the perspective shift from having a new wife and stepchildren in his 50s. 

“I find myself in a strange place in my life,” Wilson says. “I got married four years ago, having never been married before. I now have two stepchildren. For the first time, I have dependents. It definitely makes a big difference in the way you look at life. I’m 55 now, so I’m very conscious that I’m clearly well into the second half of my life. Quite literally, there is a song titled ‘Time Is Running Out’—I’m very much aware of that. One of the central themes of the record, which comes from the short story the album is based on, is the idea of the infinite staircase—the idea that, very often, it’s not about arriving; it’s about the journey.”

Wilson’s music, similarly, also takes this staircase shape, infinitely twisting and turning. 

“This album is, in a way, continuing a pattern I’ve established throughout my career—always doing something different, always confronting the expectations of the audience,” he says. “A lot of people have asked me: ‘What were you listening to when you made this record? What were your influences?’ And for the first time, I can actually say, ‘Nothing.’ I was influenced by myself.”