Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree on finding inspiration in progressive pop acts of the '80s

Steven Wilson was remixing Tears for Fears' "Songs from the Big Chair" and "The Seeds of Love" when he found himself missing the blend of ambition and pop sensibilities that had defined so many classic albums he loved growing up in the '80s.

"I did a Simple Minds record around the same time," Wilson says. "And I did Roxy Music’s first album, all of these records that could be described as arty pop or progressive pop. And I kind of fell in love with that notion all over again."

Just enjoy the music

One of the qualities he loves the most about those types of records, Wilson says, is that the artists wanted people to enjoy their music.

"They’re not trying to be difficult," he says. "They’re very accessible records with catchy choruses. But at the same time, there’s no sense of compromise in the ambition. And I really miss those kind of records."

Outside of hip-hop, Wilson says, "there's precious little these days which you could say occupies the area that bands like Talking Heads once occupied, or the Police, or an artist like Prince or even Michael Jackson, that idea of being able to make a really ambitious record that is at the same time unashamedly aiming for a mass audience."

Big mass audience + big ambition = Wilson's goal

So he set out to do just that on "To the Bone," his latest effort, and succeeded remarkably well.

"I guess in my own way," he says, "I felt like I wanted to try, from my perspective, to redress that balance."

Wilson checked in from the road to talk about the making of his latest album, which features a co-write with another '80s art-pop hero, XTC's Andy Partridge, and the inspiration he's found in remixing albums for personal heroes.

Q&A with Steven Wilson

Question: You’re here on a tour in support of “To the Bone.” Will you be focusing primarily on that album?

Answer: I’ve always been the sort of person who likes to look forward and live in the present. Certainly, I’m playing most of the new record. But there’s a substantial back catalog now and I tend to go back and pick songs at whim.

One advantage of not having been a particularly successful mainstream artist is that I don’t have that burden of having to play the hits.

While on the one hand it might be frustrating to not have any big hits, on the other hand it’s liberating in the sense that I can pretty much go in and cherry pick what I like from my catalog. I’m playing songs that go back as far as 20 years.

Q: Despite the lack of proper hits, you don’t think there are songs your fans would be more likely to request?

A: I don’t have that mentality. I think there are some songs that fans certainly would like to hear every show, but I need to be able to play the material that I feel excited to play, that my band enjoys playing, rather than that sense of going through the motions.

Maybe some fans come expecting to hear certain songs and may be disappointed they don’t hear those songs, but at the same time, they go away having seen a very spectacular and immersive three-hour show. So, you know, there’s always that.

Q: Do you find that the older songs that excite you enough to play tend to change from year to year as you change?

A: One of the things I try to do is to pick stuff from my catalog that resonates with the new material. There are certain topics that I’ve come back to time and again throughout my career. On “To the Bone,” there are certain subjects I have touched on before.

So that’s one thing is to try to find things that at least feel like they’re part of this particular cycle of music even if they’re 15 or 20 years old. I have a career that’s long enough that there’s always something that seems relevant to what I’m doing now.

Q: You mentioned the lyrical topics on this record. I was hoping you could touch on that.

A: Unusually for me, this album doesn’t have a kind of unifying theme. If there is a unifying theme, I would say it’s more general – “Isn’t the world a wreck?” The evidence is all around us. But I think there’s a lot of artists currently talking about that.

It’s one of those things it’s almost difficult not to address if you’re a songwriter. But more specifically I became quite interested in this idea of what is the definition of truth in 2018? Or 2016, when I was writing this. Is there such a thing as truth?

Isn’t the notion of truth always something that is unique to every single one of us? How can everyone have their own truth? Truth is an absolute. But truth gets filtered through our upbringing, our gender, race, religion, politics.

We all kind of arrive at our own definition of what reality and truth are. I became kind of fascinated with that idea, particularly in the era of fake news. How can we really approach the idea of truth?

Q: So you were already exploring this concept before Kellyanne Conway advanced the idea that there are alternative facts?

A: The whole notion of an alternative truth is a paradox. How can you have an alternative to truth?

The conclusion I came to is that most of what is called truth is actually perspective. We all arrive at our own perspective on the world and filter the truth through our agenda.

The clearest example of that is how there are tens of thousands of religions in the world and every single one of those religions believes itself to be the absolute and only truth. Now, that’s simply not possible.

And that’s a perfect example of how truth is really nothing of the kind. It’s pure perspective.

Even the notion of relationships, there are a couple of songs on the record that are duets. So they are essentially songs between a man and a woman who have completely different perspectives on the relationship.

Q: I’ve read that this album was partly inspired by the progressive pop records of the ‘80s – Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Tears for Fears.

Progressive pop is an interesting term. Some people like to draw a distinction between progressive music and pop. But a lot of the records you enjoy combine the two.

A: Unfortunately, the word progressive, it’s a bit of a minefield because everyone has their own agenda about what progressive means.

As I’m sure you’re aware, there’s some people who if you say progressive, they just think you’re talking about Genesis circa 1972. The word progressive, if you’re gonna use a synonym, I would say ambitious.

There was a time when pop music and rock music were really reaching for the stars and were not ashamed to be experimental. You think of a song like “Shout” by Tears for Fears. That’s a massive global No. 1 hit and yet the subject matter is very dark.

It’s about primal scream therapy. And I think that idea of being ambitious within the context of pop music is sorely lacking for me in a lot of what I hear in mainstream pop music these days.

Q: Do you have any thoughts on how we’ve arrived at this point where people are less likely to strive for those twin goals?

A: We live in the age of social media, of YouTube and streaming. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Radio stations are becoming more conscious about not losing their listeners.

Now you can’t even release a single that has what you might call an instrumental intro. You can’t release a single to radio which has what you might consider to be a solo. It has to be all about the lead vocal.

So it’s very hard without having that kind of opportunity to explore the texture of the music to approach the notion of progressive or ambitious pop music.

I can’t see that changing anytime soon because that’s unfortunately what the internet is doing to us. It’s making our attention spans shorter and shorter.

Q: You’ve mentioned a few of the artier pop acts from the ‘80s and you have a song on this album that you co-wrote with one of those acts. How did you come to this song with Andy Partridge and what was that experience like?

A: Andy’s someone I’ve become very good friends with through approaching the remixing of his catalog into surround sound. We’ve been working gradually through the XTC catalog. We’re doing about one album every year.

And they’re one of my Top 5 bands ever. I was a massive fan growing up. So it’s been an honor and a privilege to be able to work on their catalog. Andy’s a very hands-on guy so he’s been very much involved in that process. And he’s also a sweetheart.

He’s also not doing a massive amount in terms of creating new music of his own so it seemed like a very obvious thing because I had a subject that I particularly wanted to write about but I didn’t know necessarily how to go about it.

And I thought immediately of Andy. He’s one of my favorite songwriters of all time. It seemed like a no-brainer, as they say. And he did a fantastic job.

Q: You’ve mentioned a few of the projects that you’ve been involved in remixing and I was wondering if you feel like getting involved in that side of things has had an impact on you artistically, which it sounds like it definitely has.

A: Honestly, without wishing to be pretentious about it, if you are someone who writes music or movies or paints, whatever it is that you do, your input obviously has an impact on your output.

If I’m spending three or four weeks of my life deconstructing and reconstructing an XTC album or a Tears for Fears album, my head is full of that music.

If the next day or the next week or the next month, I go into my studio and start writing music of my own, I think it kind of almost happens without me being aware of it.

I mean, I did have this idea that I wanted in a way to make my equivalent of those kind of what you might call 'creative mainstream pop records.' So I guess that was a conscious thing.

But specifically referring to those records? Let’s just say I didn’t want to make a pastiche record. I wanted to do something that still sounded very much like one of my records.

Q: In deconstructing and reconstructing these records, do you find that you’ve learned things about other people’s approach to the creative process?

A: Absolutely. I’ve learned so much. Because one of the things I have to do when remixing these records is to be almost like a detective. How did they create that sound? Sometimes you go to the artist and they don’t know.

So I’m always having to experiment to recreate some of these sounds I’m hearing. And once I’ve found out how they did that, it becomes part of my toolbox of techniques that I can apply to my own music.

So my repertoire of tricks has expanded exponentially the more I work on these records.

Q: Was there a record that you were particularly excited to go back in and work on?

Probably the XTC catalog because they were one of my favorite bands growing up. The Tears For Fears records, too. One thing I can say is almost every record I’ve worked on I’m genuinely a fan of. I don’t take on anything that I’m not.

I feel in a way that if I’m going to do this I have to approach it from that perspective of being a fan of that record. I never want to take something on as just a job.

But I suppose the XTC project for me is the closest to my heart. Probably because I think they’re still comparatively underrated as a group. So it’s been wonderful to introduce my fans to this band that maybe they’re not familiar with.

There are a lot of people getting into XTC that didn’t know them before because I’ve been involved. That’s a wonderful feeling, to feel like I’m giving something back to one of the bands that inspired me.

Q: When you won three prizes at the Progressive Music Awards in 2015, BBC News said it amounted to you being crowned the King of Prog Rock. How did you feel about that?

A: Ummm. (hesitates). Kind of ambivalent really. Listen, it seems churlish to not be happy about any accolade. And of course, it’s very flattering. But at the same time, I don’t like this idea that somehow you can put me in this box and label it.

Ultimately you come back to this idea that Kate Bush makes Kate Bush music, David Bowie made David Bowie music and Prince made Prince music.

And I’d like to think that in my own way, I’ve earned the right to be seen as someone that exists outside this kind of easy generic classification. Maybe I’m kidding myself but that’s the way I feel.

I would like to think that at this stage in my career people listen to my music and it just seems like whatever I do is part of this body of work that you can only characterize as Steven Wilson music. So this King of Prog stuff, it’s flattering …

Q: It seems a bit limiting, really.

A: It’s completely limiting. I’m not denying that there’s a strong element of that musical vocabulary in my music. There is. But there’s also a lot of other things.

“To The Bone” is a good example of an album where you’ll hear pop, you’ll hear electronic music, you’ll hear ambient music, you’ll hear singer-songwriter music.

And I think what’s important is that you take all those elements and you filter them through your personality and hopefully what is a unique perspective.

I would feel very depressed if I felt that people got used to me making a particular type of music and just expected the same kind of tropes with every record. I like to do the unexpected.

Steven Wilson concert

When: 7:30 p.m. Monday, May 14.

Where: Celebrity Theatre, 440 N. 32nd St., Phoenix.

Admission: $50-$90.

Details: 602-267-1600, celebritytheatre.com.

READ MORE: