Lasse Hoile
Steven Wilson: 'I grew up in the era when rock music still was an enigma.'
To uncompromising progressive-rock fans, Steven Wilson is a cult hero — a British singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer who’s worked with Marillion and Yes and remastered old King Crimson and Jethro Tull albums with tender loving care.
Wilson also has fronted numerous bands (most famously, Porcupine Tree), he’s been nominated for four Grammys, and his non-prog musical and engineering credits include Yoko Ono, Roxy Music, Simple Minds, Tears for Fears and XTC.
So why don’t more people know about Wilson? Because he likes it that way.
“I grew up in the era when rock music still was an enigma,” says Wilson, 47, tall, thin and bespectacled, calling from his home near London. “It had that sense of magic and romance, and you didn’t know much about the people who made the records. That’s one of the reasons rock music is in decline, because that magic is gone.”
Wilson attempts to keep that magic alive by maintaining that listeners don’t need to know too much about his personal life. His album covers avoid his image, unless it’s masked (as on 2008’s Insurgentes), silhouetted (2011’s Grace for Drowning) or sketched (2014’s Cover Version), and those enigmatic tendencies suit his sophisticated hybrid of rock, pop, jazz and electronic music.
That said, Wilson’s fourth solo album, Hand. Cannot. Erase., is his most revealing yet. The conceptual work is inspired by the story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a 38-year-old British woman who cut ties with her family and friends. When she died alone in her London one-bedroom apartment in 2003, her passing went unnoticed, and her corpse wasn’t discovered for more than two years.
“I completely understand how it’s possible to disappear whilst living in the heart of a metropolitan area,” Wilson says, explaining that much of the fictional main character in Hand. Cannot. Erase. is based on Vincent but is actually more like himself. “Eighty percent of her is me. I was able to put more of myself into that character, because on the surface, the connection isn’t obvious.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, Hand. Cannot. Erase. emerges as Wilson’s most accessible album, sustained by glorious melodies (the rousing “3 Years Older” and the bittersweet “Happy Returns”); sweeping, often sublime instrumental passages (the 13-and-half-minute “Ancestral”); and arguably Wilson’s least nebulous lyrics. “I was aware that this story could become depressing if I didn’t insert something with positive energy,” he says.
Released in February, the album garnered nearly unanimous praise from critics and reached No. 39 on the Billboard 200 chart in the United States while breaking the top 20 in four other countries. One German magazine declared it “The Wall for the Facebook generation.”
Building on that enthusiasm, Wilson has taken the new album on the road with a high-end multimedia show performed in quadrophonic sound at theaters in select North and South American cities. Wilson will make his first-ever stop in Madison on June 6 at the Barrymore Theatre.
He and his band plan to play most of Hand. Cannot. Erase., and they likely will dig into songs Wilson recorded with Porcupine Tree and other projects.
While his music can be considered part of the “progressive rock” genre, Wilson’s not enamored with that label. “I’m very much identified with that genre without having much interest in being a part of it,” says the guy who recently graced the cover of a UK magazine called PROG. “Progressive-rock fans like what I do because I don’t confine myself to one genre. But I’m not trying to be a progressive-rock musician, and I don’t believe that Pink Floyd, King Crimson and Yes were, either.”
