Holmes Steven Wilson On Track

Insurgentes - To The Bone
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-575-5
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

Reihe: On Track

'Probably the most successful British musician most people have never heard of.'
The Telegraph

A self-taught musician, songwriter and producer, Steven Wilson grew up wanting to be a pop star. His early band No-Man signed to a major label, but instead he gained a dedicated following and chart success with Porcupine Tree, who eventually sold out London's Royal Albert Hall in 2010 before a r revival after 12 years in 2022. Porcupine Tree are the subject of Nick Holmes' first book in this series.
This book, the first of two volumes on Wilson, tackles the first ten years of his solo career, from his debut Insurgentes in 2008, up until 2017's bold and hugely successful To The Bone, via the award-winning Hand. Cannot. Erase. Wilson became known as the 'King Of Prog' since some of these albums feature long-form songs, virtuosic musicianship and complex concepts. But he has always enjoyed surprising his fans, and this part of his solo career also includes jazz, indie rock, pop and electronic music. Whatever the genre, his music shares strong melodies, profound lyrics, thoughtful concepts and high production values. This book is a forensic and illuminating analysis of Wilson's first five solo albums, associated EPs and bonus tracks.

Nick Holmes has been passionate about music ever since he joined his local church choir at the age of six. He has an English Degree from Oxford University and now works for BBC Radio making programmes for Radio 3 and 4, mostly about music. He was a semi-professional classical baritone for some years, and has also played guitar in various rock bands with his brother. The first live concert he went to was Tangerine Dream at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, and he is lucky enough to have seen Pink Floyd, David Bowie and Prince live. He blogs at nick-holmes-music.com. He lives in Stockport, UK

Autoren/Hrsg.

Holmes, Nick

Leseproben

Chapter 2

Grace For Drowning (2011)

Personnel:

Steven Wilson: vocals, keys, guitars, autoharp, bass guitar, percussion, piano, gong, glockenspiel, programming, harmonium

Jordan Rudess: piano

Theo Travis: saxophone, clarinet, flute

Ben Castle: clarinet on ‘Sectarian’

Nick Beggs: Chapman stick, bass guitar

Tony Levin: bass guitar

Steve Hackett: guitar on ‘Remainder The Black Dog’

Pat Mastelotto: electronic drums on ‘No Part Of Me’ and ‘Index’

Trey Gunn: guitar and bass on ‘No Part Of Me’

Markus Reuter: guitar on ‘No Part Of Me’

Mike Outram: guitar on ‘Raider II’

London Session Orchestra: strings

Nic France: drums

Synergy Vocals: choir

Recorded at No Man’s Land, Hemel Hempstead, Koolworld, Luton, Angel Studios, Islington, between January 2010 and June 2011

Steven Wilson: production, mixing

Dave Stewart: string and choir arrangements

Release date: September 2011

Highest chart placings: UK: 34, US: 85

Running time: 83:01

Record label: Kscope

Current edition: Kscope

Grammy-nominated for Best Surround Sound Album 2012: Steven Wilson: engineer/producer, Paschal Byrne: mastering engineer

Dedication: ‘to my father, Michael George Wilson – 1938 – 2011, without whom ...’

Grace For Drowning is Steven Wilson’s second solo album, released in 2011. The meaning of the album’s unusual title is mysterious. ‘Grace’ could refer to the lighthouse keeper’s daughter, Grace Darling. In 1838, she became a national hero when she and her father saved nine crew members from the shipwrecked Forfarshire from drowning, near the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland.

Wilson has spoken very rarely about the title. In August 2011, he told Stephen Humphries of PopMatters that it came from descriptions of people who had suffered near-death experiences when they almost drowned. They all said that ‘they got to a point where they stopped struggling, where they reached a point of calm, of grace.’ An example of this, quoted in an article by Christof Koch in Scientific American in June 2020, is the ‘calm feeling of the most perfect tranquillity’ experienced by Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, who nearly drowned in 1791. These may be spiritual experiences, but Koch, taking a rigorous scientific approach, concludes that the reason why the brain experiences loss of oxygen as ‘positive and blissful rather than as panic-inducing remains mysterious.’

Wilson rather poignantly told Humphries that he saw this state of grace as a ‘metaphor for my life.’ He was no longer worried about success: ‘I’d still like to share my music with more people. But I’m not stressed about it.’ Wilson had been thinking deeply about this for a long time. On Porcupine Tree’s Stupid Dream (1999), Wilson contrasts his teenage dream of becoming a rock star with the harsh reality of being a musician when music can become a commodity rather than art. In 2000, during the sessions for Lightbulb Sun, he recorded the gorgeous song ‘Buying New Soul’ (released on Recordings in 2001) in which he movingly describes his fight with the music industry – ‘I still rage and wage my little war’ – but ends up feeling he has sold out, being forced to ‘buy a new soul’ every year. And one of the themes of the 1996 Porcupine Tree album Signify is the attempt to make something significant out of one’s life.

By 2011, he told Humphries he’d reached a kind of equilibrium, an acceptance of his position, ‘I’m making the best music I’ve ever made now because I feel totally liberated from trying to please anyone.’ But elsewhere, he expressed his frustration at being ignored by the mainstream media. He told Graham Reid of Elsewhere Magazine in September 2011 that ‘one of the big newspapers here [in England] wouldn’t review my album because I was too under the radar … this is partly their ignorance but also a wilful laziness.’

In 2012, he told Anil Prasad of Innerviews his ambition was to ‘eclipse everything that I had done before, including Porcupine Tree’, particularly in his live shows. He wanted to avoid the impression that his solo work was a side project. He didn’t want his work to be ‘stripped down ‘Steven Wilson with his piano and acoustic guitar’ efforts.’

A specific limitation of Porcupine Tree, as he told Steven Rosen of Ultimate-Guitar.com, was that ‘I know for a fact in Porcupine Tree, one of the guys hates jazz.’ He told Grant Moon of Prog magazine in September 2011 that it’s easy to forget the role jazz played in the birth of prog rock: ‘It was when pop musicians started to incorporate their love of jazz and classical that progressive emerged.’ He referred to Bill Bruford, who played with Yes and King Crimson but was a jazz drummer at heart, and to King Crimson co-founders Michael Giles and Ian McDonald, who ‘both grew up listening to jazz and chose to form a rock ’n’ roll band [with Robert Fripp, Greg Lake, and Peter Sinfield].’

In April 2012, Wilson told Thodoris of Hit Channel (Greece) that Grace For Drowning was the first time he had incorporated jazz elements into his songwriting: ‘I think on this album, I’m not interested only in jazz; it has all sides of my musical taste … the only thing actually I hadn’t done before is writing jazz.’ As he told Rosen, he brought in jazz musicians because he didn’t feel able to improvise: ‘That’s something that’s been lacking for me in a lot of my work over the last ten years ...’

Wilson chose jazz drummer Nic France as he wanted ‘a very different approach to drumming than a rock drummer would take.’ He also invited two other jazz musicians – flautist and saxophonist Theo Travis and guitarist Mike Outram, who had both played on Insurgentes. He told Prasad that he recorded fairly elaborate demos for the album, as was his usual practice, but this time, he ‘allowed a lot more space for accidents … the soloists had the opportunity to express themselves without the restrictions of tight arrangements.’ The most obvious example of this freedom is ‘Raider II’, which includes Theo Travis’ long solos. He felt that these passages were ‘spiritual’, in the sense that they came ‘directly from the heart or soul.’

Wilson also changed his approach to recording. He was of the generation who grew up recording into a computer, meticulously overdubbing each part, asking the drummer to play to a click track so that the tempo didn’t drift. When he was asked to remix classic albums by King Crimson and Jethro Tull in 5.1 surround sound, he was amazed to discover that those bands and others from the 1960s and 1970s recorded in a completely different way. He told Rosen that by going back to the original master tapes, he learned how the records were made, by ‘going into the studio with a band and just setting up and playing as a group.’ He adopted this approach on several of the tracks on Grace For Drowning, with bass, guitar, drums, sax and flute all played live in the studio. This didn’t work on all the tracks – for instance, ‘Deform To Form A Star’ was too complicated. But tracks like ‘Sectarian’, ‘Remainder The Black Dog’ and big parts of the epic ‘Raider II’ were ‘cut live in the studio.’ Later, he told Prasad that the live versions of the songs were even better: ‘No matter how pleased you are with what you do in the studio ... a great group of musicians can prove you wrong time and time again. And they did prove me wrong, every night.’

At just over 80 minutes, the album is perhaps just too long to fit on a single CD. Originally, CDs were designed to be no more than 74 minutes, but their length has crept up slightly over the years. Roger Trenwith of DPRP said in September 2011 that Wilson had made a virtue of having to split the album into two, giving the listener a break and ‘a chance to indulge in a metaphorical half-time orange.’ The two CDs have their own names, taken from tracks on each CD. Volume I is ‘Deform To Form A Star’ and Volume II is ‘Like Dust I Have Cleared From My Eye’.

The cover depicts Wilson seen from behind in silhouette against the setting sun. The image has a vivid orange glow like an oil painting, although it is, in fact, a photograph taken by Lasse Hoile. It bears a striking resemblance to a painting by the German 19th-century Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich called Woman Before The Rising Sun (also known as Woman Before The Setting Sun), which shows a woman from behind silhouetted against a bright orange sky. The painting is in the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany. Wilson told Thodoris that Hoile used an analogue camera – which may explain the painterly look – and took the photo ‘at the very last moments of the daylight … that time the sun is getting very red and orange … it was like twilight.’

Vol 1 – Deform To Form A Star

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