Branching Out

In a sense, artists have a duty to be as selfish and arrogant about the way they make their music as they can,” declares Porcupine Tree vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Steven Wilson. “I don’t believe Picasso made his paintings for anybody else, and that’s the way I think a true artist should be, someone who creates only for himself but in the process manages accidentally to cross over and appeal to and touch a large number of people.”

Although Wilson has not yet achieved Picasso-like standing in his chosen field — he’s beloved by a loyal cult, yet little known by the rest of the populace — he otherwise epitomizes this philosophy. Throughout a thoroughly unconventional career that dates back to the late ’80s, he’s spread his musical seeds via widely varied combos such as Blackfield, No-Man, Bass Communion and IEM (also known as Incredible Expanding Mindfuck) with little regard for fashion. Nevertheless, Porcupine Tree, a project he launched as something between a lark and a gag, is signed to a major U.S. label, Lava/Atlantic, and its new album, Deadwing, fits snugly within the confines of the neo-prog movement that’s currently so hot.

If Wilson was caught off guard by the way he’s temporarily synched up with the zeitgeist, he’s censoring his reaction. “None of us feel our music is willfully obscure and uncommercial,” he says. “In some respects, it’s very accessible. It’s not difficult to enjoy a Porcupine Tree record if you give it a little bit of a chance.”

That’s certainly true of Deadwing, despite a pedigree that hints at heavy sledding. The disc shares its moniker with a Wilson screenplay that centers on David, a character he describes as being “extremely damaged in a psychological way. Over a series of flashbacks and playing with time, we learn that at some point in his childhood, his destiny has taken a wrong turn, and in the process of unraveling this life that he never should have led, he’s visited by various people from his past. You’re not necessarily aware that you’re looking at ghosts, but it becomes clearer at the end — the surprise ending, which I’m not about to give away.” In other words, Deadwing is a concept album, albeit one that’s inspired by the script, instead of being yoked to it. According to Wilson, “There’s a lot of information in the screenplay that’s not represented at all in the album and vice versa — so they’re kind of loosely connected. They’re certainly not trying to tell the same story, or even approach the same subject in the same way.”

Fortunately, listeners don’t need to know the ins and outs of this tale to enjoy the Deadwing disc, on which Wilson, keyboardist Richard Barbieri, bassist Colin Edwin and drummer Gavin Harrison embrace stylistic choices that were, until recently, very much out of vogue. “Shallow,” the first single, is undeniably radio-ready, thanks to its steely sheen and lyrics that mate romantic discord (“Don’t use your gender to drive a stake through my soul”) with techno-alienation (“It’s easier to talk to my PC”). But the title cut features machine-tooled riffing, elongated guitar glissandos, rock-operatic harmonies and an arrangement that shifts and tumbles over nearly ten pyrotechnical minutes. The results simultaneously recall past head-music masters and more contemporary acts such as Opeth, a frequently fascinating death-metal act whose 2001 magnum opus, Blackwater Park, was produced by Wilson.

“It’s been very nice to see a lot of kids coming to the shows who’ve obviously discovered us through the Opeth connection,” Wilson allows. “And you can say this about people who listen to metal: They tend to appreciate live musicians and people who can play their instruments. So Porcupine Tree is almost like the next progression for them.”

This turn of events is almost as unexpected as the quartet’s origins. Wilson, who was born in London circa the late ’60s, formed No-Man in 1986 with the assistance of cohorts Tim Bowness and Ben Coleman. But despite its willful eclecticism, No-Man couldn’t entirely satisfy Wilson’s every musical urge — so, in his free time, he and pal Malcolm Stock concocted a fictional group they dubbed, yes, Porcupine Tree.

“We created this sort of insane history, and then I was going to sit down and methodically rerecord all of the albums that we had written about,” Wilson recalls. “In the end, I ran out of steam. But before then, I came up with music that was deliberately a pastiche of progressive ’60s and ’70s bands.” In the process of doing so, however, “I failed, and accidentally created something a bit more unique. For one thing, I was forced to use drum machines and drum samples that I had at home, which gave it more of a contemporary feel than I had perhaps intended. It actually sounded like a product of its era, which was kind of accidental, but a good thing in the long run.”

Cassettes of this material, issued as Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm and The Nostalgia Factory, caused a stir among scenesters, putting Wilson in a fix. “I realized that there were actually a lot of people who wanted that kind of music, but I wasn’t interested in really becoming a nostalgia factory,” he emphasizes. “So I decided to make it more of a serious, contemporary concern.” Something similar happened with IEM, an instrumental outfit with a Kraut-rock bent that was initially nothing more than a name in the imaginary Porcupine Tree saga, making it twice removed from reality. Like No-Man and Bass Communion, an experimental/ambient collective, IEM is “still extant,” Wilson says. “I can go back to them at any point if the mood takes me.” The same is true of Wilson’s latest sideline, Blackfield, a comparatively pop-oriented pairing with Israeli singer-songwriter Aviv Geffen. Blackfield, the duo’s enjoyable debut CD, was released in February on the Koch imprint, and it has done so well internationally that Wilson says a sequel is already in the works.

Even so, Porcupine Tree remains his highest-profile endeavor. Beginning in 1993, the band put out nine full-lengths on assorted independent labels before joining the Lava/Atlantic family for 2002’s In Absentia, which went on to sell well over 100,000 copies. To Wilson, these numbers make perfect sense. “I was forever hearing people say, ŒI didn’t know that bands like yours existed anymore,'” he notes. “For the last ten or fifteen years, we’ve been completely dominated by MTV culture — stuff that’s very shallow, very empty and doesn’t have a great deal of soul to it as regards giving people some kind of more enriching life experience. So we knew there were a lot of people out there who would like what we do. The demographic isn’t easy to define, but there are millions of people who fit into it and want something of substance.”

Wilson would like to meet these needs, both at cinemas (no one’s bitten on the Deadwing script yet) and concert venues. Not that he’s willing to compromise his vision for popular acclaim.

“There’s a paradox at work,” he says. “The more songwriters try to engineer their music to appeal to a lot of other people, the more likely they are to miss out, because people won’t buy what they’re selling. But the more self-indulgent a songwriter is, the more likely he is to connect. That’s why I think the most important thing, ultimately, is to make music to please yourself.”