Steven Wilson’s Space Songs Part II: The Solo Years

Steven Wilson’s latest album, The Overview, is inspired by the emotional and sometimes spiritual experience that astronauts have described when they look back at the Earth from space, known as ‘The Overview Effect’. This article reflects on Wilson’s space songs from his previous solo work. For an analysis of the space songs he wrote for his band Porcupine Tree, click here.

Happy Returns (Hand. Cannot. Erase. 2015)

Hand. Cannot. Erase, Wilson’s fourth solo album, was released in 2015. The concept is based on the true story of the life of Joyce Carol Vincent and the grim circumstances of her death. Joyce was found in her London flat in January 2006. She had been dead for nearly three years. Her body was only discovered when bailiffs broke in to recover rent arrears.

As the protagonist for his album, Wilson created an isolated character, who is never named, loosely based on the story. For the Deluxe Edition of the album, he created a whole back story for his character. The book provides unique and realistic artefacts from the protagonist’s life, beautifully recreated, including a sketchbook, newspaper cuttings, a postcard, a birth certificate, a letter, a handwritten mixtape cover and her diary. The book also contains entries from her Blog. In her Blog, the protagonist mentions ‘the Visitors’ several times. It’s unclear whether they are real, or figments of her imagination. They may be aliens from outer space.

The words of the song, the penultimate track on the album, come from a letter the protagonist wrote to her brother, dated 22 December 2014, a physical copy of which can be found in the Deluxe Edition book, handwritten in blue ink on lined paper. In a blog dated the day before, she describes her relationship with him, ‘I barely know my brother. I know he has a wife and two children, but I have no idea if he’s happy or what is important to him.’ Poignantly, she refers to the annual Christmas card she has just received from him and the invitation to visit that she knows she won’t take up, ‘for some reason this time it made me cry.’ Perhaps this is because she now realises she will never see him again. 

The end of the album is ambiguous. The letter and the song both end with the words, ‘I’m feeling kind of drowsy now/So I’ll finish this tomorrow.’ This could be a note of hope, a suggestion that her life will continue the next day. Her words, ‘I bet you thought that I was dead but I’m still here’ contrast with Joyce Carol Vincent’s tragic death. But on Twitter Wilson said, ‘Just like Joyce wrapping Christmas presents on the evening she died, things left unfinished.’  

So what happens next? In contrast with the words in the letter, in her final blog dated 28 February 2015 her last words are, ‘I told them I’m ready, it’s time to leave now.’ Presumably, ‘they’ are the visitors, and she is leaving with them. The photos in the blog show strange lights in the sky, like those from an alien spacecraft. As Wilson said cryptically on Twitter, ‘You can make up your own mind where the character goes.’ 

Wilson’s wordless vocalising at the start is haunting. Although the song is seen entirely from the protagonist’s point of view – it’s her letter – Wilson sings the words rather than using a female vocalist. The song begins with a simple, singer-songwriter feel which matches the thoughtful approach of the letter. Wilson sings like a contemporary folk singer, his voice close-miked and honest, with more wordless vocalising at the end of the vocal section, ‘doo doo doo…’ The song becomes subtly epic, as instruments surround Wilson’s voice, ending with a lovely but relatively subdued guitar solo from Guthrie Govan. The contrast between the relatively epic instrumentation and the raw solo voice continues the feeling of ambiguity; are we witnessing the tragic ending of a human story, or a new beginning? The song ends with an unfinished feel, like the letter itself. 

‘Ascendant Here On…’ (Hand. Cannot. Erase. 2015)

On Twitter, Wilson said ‘Ascendant Here On…’ is an almost anagram of Hand Cannot Erase.’ He’s right – there’s a missing letter ‘A’ but the rest of the letters are all used. It’s strange to end the album with an instrumental, but as Wilson said, ‘It’s a reprise of the theme from Happy Returns arranged for piano and the boy choristers.’ The title of this instrumental seems to refer to the protagonist ascending into another dimension, or it could be a metaphor for a new, happier state (death?) into which she is passing. Cleverly, Wilson doesn’t divide his listeners.

Those who like stories of aliens from space can follow that story, and those who prefer poetic metaphors will also be satisfied. Some may like to enjoy the ambiguity and hold both options in their mind at the same time. 

Nowhere Now (To the Bone, 2017)

The song’s title echoes the Porcupine Tree song Arriving Somewhere But Not Here (Deadwing, 2005). 

We begin the song ‘six feet underground’; humankind has lost its way, so we might as well be dead and buried. On Earth (or under it) we are moving backwards at the speed of sound, wasting our lives, failing to learn. Love no longer has any meaning. This contrasts with the chorus in which the protagonist (a single individual rather than the collective ‘we’ of the verses) floats in space feeling a ‘rush’ of the love that no longer exists on Earth. Looking down at Planet Earth, it now appears ‘luminous’, the same joyous adjective that is used to describe the moon in the song Permanating, which appears later on the album.

‘Here above the clouds, I am free of all the crowds
And I float above the stars, and I feel the rush of love
Looking down at Earth, it is luminous observed‘

Ken Grady of Upside Adelaide perceptively suggested to Wilson that there was a possible link between this song and David Bowie’s Space Oddity (1969), which Wilson played live as a tribute to Bowie, who died in January 2016. Wilson reacted initially with slight surprise to Grady’s suggestion, but soon accepted that he was right, as both songs share ‘a sense of someone drifting high above the Earth, and seeing it as a beautiful thing far removed from all the politics and terrorism.’ 

The video was filmed by Lasse Hoile at the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, a collection of over 60 radio telescopes in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Earlier in 2025, Wilson visited the site where the European Southern Observatory is building the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope).

The Harmony Codex (The Harmony Codex, 2023)

The album is based on Wilson’s short story, The Harmony Codex, which was published in his 2022 book Limited Edition of One. The story describes a visit made by Harmony (a 12-year-old girl) and her brother Jamie (16) to visit their father in the tower block where he works in Whitechapel, East London. They ascend the skyscraper to the 38th floor, but before they can meet their father there’s an explosion. They try to escape the building and get trapped on an apparently endless staircase.  At the end of the story, Jamie is in space, looking back down on the Earth towards London, but also across endless stars and galaxies.

On the album’s title track, Wilson takes Jamie’s thoughts, which are seen from a third-person point of view in the story, and puts them in the first person, spoken on the track by his wife, Rotem,

‘It seems I’m miles above the surface of the Earth
I can see across the whole of London and beyond
Lights from a thousand cities…
A trillion stars in a billion galaxies‘

The theme of the enormity of space is picked up again by Rotem’s spoken words at the beginning of the title track of The Overview, which describe the relative sizes of objects in space,

‘Size beyond one megametre
Ten to the power of six
Ganymede, Callisto
Wolf 359…’

Them No. 1 (Tape Experiments 1985/1986, 2010)

This begins with an electronic recreation of the sound of a helicopter or an alien spaceship (perhaps referred to by the word ‘Them’ in the title). With its eerie, slow synths, it could be the theme tune to a horror film. It’s given a touch of the avant-garde with ‘random radio transmissions.’ 

Collecting Space (Insurgentes Deluxe Edition, 2008)

A lovely instrumental, featuring koto playing from Michiyo Yagi, who also plays on the title track of Insurgentes, and lively bass-playing from Tony Levin. The melody at about 1:00 is a pre-echo of the opening of the verse melody of Dignity on Porcupine Tree’s 2022 album Closure/Continuation. The guitar solos, probably played on a PRS (Paul Reed Smith) guitar, have a warm, honeyed sound. 

Space Oddity (B side to Happiness III single, 2016)

Like most people of his generation (he was born in 1967), Wilson grew up listening to David Bowie. He first heard Bowie’s music in 1973, when he was given a copy of Bowie’s novelty single The Laughing Gnome. Bowie died on Sunday 10 January 2016, at the age of 69, just after the release of his final album Blackstar. Wilson and the rest of the world woke up the following morning to hear the sad news.

It felt very surreal to wake up this morning into a world that no longer has David Bowie in it. I can’t imagine there is any rock or pop musician on earth that hasn’t been influenced by Bowie, either directly or indirectly, and I’m no exception.

Steven Wilson, 11th January 2016

Bowie wrote several songs on a space theme, including Life on Mars, Starman, Ashes to Ashes, Moonage Daydream and Hallo Spaceboy. As a tribute to Bowie, Steven Wilson performed Space Oddity at the Hammersmith Apollo on 27 January 2016. Wilson was joined on stage by Ninet Tayeb, who duetted with him on the vocals. It’s a simple, heartfelt version of one of the greatest space songs ever. The live recording was released as the B-side of the 7-inch single Happiness III on 14 October 2016.

How Big the Space (Single, 2018)

This song was released as a 12-inch single for Record Store Day on 21 April 2018. In 2017, Wilson told Anil Prasad of Innerviews.org it didn’t fit the To The Bone album because it’s a ‘60s psychedelic-sounding song.’ The lyrics are by Andy Partridge of the English rock band XTC, who also wrote the words for the title track of To The Bone.

Partridge contributed lyrics to Objects Outlive Us on The Overview, which contrast the mundane nature of life here on Earth with what is happening in space, such as,

And there, in an ordinary street
A car isn’t where it would normally be
The driver in tears, ’bout his payment arrears
Still, nobody hears whеn a sun disappears
In a galaxy afar

The lyrics of How Big the Space are a beautifully poetic description of the end of a relationship, superbly contrasting the mundane, ‘I think I’ll change the locks’, with the existential, using a cleverly-worked space metaphor,

How big the space inside an empty heart
How brave the face when orbits pull apart
How black the hole where universes fade
How vast the bed where both of us once laid 

Sources

Twitter (now X)
Ken Grady, INTERVIEW: STEVEN WILSON, PROGRESSIVE ROCK’S BIGGEST STAR TALKS ABOUT TRUTH, TOURING AND ‘TO THE BONE’ (Upside Adelaide September 2018)  
Anil Prasad, Perceptions of Reality (Innerviews.org 2017) 

For Part I of Steven Wilson’s Space Songs: The Procupine Tree Years, click here