In the early years Steven Wilson’s band, Porcupine Tree, were often compared to Pink Floyd and Wilson himself admitted the importance of that musical influence. He later distanced himself from the Floyd, moving towards a more distinctive sound. It is not surprising that he came to be regarded as a new hero in the genre of Progressive Rock, even though again he has often tried to distance himself from that label.
Wilson grew up not only listening to TheDark Side of the Moon but also to Love to Love You Baby by Donna Summer, produced by disco and electronic dance music pioneer Giorgio Moroder. So the fact that his latest album The Future Bitesโข heavily features electronics and very little electric guitar should not come as a surprise, although some of his fans have been upset by the change of direction.
Wilson announced a while ago that he would be working with producer David Kosten, who makes dance music and electronica under the name Faultline, which suggested that another change in direction was coming. Wilson doesn’t like standing still or repeating himself musically, which means that over his very long and varied career he has written music which could be defined as…psychedelia, space rock, trip-hop, jazz fusion, progressive rock, progressive metal, pop, ambient, art rock, alternative rock, pop rock, drone music and trance. What unites Wilson’s music in all these different styles is his searching musical intelligence, a gift for melody, the willingness to innovate even at the risk of alienating some of his fans, and the ability to write songs that sound sophisticated yet familiar. Like the film director Stanley Kubrick, one of Wilson’s cultural heroes, he likes each piece of work to be different from anything else he has produced.
What is rather surprising is that Wilson admitted in a recent interview to promote the new album that he is no longer inspired by the guitar,
I got to the point where I would sit with a guitar on my knee and I didn’t know what else I could do…I’ve done everything with this thing.
He has spent the last few years collecting vintage keyboards, which he installed in his new studio. Most of the songs on the new album are built around these keyboards, rather than around the guitars that feature heavily in most of his music to date.
Steven Wilson’s new studio (Twitter)
Wilson’s new album which feels very contemporary from a musical point of view; previous solo albums have sometimes been consciously nostalgic, such as the superb 2013 album The Raven That Refused to Sing which referenced the peak of 1970s progressive rock story-telling, and To the Bone (2017) which was influenced by 1980s art rock. His current abandonment of the guitar as his main instrument perhaps reflects its demise in the 21st century – and certainly the demise of the guitar band. It will be interesting to see whether the increase in guitar sales during lockdown will lead to new guitar bands being formed.
But if Wilson has moved on from the guitar at present, one of the themes of the album has troubled him for many years: the way that the human brain has evolved in the internet era. He first explored the possible negative effect of the technology 25 years ago, with Porcupine Tree, in the song ‘Every Home is Wired’ on the album Signify and on Fear of a Blank Planet in 2007.
The other major theme of the album is consumerism, the urge to buy vastly overpriced ‘designer’ products. He set up a website selling products branded with the TFBโข logo, mostly items which would usually be inexpensive. The site was a well-executed concept, a sarcastic joke, although some of the products were genuinely for sale such as volcanic ash soap. The branded toilet rolls suddenly took on an unexpected and highly ironic resonance during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic when there were shortages of toilet paper in the UK and elsewhere.
The opening pair of tracks Unself and Selfare a bitter commentary on self-identity in the age of social media. Unself, which is only a minute long, starts with a gently-strummed acoustic guitar, sounding distant as it’s drenched in echo, perhaps a nostalgic nod to Wilson’s past as a guitarist. The instruments fall away and his solo voice is brought sharply into focus with the words ‘the self can only love itself’, leading to the industrial funk and pulsating sequencers of Self, a fierce critique of the effects of social media,
Self sees a billion stars But still can only self-regard
Richard Barbieri, former keyboard player with Japan and Porcupine Tree provides atmospheric soundscapes on the track.
King Ghost is one of the most beautiful songs Wilson has ever written, with poetic lyrics, haunting synthesiser lines, and soaring falsetto vocals which create an atmosphere of sparkling luminosity perfectly matched by Jess Cope in the official video.
12 Things I Forgot shows that one of the things that Wilson has not forgotten is how to write simple, catchy pop songs just as he did with Porcupine Tree (‘Lazarus’ from Deadwing and ‘Trains’ from In Absentia), on his solo albums (‘Pariah’ from To the Bone) and with Blackfield (pick almost any song).
Eminent Sleaze is crisp, dystopian, industrial funk, similar in style to the equally satisfying ‘Song of I’ from his last album To the Bone. The song features very few electronic instruments. It includes cameos from Nick Beggs on bass and Chapman Stick, Adam Holzman on keyboards, and strings from the London Session Orchestra. Yet the production cleverly combines these elements to create an electronic sound. The central character, as shown in the official video, encapsulates Wilsonโs fears that social media and technology companies have more power now than politicians; the title of the song is a play on the term รฉminence grise, the hidden power behind politicians.
Politicians donโt escape Wilsonโs searching gaze either. In Man of the People he adopts the point of view of a member of the family of a politician who has been damaged by a scandal, the long-suffering partner who stands beside them with a fixed smile for the cameras. Itโs a gentle, poignant song which shows some degree of sympathy for the victims who stay with the disgraced politician even though they know that the love and trust they receive are fake. The song includes some of the most powerful lines on the album,
Ambition froze me out
Like a demonic winter.
The centre-piece of the album, both in terms of concept and length, is Personal Shopper. Itโs a powerful satire, urging us to buy things we donโt need and canโt afford, to โhave now, pay in another lifeโ. It has the melancholy disco feel of Steven’s most recent album with no-man, love you to bits.
The middle section of the track includes a list of pointless items which the modern consumer can buy, read out by perhaps the most famous shopper of all, Sir Elton John. The list of possible items to buy has been approved by Sir Elton himself โ for instance he rejected a reference to โmobile phone skinsโ as he doesnโt own mobile phone himself so wouldnโt buy a cover for it. The list includes obvious examples like ‘designer trainers’ and ‘monogrammed luggage’, but also ‘deluxe edition box sets’. Ironically, Wilson has released a deluxe edition of this album, limited to 5000. This is done with great self-awareness of course. Wilson has also admitted that he does enjoy shopping, including buying box setsโฆ
In Follower the target is social media again, and in particular social media influencers. Itโs the most direct song on the album, and the one that sounds most like a conventional rock song, showing Wilsonโs anger at the influencers with their needy cry โOh follow me, follow meโ. These lines show Wilsonโs view of the vitriol that the internet (or more accurately the people that use it) can generate.
Future biting
Millions spiting
Wilson has often ended his albums, both as a solo artist and with Porcupine Tree, with a transcendent ballad. For instance in 2002 he ended In Absentia, one of Porcupine Tree’s heaviest and most disturbing albums, with the beautiful solo ballad ‘Collapse the Light Into Earth’ (recently revisited in one his Future Bites Sessions recorded in lockdown). After the fury and satire of much of the rest of the album Count of Unease plays a similar role. Wilson plays all the instruments here, except for the ‘drone’ credited to co-producer David Kosten. It’s a lovely end to the album.
On The Future Bites, Wilson seems to have found a new musical language as he stares the future in the face. As is always the case with his work, the album is superbly recorded and produced. Where it differs from much of his previous work is that he has eliminated the signs of musical virtuosity that were so spectacularly and thrillingly present before, and has created music that serves his message as directly and compellingly as possible. Does that mean his music is no longer ‘progressive’? Perhaps in the narrow sense of the musical genre that is Prog Rock, this album marks a departure, but in terms of Steven’s musical journey, this album shows that he is continuing to make progress, constantly moving forward into the future.
This review was originally published at 7.16 pm on 29 January 2021, and republished with minor amendments on 12 January 2026 at 09.53 am to mark the fifth anniversary of the album’s release.
The Cover of The Overview by Steven Wilson, designed by Hajo Mรผller
His Eighth Solo Album
The Overview is Steven Wilsonโs eighth solo album, released on 14 March 2025. It charted at number three in the UK, the fourth of Wilsonโs albums (as a solo artist or with his band Porcupine Tree) in a row to reach the UK top five. On his website, Wilson described the album as โa Kubrickian journey into the darkness of outer space.โ
Steven Wilson. Image credit: Kevin Westerberg
The Overview Effect
The album takes its title from the Overview Effect, a term coined by author and space philosopher Frank White in his book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution to describe the cognitive shift experienced by astronauts looking back on the Earth from space.
“[The Overview Effect] is the experience of seeing first hand the reality that the Earth is in space, a tiny, fragile ball of life, โhanging in the void,โ shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. The experience often transforms astronautsโ perspective on the planet and humanityโs place in the universe. Some common aspects of it are a feeling of awe, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.”
Frank White
The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (First Edition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987)
White, who interviewed astronauts about their experiences, wrote that during the initial stages of the Space Program, it was thought that, โAll the astronauts have religious or spiritual experiences and that they all had their lives fundamentally changed… The reality is far more complex than that.โ He quoted the astronaut Don Lind, who said that having spoken to many other astronauts, he concluded that space travel would intensify previously held religious convictions but wouldnโt make someone religious.
The Blue Marble. The Earth Seen from Apollo 17. Source: Wikimedia Commons
One of the most strikingly negative reactions to travelling into space, mentioned by Wilson in several interviews, was โ ironically โ from Captain Kirk, the actor William Shatner. In his 2022 book, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder, he wrote that when he was in space, he experienced profound sadness and grief. Eventually, this became a profound feeling of hope, inspiring him to say that we should โrededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us.โ
“There was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing… Everything I had expected to see was wrong… The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.“
Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria Books, 2022)
William Shatner as Captain Kirk. Source: NBC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wilson coined his own phrase for the Overview Effect, โcosmic vertigoโ, meaning a sense of the fragility of the Earth, and the insignificance of our lives in relation to the vastness of the cosmos. The existential struggle to make something of our lives, to make them signify something, is a recurring theme in Wilsonโs lyrics, going back to Signify (Porcupine Tree, 1996). He told Dave Everley of Prog that ‘Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo.โ As an atheist, he said that to give life meaning, humankind had invented religion.
โThe Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesnโt matter, and itโs a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.โ
Steven Wilson
Wilsonโs solution to the apparent futility and insignificance of our lives, and of the Earth in relation to the vastness of the universe, is not to embrace religion or misery. He told Musicwaves magazine that, โThe Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesnโt matter, and itโs a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.โ
Frank White wrote, ‘ The impact of the [Overview] Effect is not limited to space travellers alone.โ Wilson described the profound awe and sense of insignificance he experienced when he visited the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in the Atacama Desert, Chile, in early 2025. At the album launch at IMAX in London in February 2025, a photo of Wilson standing next to the telescope was exhibited on the vast screen, and Wilson was a tiny orange dot wearing a hi-vis jacket. Reflecting on the Overview Effect led him to consider our insignificance and how it shapes our sense of perspective. During the roundtable discussion at the album launch, he said he could have called the album ‘Perspective … but itโs not as good a title as The Overview.’
The Gap Between Releases
The gap between the release of Wilsonโs previous album, The Harmony Codex, in September 2023 and the release of The Overview was just under 18 months, a relatively short period considering the gap between his previous solo albums was around two to three years. He told Paul Sinclair of Super Deluxe Edition that there was a pragmatic reason for this. The Harmony Codex was his first album after COVID, and he felt that the previous album, The Future Bites, had been โvery divisive amongst my fans.โ He didn’t book a tour supporting The Harmony Codex because he wasnโt sure how people would react to the album. By the time he realised that the album had gone down well, it was too late to book a tour for 2024. He decided that in the meantime, he might as well make another record.
The Concept
While he was looking for a concept, Wilson met up with Alex Milas, Editor-in-Chief of Metal Hammer and founder of Space Rocks. This organisation describes itself as โa celebration of space exploration and the art, music, and culture it inspires.โ Wilsonโs original idea was to collaborate with Milas on an exhibition or an installation for which he created the music. Then Milas mentioned the Overview Effect.
The idea immediately appealed to Wilson. As a teenager, he had a fascination with space. He used to go out on summer evenings to gaze up at the stars. He enjoyed space films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1972), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He wrote tracks about space on some of his previous albums, particularly for Porcupine Tree. At the IMAX album launch, he said that in a โsplit-second momentโ during his conversation with Milas, he had the title and the concept and heard the music in his head.โ He saw it as a โpiece of cinema for the ears.โ
He told Stephen Humphries of Under The Radar that he had written several albums about โplanet Earth and human beings and the way we engage with each other.โ It was time to โwrite an album about something bigger than us.โ
Humphries asked him why he was โasking these bigger questionsโ now. Wilson admitted that perhaps he was having โmy own existential crisis… of wanting more perspective on my own lifeโ. Even so, he found it โfascinatingโ to consider the vast numbers and distances in the universe. He told John Earls of NME that having a concept for the album before he started writing it led him to produce something that โintuitively felt like something long-form, analogous to a novel or a film.โ
โThis record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.โ
Steven Wilson
Wilson told Dave Everley, โThis record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.โ Wilson has an uneasy relationship with the genre. His previous three albums certainly strayed from prog rock. To the Bone was an art-rock record with only one long track, โDetonationโ; it also contained a happy pop song, โPermanating.โ The Future Bites was resolutely electronic. Its longest track, โPersonal Shopperโ, was more like dystopian disco than prog. That album brought some of the best reviews of his career, โfrom the more indie, hipster people that hadn’t really paid attention to me beforeโ, but it also lost some of his core prog audience. To an extent, he has always enjoyed challenging his prog audience, but he also respects that audience. Although the album does mark a return to prog rock, itโs far from the loving, nostalgic homage to prog of his 2013 solo album The Raven that Refused to Sing (and other stories).
The album’s structure
The album is divided into two long tracks of about 20 minutes each, โObjects Outlive Usโ and โThe Overview.โ Wilson told The Prog Report that an album with only two long tracks was โa wilfully uncommercial gestureโ and that โthe reason there are two pieces is Iโm old and I still think in terms of vinyl.โ
Wilson referenced other records with the same structure, such as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells(1973), Miles Davisโ In a Silent Way (1969) and Tangerine Dreamโs Rubycon (1975). He told Tobias Fischer of Tonefloat Magazine that he has always liked โgreat double albums with just one track per side.โ He referred to Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973 UK, 1974 US) by Yes, which he remixed in 2016, as a โmuch maligned record, but I love it.โ
Writing the Album
Wilson told Anil Prasad of Innerviews that โthe idea and title came before I had written a single note of music… Itโs nice when something this strong falls into your lap.โ The album almost wrote itself. Wilson wrote it in the order we hear it, and the lyrics came last.
At a Q&A session at Cultplex in Manchester in February 2025, Wilson told John Robb that โone doorway led to the nextโ, and that the album flowed out of him, โit doesnโt always work that way.โ It took Wilson only eight weeks to record the album at his home studio. The process was quite different from recording The Raven That Refused to Sing in a studio, surrounded by other musicians. He played all the bass parts, as he did on the most recent Porcupine Tree album, Closure/Continuation(2022). When he toured with Porcupine Tree, Nate Navarro played the bass parts. When he toured The Overview, the bass parts were played by Nick Beggs.
The Musicians
As with all his albums, except the very early ones with Porcupine Tree, Wilson used real drummers rather than using electronic drums or playing them himself. For the first side of the record, he used Russell Holzman, son of his regular keyboard player, Adam Holzman. Wilson said he wanted a drummer with no apparent connection to progressive rock, or even to rock music in general. Holzman plays drums for the American singer Caroline Polachek. Wilson had seen his renditions of classic drum and bass breaks on Instagram. On the second side, Wilson brought in his regular drummer, Craig Blundell, partly because of his experience as a prog rock drummer with Steve Hackett, but also because of his wide-ranging knowledge of multiple musical genres.
OBJECTS OUTLIVE US
No Monkeyโs Paw
The opening describes an eerie meeting on a misty moor. Wilson refers to two ghost stories that may have occurred on the moor (recalling the ghost stories on which his 2013 album The Raven that Refused to Sing is based) but says that neither happened here.
First, there is โno ghost on the moorโ/no open windowโ. This appears to reference Kate Bushโs 1978 song Wuthering Heights, set โOut on the wily, windy moorsโ, when the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw haunts Heathcliff at his window. Bush, of whose music Wilson is a huge fan, memorably sings,
โHeathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy I’ve come home, I’m so cold Let me in your window.โ
Second, there is โno monkeyโs pawโ. The Monkeyโs Paw is a ghost story by the English author W.W. Jacobs, first published in 1902. It describes a magical monkeyโs paw, which provides three wishes that lead to unforeseen and terrible consequences. According to the story, the holy man who put the spell on the paw, โwanted to show that fate ruled peopleโs lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.โ
The Alien on the Moor. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
Instead, Wilsonโs protagonist looks beyond Earthbound ghost stories and into space, encountering an alien on the moor. The alien pointedly says, โDid you forget I exist?โ The protagonist blames the alien for playing โtoo hard to get.โ In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, Wilson said the reference to the alien is โa bit tongue in cheekโ, but that there was a โserious pointโ, which is that we spend too much time looking down at our digital devices, and not enough time looking up โwith a sense of aweโ at the sky and the stars, as he did when he was a child. We have lost our sense of curiosity and wonder and are obsessed with chasing likes and followers on social media, a central theme of Wilsonโs 2020 album The Future Bites. The theme that technology has changed the course of human evolution, and not necessarily for the better, goes back to Fear of a Blank Planet, the 2007 album Wilson wrote for Porcupine Tree.
The track opens with Wilson singing in a gorgeous falsetto, showing how strong his upper register has become since he started developing this part of his vocal range on The Future Bites. His voice is bathed in echo, evoking the ethereal rather than the Earthbound. His voice is gentle and intimate, beautifully contemplative, enriched by the sound design and spacey effects created by Randy McStine, who also plays guitar and sings backing vocals on the album. Wilson plays the soft-edged bass line on an acoustic bass. The alienโs voice is Wilsonโs own, transposed to a lower register using the same effect as on โKing Ghostโ from The Future Bites.
The Buddha Of The Modern Age
The Buddha of the title refers to Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. According to Buddhist teaching, the Buddha will be succeeded by Maitreya, sometimes referred to as โThe Buddha of the modern age.โ Wilsonโs lyrics refer to a contemporary Buddha, who is โbarely paid minimum wageโ for doling out โtruth and healthy karma.โ Wilson says his teaching is ignored. In a poetic line, he refers to humanity ignoring the truths revealed by the wise men of the past, who are now mere shadows to us, โthe blurred photos of the ghosts of menโ.
The lyrics in this section are the most personal on the album. Wilson is rarely so open and direct. He told Anil Prasad of Innerviews, โIโve always been slightly wary of being too preachy or holier than thou,โ but he feels so strongly about the effect of meat eating not just on animals but on the planet that heโs โbecoming a little more forthright about my veganism.โ
‘Slaughter our sacred cow To stuff our stupid mouths Already fit to burst Still the insatiable thirst To kill over and over’
Wilson is highly critical of what he sees as the failure of our stewardship of the planet, which we regard as ours to treat however we want. The phrase โinsatiable thirstโ refers to our appetite for food, our obsessive consumerism, and our destruction of the planet, โWe interlopers, the inferior species/Wallow in our own faeces.โ
The Destruction of our Planet. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
The track begins with a resolute piano motif which matches the stridency of Wilsonโs opinions, soon joined by drummer Russell Holzman on icy cymbals โ the first time we hear him on the album. Randy McStine and Willow Beggs soon join him on rich, layered backing vocals. Willow is a singer-songwriter and the daughter of bass player Nick Beggs. The backing vocals are reminiscent of those on Porcupine Tree songs like โHeartattack in a Laybyโ from In Absentia (2002), which ends with 38 tracks of multi-tracked voices. The song builds to a climax, with thundering drums, then drops away on the word โtryโ, creating a moment of compassion for humanity as a gentler piano melody ends the track.
Objects: Meanwhile
Steven Wilson – Objects Outlive Us: Objects: Meanwhile. Video by Miles Skarin
The lyrics for this section were written by Andy Partridge of the English rock band XTC, who also wrote the lyrics for the title track of Wilsonโs 2017 album To The Bone (2017) and for his 2018 single How Big the Space. Wilsonโs admiration for Partridge dates back to XTCโs formation of the fictitious band The Dukes of Stratosphear, which inspired Wilson to form his own fictional band, Porcupine Tree, which eventually became a real band.
Wilson has said that Partridge and Ray Davies of the Kinks are the best at describing everyday lives in their lyrics. While writing The Overview, he was remixing XTCโs 1984 album The Big Express in surround sound. The Big Express is a concept album about life in Swindon, a town in Wiltshire in the southwest of England. The song that interested Wilson particularly was โThe Everyday Story of Smalltownโ. Partridge told Todd Bernhardt of XTC’s Blogs that โthereโs a little vein of [Welsh poet] Dylan Thomas in there.โ Wilson told Stephen Humphries of Under the Radar that the song has โsome of the most divine Little England observational lyric writing.โ
He told Dave Everley of Prog that he rang Partridge with a challenge, โI want smalltown soap operas juxtaposed with cosmic phenomena.โ He wanted to put our ordinary lives in perspective โ a central theme of the album โ by providing links or contrasts with what was happening โmeanwhile, on the other side of the universe.โ The two men entered a productive dialogue. Wilson was fascinated by Partridgeโs comment that the lyrics make a significant difference in how you produce a track, particularly the vocals.
A Teenager with his First Telescope. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
Partridge fulfilled the brief perfectly. Events on Earth are sometimes linked with cosmic events,
โAs you queue at the bank for an hour โCause a solar flare blew out the power.โ
Sometimes people on Earth are oblivious to the effect of cosmic events,
โThe driver in tears โbout his payment arrears Still nobody hears when a sun disappears In a galaxy afar.โ
Sometimes the link is metaphorical,
โHer shopping bag broke, sending eggs and flour crashing Down to the ground like star clusters smashing.โ
One of the verses refers to a โteenager with his first telescopeโ, which reflects Wilsonโs nostalgia for his own teenage years, looking up at the sky, fascinated with space, before smartphones were invented. Robert Smith of The Cure shares that nostalgia. The track โEndsongโ from Songs of a Lost World (2024) was inspired by his memories of looking up at the sky with his father around the time of the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969. In another verse, a young man cleaning cars wonders, โIs there life on Mars?โ, the title of David Bowieโs 1973 single.
Some of the politics from To the Bone creeps in. That album addressed what some have described as a โpost-truthโ world. Partridge’s lyric describes humans bickering about โfencesโ – petty disputes between neighbours, and about โbordersโ – between countries, often leading to war. The lyric wryly states that itโs best not to think about those disputes, an understandable reaction to the conflicts that have blighted the early years of the 2020s. There is deep sarcasm in the line, โItโs better to live without facts.โ
The track begins with a clear statement of a central musical theme. Itโs a 19-note piano motif that restlessly snakes back on itself, returning every three beats to the same note (F#). It sounds straightforward when broken down into three-note segments, but the complete theme helps restore Wilsonโs prog credentials due to its length. Wilson told Prasad that the basic melody is like a Shepard Tone, โin that it constantly ascends in whole tones.โ A Shepard Tone is an auditory illusion in which a repeated musical pattern appears to be constantly rising even though it remains in the same octave. Examples are the end of Pink Floydโs โEchoesโ from Meddle (1971) and Hans Zimmer’s score for Christopher Nolanโs 2017 film Dunkirk.
‘A bit of a masterpiece.’ Variations by Andrew LLoyd Webber
Wilson said the 19-note motif returns in different musical forms throughout Objects Outlive Us, like the use of the leitmotif (leading motif) in Richard Wagnerโs operas or the musical formula in the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, such as his massive opera cycle Licht (Light) (1977 – 2003). Wilson also referred to repeated themes in Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells(1973) and Pink Floydโs โEchoesโ. He told Humphries that Andrew Lloyd Webberโs 1978 album Variations, which repeatedly used a theme by the composer Niccolรฒ Paganini, was โoverlookedโฆ [but] I think itโs a bit of a masterpiece, actually.โ The second track on the album was used as the theme tune for the television arts series The South Bank Show, which ran on ITV from 1978 to 2010, before moving to Sky Arts.
After three statements of the 19-note theme, the central song of Objects Outlive Us begins, with an earworm of a melody. Itโs decorated with Floydian sliding guitars and a plucked string theme played by Wilson. McStine provides gorgeous backing vocals that evoke the sound of Electric Light Orchestra (ELO).
At around 3:30, thereโs a blistering bass solo in the unusual time signature of 12/8. Each beat in the bar is divided into three semi-quaver (sixteenth note) triplets instead of the more usual two quavers (eighth notes). Perhaps surprisingly, Wilson plays it on an acoustic bass guitar. Itโs heavily distorted and put through an amp with lots of overdrive. As Wilson repeats the bass riff, the track takes flight in the proggiest section of the album so far, as McStine adds an extra guitar line above the bass in the style of the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) bands of the late 70s and early 80s, such as Iron Maiden and Saxon. At around 4:45, the track stalls as a metaphorical handbrake is applied, then rouses itself with a drum flourish into a spacey instrumental before the vocals return. At 6:00, the 19-note theme returns, now in a driving, much heavier version for full band, followed by a gentle piano version that takes us back to the beginning of this section.
In the sleeve notes, Wilson describes Theo Travisโ saxophones in the track as โJaxonsaxesโ, named after David Jackson, who played saxophone with Van der Graaf Generator, often playing two at once. His nickname is โJaxonโ. He worked on many of their albums, including a long run of classic albums in the 1970s.
The Cicerones/Ark
The archaic word โciceronesโ is from the word ‘cicerone’, meaning a tour guide, derived from the name of the great Roman orator, Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC). The track’s title comes from a short story, The Cicerones, by the English writer Robert Aickman (1914 โ 1981). The protagonist, John Trant, visits the Cathedral of Saint Bavon (presumably Saint Bavo) in Belgium. He begins a self-guided tour using a guidebook but soon meets various strange figures who act as his guides to the increasingly macabre sights of the cathedral. Thereโs a creeping sense of unease and the surreal. The eerie atmosphere builds in the same way as in Thomas M. Dischโs short story Descending, which inspired Wilsonโs previous album and short story The Harmony Codex. The Cicerones was filmed for Film Four in 2002, in a short starring Mark Gatiss (The League of Gentlemen, Sherlock, Bookish). In the context of the track, the title refers to the guides who lead the remnants of humanity into space, following the planet’s destruction so graphically described earlier in โThe Buddha Of The Modern Age.โ
Leaving the Planet. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
The Ark represents a new start, like Noahโs escape from the Flood in his ark with two of each animal. Compared with the relaxed rhyming couplets of Partridgeโs lyrics in the previous section, the lyrics of this section are breathless, broken up into short sections. Itโs a technique that goes back to โOpen Carโ from Porcupine Treeโs Deadwing (2005). After the withering invective of โThe Buddha Of The Modern Ageโ, only a few who warned about Earth’s destruction survived. Itโs easy to miss the story – and the message – here amongst the turbulence of the lyrics. Humanity is leaving the Earth, which is now destroyed and reduced to dust. Ironically, when Prasad asked Wilson if he would rather live on Mars, he replied, โMars is a planet of red dust. Earth is incredibly diverse, geographically, ecologically, and climate-wise.’
Wilson plays all the guitar parts at the beginning of this section. It starts with a gently contemplative acoustic guitar part, gorgeously recorded, that wouldnโt have been out of place on one of his early solo albums. After a rich keyboard wash, at about a minute in, the 19-note theme returns in a version for band and piano, and the section builds to a climax with repeated melody, with a similar feel to โEclipseโ, the epic finale to Pink Floydโs The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). Itโs also the emotional climax of the album’s first half, sung with gathering, hymn-like intensity, marking the historic significance of our decision to leave Earth after destroying it. The epic guitar solo marks the beginning of our journey to the stars, to begin a new life on the other side of the universe.
Cosmic Sons of Toil
The title of this instrumental section is intriguing. Wilson told Stรฉphane Rousselot of Amarok Magazine that itโs just a play on words. Perhaps he was thinking of the phrase โHorny-handed sons of toil.โ That phrase was first used by Lord Salisbury, three times British Prime Minister in the nineteenth century. The manual labourers described by Salisbury, with their horny (calloused) hands, have now been replaced by cosmic labourers. Perhaps that interpretation is incorrect, but as Wilson told Rousselot, โThatโs the fun of analysis.โ
This section is more up-tempo after the stately, anthemic pace of previous sections. The spacey electronic noises, sounding like a cosmic ray gun, are provided by the ARP 2600 analogue synthesiser. In a YouTube Reel, Wilson described it as โperfect for a space-themed album… It sounds like Hawkwind in 1973.โ The track begins with a tumbling, repeated piano theme, soon joined by jerky, melodic bass and frenetic guitar. The guitar solo at around 0:45 is the first of two on the album by Randy McStine. The solo is agitated, fragmented and unusual. McStine also plays guitar on the rest of the track. At around 2:00, thereโs a funky, jerky, distorted guitar riff, a variation on the fuzzy bass theme we heard earlier, with agitated drumming from Russell Holzman. At around 2:45, the track becomes so frenzied that it falls over itself. The whole section describes an out-of-control spacecraft hurtling through space. Itโs reminiscent of the scenes in Christopher Nolanโs 2014 film Interstellar, where the spaceship struggles to fly as it creaks, groans, and shudders, reminding us that interstellar travel is difficult.
No Ghost on the Moor/Heat Death of the Universe
The first part of this section, โNo Ghost On The Moorโ, is a reprise of the opening section, with the same lyrics and melody, but we are now on the other side of the universe. The alien has taken us as far away from Earth as possible, and in this new context, Wilson is joined by a conventional rock band. The lyrics take on a new meaning, becoming achingly tender and emotional. Wilsonโs recurring nostalgia for childhood has been replaced by an existential nostalgia for the Earth we have left far behind. His previous anger about the reckless destruction of the Earth has been replaced by deep empathy for the human condition and the fragility of life
The Heat Death of the Universe. Image created by AI.
The second part of this section is an instrumental. The โHeat Death of the Universeโ – also known more prosaically as the Big Chill or the Big Freeze – refers to the scientific hypothesis about the ultimate slow demise of the universe. Eric Betz of Astronomy.com described it as a,
‘Long and frigid affair… the day when all heat and energy is evenly spread over incomprehensibly vast distances. At this point, the universeโs final temperature will hover just above absolute zero… the existence of our entire species registers as but a brief ray of sunlight before an infinite winter of darkness.’
The guitar solo at around 2:00 is McStineโs second on the album. Wilson told McStine that he didnโt want a classic rock solo of the kind played by David Gilmour on โComfortably Numbโ from Pink Floydโs 1979 album The Wall. This is no reflection on the quality of Gilmourโs playing โ he told Roie Avin and Geoff Bailie of The Prog Report that the โComfortably Numbโ solo is the โgreatest guitar solo of all time.โ McStineโs solo sounds like a synthesiser rather than a blues guitar, and the tone breaks up intermittently rather than constantly as it would with conventional distortion. Russell Holzmanโs languid drumming creates a feeling of gravitas beneath.
A Scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Touring Club Italiano
At around 2:45, thereโs a lovely harmonic turn and some filigree decoration reminiscent of the great Guthrie Govan. As the guitar solo fades to nothing, the track descends into noise. Wilson told Rousselot this was a nod to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the use of โvery atonal musicโ to describe both โwonderโ and the feeling that the universe is โterrifying… an immense void of death and nothingness.โ He told John Robb at the launch of the album in Manchester that there was a โnod to Ligetiโ. Wilson is referring to the orchestral piece Atmosphรจres (1961) by the Hungarian composer Gyรถrgy Ligeti, used by Kubrick in the film. The piece uses the technique he called micropolyphony, with large numbers of tiny musical themes woven together to create a constantly shifting composition with no discernible rhythm or melody. This music reminds us of, in Wilsonโs words to Humphries, โthe blackness and death of space… So you get an orchestra.โ The track ends with a wall of noise, a technique he uses compellingly on his first solo album, Insurgentes (2008), when noise rock brutally obliterates the end of various tracks. The track โGet All You Deserve ends with Ligeti-like noises. Wilson told Prasad that sounds from the most recent record by Bass Communion (his โambient/noise /experimental projectโ), The Itself of Itself (2024), fed into this section of the track.
THE OVERVIEW
Steven Wilson – The Overview: Perspective (Official Video) by Miles Skarin
Perspective
Perspective begins with radio transmissions from deep space. They sound like the opening of another space rock song, โAstronomy Domineโ from Pink Floydโs 1967 album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In March 2024, Wilson said in a YouTube interview with Rick Beato that one of his favourite albums, by Pink Floyd – โstill my favourite bandโ โ is Ummagumma (1969), which includes a live version of the song (although without the spoken words). When The Piper was released, Pink Floyd were managed by Andrew King and Peter Jenner. The latter read out the names of planets, stars and galaxies through a megaphone.
โPerspectiveโ includes spoken word commentary from Wilsonโs wife Rotem, just like the two previous albums, The Harmony Codex and The Future Bites. She names various cosmic phenomena and their sizes. Wilson used a website called scaleofuniverse.com to provide scientific facts.
A megametre = 10^6 = 10โถ = ten to the power of six = ten with six zeroes = 1,000,000 m = a million metres
A gigametre = 10^9 = 109 = ten to the power of nine = 10 with nine zeroes = 1,000,000,000 m = a billion metres
According to the Scale of the Universe website, Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, over twice as big as our moon. It’s 5,268,000 metres in diameter. Callisto is Jupiter’s second largest moon, 4,821,000 metres in diameter.
Size beyond one megametre Ten to the power of six Ganymede, Callisto
A still from The Overview Film by Miles Skarin
Rotemโs voice is tuned down in pitch. Wilson told The Rockonteurs podcast that he wanted her voice to sound dispassionate, and โemotionally flatโฆ to recite these scientific facts.โ He had in mind HAL, the talking computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the spacecraft Discovery One, who memorably says, โIโm sorry, Dave, Iโm afraid I canโt do that.’
The red camera eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Source; Wikimedia Commons
What intrigues Wilson is not just the scientific facts about the space phenomena that Rotem describes, but also the effect such facts have on human consciousness. In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, he said that the sense of perspective shows who and what we are in relation to the vastness of the universe. He referred to Douglas Adamsโ Hitchhikerโs Guide to the Galaxy series and the Total Perspective Vortex. This machine allows the user to take in the whole universe, by extrapolating โthe whole of creationโฆ from one small piece of fairy cake.โ Built to annoy his wife, when the inventor turned the machine on, she saw โin one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to itโฆ to [the inventorโs horror] the shock completely annihilated her brain.โ Despite this, the inventor had proved to his satisfaction that โthe one thing [we] cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.โ The machine was later used as a punishment; the first person to survive it was the Betelgeusian, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who promptly ate the fairy cake.
The opening music is the most electronic on the album, following on from the more electronic sound of parts of The Future Bites and The Harmony Codex. Wilson told John Earls of NME that itโs something that the English electronic duo Autechre might have produced. Wilson isnโt the first musician to use electronic music on a prog rock album. Pink Floyd opened The Dark Side of the Moon with โOn the Runโ, which used the VCS3 analogue synthesiser to create the electronic sequence. Roger Waters can be seen manipulating the synth sounds, cigarette in hand, on Pink Floydโs Live at Pompeii (1972; re-released in 2025 as Pink Floyd at Pompeii โ MCMLXXII with new mixes by Wilson).
EMS Putney VCS 3 Synthesiser, of the Type Used by Pink Floyd on The Dark Side of the Moon. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The fiercely rhythmic, jerky synth tracks and electronic drums โ all played and programmed by Wilson – contrast with Rotemโs deadpan delivery of scientific facts. At the same time, they create a futuristic soundscape that suggests that science is more dominant on the second side of the album. Wilson told Dave Everley of Prog that Objects Outlive Us is more of a โhumanโ story, whereas in Everleyโs phrase, the title track โevokes the sparseness and coldness of space.โ At around 2:00, slower, more human-sounding chords begin to take over. We hear Wilsonโs voice at around 2:30, albeit partly stripped of its humanity in a wordless vocalise, transposed up an octave, so that it sounds more like a synthesiser than a human voice.
A Beautiful Infinity I/ Borrowed Atoms/A Beautiful Infinity II
The protagonist is now on the other side of the universe, reflecting on his life back on Earth. He considers the time it takes light to travel long distances across space to reach the Earth; we see stars as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. Thereโs a strong parallel with Christopher Nolanโs 2014 film Interstellar. The line โEach moment for me is a lifetime for youโ could apply to the film’s plot. It stars Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a widowed former NASA test pilot who leaves a devastated Earth on a mission to find other habitable planets, leaving his young daughter Murph behind. Cooper and his crew travel remarkably close to a black hole called Gargantua. The scientific adviser to the film, Kip Thorne, wrote in his 2014 book The Science of Interstellar that time reaches a complete halt at the surface of a black hole.
When Cooper travels near Gargantua, he ages only a few hours while Murph, on Earth, ages eight decades. Thereโs a profoundly moving moment when he receives a transmission from his daughter, and he realises that he has missed 23 years of his daughterโs life. They are now the same age. When he left Earth, she was a child. Wilson encapsulates the emotion of this moment in the simple but deeply poetic line, โBack on Earth, my loving wifeโs been dead for years.โ Although the title track concentrates on science, there is room for humanity, too. The protagonistโs distance from Earth puts everything in perspective: โwhat seemed important [is] now like dust inside the squall.โ Thereโs perhaps an echo of the dust storms in Interstellar, which make Earth uninhabitable.
โA Beautiful Infinity Iโ is the first time we hear Craig Blundell on drums. He plays in a more robust, rockier style than Russell Holzman on Objects Outlive Us; both drummers are superb. Wilsonโs vocals are treated with a delay effect; the final part of each phrase is repeated, โfrom hereโฆ from hereโฆ from here.โ Pink Floyd used this effect on โUs and Themโ from The Dark Side of the Moon to add emotional depth. Wilson used the same effect on โArriving Somewhere But Not Hereโ on Deadwing (2005).
The slide guitar adds to the Floydian feeling of the track, but the guitar solo isnโt Gilmour-esque. Wilson asked Niko Tsonev to play the solo โ his only solo on the album โ in a style that combined the classic with the contemporary. The acoustic guitar, played by Wilson, is an Ovation in Nashville tuning. He used the same guitar and tuning on โChimeraโs Wreckโ from the 2022 Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation. He told Amit Sharma of Total Guitar that he used his Ovation guitar in Nashville tuning โ the lowest four strings are tuned up an octave, creating โa very crystalline, musical box kind of tone.โ
‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’
The โBorrowed Atomsโ section begins at around 2:40 with a piano break. The delicate musical backdrop of piano and synthesiser accompanies one of the most poetic moments on the album, with the words โThe clouds have no historyโ, and ends ten lines later with the words โIs this a dream?โ Wilsonโs lyrics express profound complexity in simple language. He reverses the โpathetic fallacyโ, a poetic device where human emotions or characteristics are attributed to nature. (A good example is I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, which describes the daffodils as human dancers, โtossing their heads in sprightly dance.โ) Wilson does the opposite, stressing that nature has no human emotion: โThe clouds have no history/And the sea feels no sorrow.โ This is another aspect of the albumโs perspective theme. Nature ignores us, so we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. Wilson says our atoms are just โborrowedโ; when we die, they return to the universe. This is ambiguous โ if our atoms are only โborrowedโ, we are insignificant, but we should also take good care of our atoms, as we only have temporary stewardship. Wilsonโs meditation on the nature of selfhood ends with a moving expression of existential angst, warmly sung, โIs this a dream?โ
‘A Beautiful Infinity IIโ begins at around 4:00 with the words โThereโs no reason for any of this.โ Wilson’s personal view โ with which some would disagree – is that the universe was created out of chaos, not by design or by a supreme being,
โThereโs no reason for any of this Just a beautiful infinity No design and no one at the wheel Just an existential mystery.โ
The idea of no one being at the wheel is reminiscent of โThe Creator has a Master Tapeโ from the Porcupine Tree album In Absentia (2002). We discover that โthe creator had a master tapeโ, which suggests design, only to find that โ ironically – โhe left it in a cab.โ
After the massed backing vocals of Wilson and Randy McStine, there are some whimsical, almost scatting vocals from Wilson at around 4:05, in the same style as on โHarridanโ, the opening track of Closure/Continuation. At around 5:00, McStine closes the track with a richly analogue Moog solo.
Infinity Measured In Moments
This section is the climax of side two. Rotem Wilson returns, reciting another list of space statistics to create a further sense of awe about the vastness of the universe. Blundellโs drumming here is impressive. He adds subtle shifts to the rhythmic patterns, building the track’s epic feel and bringing a human element to the electronic parts. The track is built around arpeggiating analogue synth patterns, just as Wilson built up the title track on The Harmony Codex. Wilsonโs vocals are warm and rich, multitracked in unison rather than complex harmonies, as often in his Porcupine Tree songs. McStine provides backing vocals and a guitar solo at 2:15, combining an angular, modern feel with a classic, uplifting rock solo.
The Inner Sleeve of In Absentia by Lasse Hoile
Itโs followed by handclaps (Wilson) and ukulele (McStine). Porcupine Tree fans may recall a similar effect on โTrainsโ (In Absentia, 2002), a fan favourite with over 39 million plays on Spotify at the time of writing. There is some very Peter Hook-style bass in this section. Wilson is a massive fan of Hookโs former band Joy Division, listing the bandโs debut single Transmission (1979), in his book Limited Edition of One as one of his top 100 tracks. At around 3:20, the track reaches a climax with Adam Holzmanโs Moog solo, the first real opportunity Holzman has on the album to show the warmth and virtuosity of his jazz-tinged playing, which was a highlight of The Overview Tour that came to London in May 2025.
Permanence
The final section of the album is a contemplative instrumental, beautiful, ambient and ethereal. We are now floating in space, billions of light-years away from Earth. The encounter with the alien on the moor at the beginning of the album now seems an infinite time ago.
Theo Travis. Photo by Mariia Korneeva
Theo Travis plays the soprano sax solo. Travis worked on some of Wilsonโs solo albums, and the two worked together on Travisโ 2024 solo album Aeolus. That album is a one-hour Theo Travis piece for duduk; the instrument Travis played on โBeautiful Scarecrowโ on The Harmony Codex. Wilson produced the recordings and created soundscapes from Travisโs alto flute playing. The album is gentle, meditative, introspective and quietly mesmerising. Travisโs playing has the same effect on ‘Permanence.’
The section begins with the evocative sound of the electric piano, processed through a reverse echo. Two new instruments are added. The first is the celeste or celesta, a keyboard instrument that looks like a small upright piano. Like a piano, a hammer is operated by pressing a key, but instead of striking strings, the hammer hits a metal plate like that of a glockenspiel. Appropriately, in the context of this track, the name means โcelestialโ or โheavenly.โ The second instrument is the Moog synthesiser on which Wilson created a sound like the theremin.
In the film by Miles Skarin, we move gradually closer to a green shoot of life. An out-of-focus creature gradually comes into focus. Our old friend, the alien from Objects Outlive Us, intently investigates the green shoot. We hadnโt forgotten that the alien exists. There is hope after all.
This post was updated at 17.27 on 29 December 2025 to correct the explanation of the terms megametre and gigametre, which had incorrectly referred to kilometres (km) rather than metres (m)
This post was further updated at 14.00 on 30 December 2025 to add details of the relative sizes of Ganymede and Callisto
Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Omnibus Edition, Boekerij 2018) Avin, Roie and Bailie, Geoff, Steven Wilson on The Overview, the upcoming tour, the future of AI, and more. (Interview) (The Prog Report Podcast, 7/3/2025) Beato, Rick, Steven Wilson Discusses His Favorite [Sic] Albums (Rick Beato 2, YouTube 24/03/34) Bernhardt, Todd, Andy discusses ‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’ (XTCโs Blog, 17 February 2008) Betz, Eric, The Big Freeze: How the universe will die (Astronomy.com) Earls, John, Steven Wilson: โIโve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar soloโ (NME 18/02/25) Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) Fischer, Tobias, Interview with Steven Wilson/ Porcupine Tree (Tonefloat Magazine, undated) Humphries, Stephen, Steven Wilson on โThe Overviewโ Space, the final musical frontier (Under the Radar, 21/2/2025) Kemp, Gary and Pratt, Guy, Gary Kemp album special with Steven Wilson (The Rockonteurs, YouTube 26/01/25) Prasad, Anil, Steven Wilson Cosmic Perspectives (Innerviews, 25/02/25) Robb, John, Steven Wilson: โThe Overviewโ Audio-Visual Experience + Q&A (Cultplex Manchester, 26/02/25) Rousselot, Stรฉphane, Interview โ Steven Wilson (Amarok Magazine, 4/3/2025) Sharma, Amit, Steven Wilson on Porcupine Treeโs triumphant return and his love of โguitar players that can play one note and break your heartโ (Total Guitar, August 2022) Shatner, William and Brandon, Joshua, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria Books 2022) Sinclair, Paul, Steven Wilson: The SDE interview: SW on his new album, The Overview (Super Deluxe Edition, 17/03/25) โStruck’, Steven Wilson (February 11st [sic] 2025 (MUSICWAVES, 11/2/2025) White, Frank, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (First Edition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987) Wilson, Steven, Limited Edition of One (Constable, April 2022)
Images from The Overview film by Miles Skarin of Crystal Spotlight
The Cover of The Overview by Steven Wilson, designed by Hajo Mรผller
This is an analysis of the first half of Steven Wilson’s eighth solo album, The Overview. For an introduction to the album, click here. Analysis of the second half of the album to follow.
OBJECTS OUTLIVE US
No Monkeyโs Paw
The opening describes an eerie meeting on a misty moor. Wilson refers to two ghost stories that may have occurred on the moor (recalling the ghost stories on which his 2013 album The Raven that Refused to Sing is based) but says that neither happened here.
First, there is โno ghost on the moorโ/no open windowโ. This appears to reference Kate Bushโs 1978 song Wuthering Heights, set โOut on the wily, windy moorsโ, when the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw haunts Heathcliff at his window. Bush, of whose music Wilson is a huge fan, memorably sings,
โHeathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy I’ve come home, I’m so cold Let me in your window.โ
Second, there is โno monkeyโs pawโ. The Monkeyโs Paw is a ghost story by the English author W.W. Jacobs, first published in 1902. It describes a magical monkeyโs paw, which provides three wishes that lead to unforeseen and terrible consequences. According to the story, the holy man who put the spell on the paw, โwanted to show that fate ruled peopleโs lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.โ
The Alien on the Moor. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
Instead, Wilsonโs protagonist looks beyond Earthbound ghost stories and into space, encountering an alien on the moor. The alien pointedly says, โDid you forget I exist?โ The protagonist blames the alien for playing โtoo hard to get.โ In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, Wilson said the reference to the alien is โa bit tongue in cheekโ, but that there was a โserious pointโ, which is that we spend too much time looking down at our digital devices, and not enough time looking up โwith a sense of aweโ at the sky and the stars, as he did when he was a child. We have lost our sense of curiosity and wonder and are obsessed with chasing likes and followers on social media, a central theme of Wilsonโs 2020 album The Future Bites. The theme that technology has changed the course of human evolution, and not necessarily for the better, goes back to Fear of a Blank Planet, the 2007 album Wilson wrote for Porcupine Tree.
The track opens with Wilson singing in a gorgeous falsetto, showing how strong his upper register has become since he started developing this part of his vocal range on The Future Bites. His voice is bathed in echo, evoking the ethereal rather than the Earthbound. His voice is gentle and intimate, beautifully contemplative, enriched by the sound design and spacey effects created by Randy McStine, who also plays guitar and sings backing vocals on the album. Wilson plays the soft-edged bass line on an acoustic bass. The alienโs voice is Wilsonโs own, transposed to a lower register using the same effect as on โKing Ghostโ from The Future Bites.
The Buddha Of The Modern Age
The Buddha of the title refers to Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. According to Buddhist teaching, the Buddha will be succeeded by Maitreya, sometimes referred to as โThe Buddha of the modern age.โ Wilsonโs lyrics refer to a contemporary Buddha, who is โbarely paid minimum wageโ for doling out โtruth and healthy karma.โ Wilson says his teaching is ignored. In a poetic line, he refers to humanity ignoring the truths revealed by the wise men of the past, who are now mere shadows to us, โthe blurred photos of the ghosts of menโ.
The lyrics in this section are the most personal on the album. Wilson’s lyrics about his views are rarely so open and direct. He told Anil Prasad of Innerviews, โIโve always been slightly wary of being too preachy or holier than thou,โ but he feels so strongly about the effect of meat eating not just on animals but on the planet that heโs โbecoming a little more forthright about my veganism.โ Hereโs an example of the anger he feels,
‘Slaughter our sacred cow To stuff our stupid mouths Already fit to burst Still the insatiable thirst To kill over and over’
Wilson is highly critical of what he sees as the failure of our stewardship of the planet, which we regard as ours to treat however we want. The phrase โinsatiable thirstโ refers to our appetite for food, our obsessive consumerism, and our destruction of the planet, โWe interlopers, the inferior species/Wallow in our own faeces.โ
The Destruction of our Planet. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
The track begins with a resolute piano motif which matches the stridency of Wilsonโs opinions, soon joined by drummer Russell Holzman on icy cymbals โ the first time we hear him on the album. Randy McStine and Willow Beggs soon join him on rich, layered backing vocals. Willow is a singer-songwriter and the daughter of bass player Nick Beggs. The backing vocals are reminiscent of those on Porcupine Tree songs like โHeartattack in a Laybyโ from In Absentia (2002), which ends with 38 tracks of multi-tracked voices. The song builds to a climax, with thundering drums, then drops away on the word โtryโ, creating a moment of compassion for humanity as a gentler piano melody ends the track.
Objects: Meanwhile
The lyrics for this section were written by Andy Partridge of the English rock band XTC, who also wrote the lyrics for the title track of Wilsonโs 2017 album To The Bone (2017) and for his 2018 single How Big the Space. Wilsonโs admiration for Partridge dates back to XTCโs formation of the fictitious band The Dukes of Stratosphear, which inspired Wilson to form his own fictional band, Porcupine Tree, which eventually became a real band.
Wilson has said that Partridge and Ray Davies of the Kinks are the best at describing everyday lives in their lyrics. While writing The Overview, he was remixing XTCโs 1984 album The Big Express in surround sound. The Big Express is a concept album about life in Swindon, a town in Wiltshire in the southwest of England. The song that interested Wilson particularly was โThe Everyday Story of Smalltownโ. Partridge told Todd Bernhardt of XTC’s Blogs that โthereโs a little vein of [Welsh poet] Dylan Thomas in there.โ Wilson told Stephen Humphries of Under the Radar that the song has โsome of the most divine Little England observational lyric writing.โ
He told Dave Everley of Prog that he rang Partridge with a challenge, โI want smalltown soap operas juxtaposed with cosmic phenomena.โ He wanted to put our ordinary lives in perspective โ a central theme of the album โ by providing links or contrasts with what was happening โmeanwhile, on the other side of the universe.โ The two men entered a productive dialogue. Wilson was fascinated by Partridgeโs comment that the lyrics make a significant difference in how you produce a track, particularly the vocals.
A Teenager with his First Telescope. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
Partridge fulfilled the brief perfectly. Events on Earth are sometimes linked with cosmic events,
โAs you queue at the bank for an hour โCause a solar flare blew out the power.โ
Sometimes people on Earth are oblivious to the effect of cosmic events,
โThe driver in tears โbout his payment arrears Still nobody hears when a sun disappears In a galaxy afar.โ
Sometimes the link is metaphorical,
โHer shopping bag broke, sending eggs and flour crashing Down to the ground like star clusters smashing.โ
One of the verses refers to a โteenager with his first telescopeโ, which reflects Wilsonโs nostalgia for his own teenage years, looking up at the sky, fascinated with space, before smartphones were invented. Robert Smith of The Cure shares that nostalgia. The track โEndsongโ from Songs of a Lost World (2024) was inspired by his memories of looking up at the sky with his father around the time of the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969. In another verse, a young man cleaning cars wonders, โIs there life on Mars?โ, the title of David Bowieโs 1973 single.
Some of the politics from To the Bone creeps in. That album addressed what some have described as a โpost-truthโ world. Patridge’s lyric describes humans bickering about โfencesโ – petty disputes between neighbours, and about โbordersโ – between countries, often leading to war. The lyric wryly states that itโs best not to think about those disputes, an understandable reaction to the conflicts that have blighted the early years of the 2020s. There is deep sarcasm in the line, โItโs better to live without facts.โ
The track begins with a clear statement of an important musical theme. Itโs a 19-note piano motif that restlessly snakes back on itself, returning every three beats to the same note (F#). It sounds straightforward when broken down into three-note segments, but the complete theme helps restore Wilsonโs prog credentials due its length. Wilson told Prasad that the basic melody is like a Shepard Tone, โin that it constantly ascends in whole tones.โ A Shepard Tone is an auditory illusion in which a repeated musical pattern appears to be constantly rising even though it remains in the same octave. Examples of its use are at the end of Pink Floydโs โEchoesโ from Meddle (1971) and Hans Zimmer’s score for Christopher Nolanโs 2017 film Dunkirk.
‘A bit of a masterpiece.’ Variations by Andrew LLoyd Webber
Wilson said the 19-note motif returns in different musical forms throughout Objects Outlive Us, like the use of the leitmotif (leading motif) in Richard Wagnerโs operas or the musical formula in the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, such as his massive opera cycle Licht (Light) (1977 – 2003). Wilson also referred to repeated themes in Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells(1973) and Pink Floydโs โEchoesโ. He told Humphries that Andrew Lloyd Webberโs 1978 album Variations, which repeatedly used a theme by the composer Niccolรฒ Paganini, was โoverlookedโฆ [but] I think itโs a bit of a masterpiece, actually.โ The second track on the album was used as the theme tune for the television arts series The South Bank Show, which ran on ITV from 1978 to 2010, before moving to Sky Arts.
After three statements of the 19-note theme, the central song of Objects Outlive Us begins, with an earworm of a melody. Itโs decorated with Floydian sliding guitars and a plucked string theme played by Wilson. McStine provides gorgeous backing vocals that evoke the sound of Electric Light Orchestra (ELO).
At around 3:30, thereโs a blistering bass solo in the unusual time signature of 12/8. Each beat in the bar is divided into three semi-quaver (sixteenth note) triplets instead of the more usual two quavers (eighth notes). Perhaps surprisingly, Wilson plays it on an acoustic bass guitar. Itโs heavily distorted and put through an amp with lots of overdrive. As Wilson repeats the bass riff, the track takes flight in the proggiest section of the album so far, as McStine adds an extra guitar line above the bass in the style of the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) bands of the late 70s and early 80s, such as Iron Maiden and Saxon. At around 4:45, the track stalls as a metaphorical handbrake is applied, then the track rouses itself with a drum flourish into a spacey instrumental before the vocals return. At 6:00, the 19-note theme returns, now in a driving, much heavier version for full band, followed by a gentle piano version that takes us back to the beginning of this section.
In the sleeve notes, Wilson describes Theo Travisโ saxophones in the track as โJaxonsaxesโ, named after David Jackson, who played saxophone with Van der Graaf Generator, often playing two at once. His nickname is โJaxonโ. He worked on many of their albums, including a long run of classic albums in the 1970s.
The Cicerones/Ark
The archaic word โciceronesโ is from the word ‘cicerone’, meaning a tour guide, derived from the name of the great Roman orator, Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC). The track’s title comes from a short story, The Cicerones, by the English writer Robert Aickman (1914 โ 1981). The protagonist, John Trant, visits the Cathedral of Saint Bavon (presumably Saint Bavo) in Belgium. He begins a self-guided tour using a guidebook but soon meets various strange figures who act as his guides to the increasingly macabre sights of the cathedral. Thereโs a creeping sense of unease and the surreal. The atmosphere builds in the same way as in Thomas M. Dischโs short story Descending, which inspired Wilsonโs previous album and short story The Harmony Codex. The Cicerones was filmed for Film Four in 2002, in a short starring Mark Gatiss (The League of Gentlemen, Sherlock, Bookish). In the context of the track, the title refers to the guides who lead the remnants of humanity into space, following the planet’s destruction so graphically described earlier in โThe Buddha Of The Modern Age.โ
Leaving the Planet. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
The Ark represents a new start, like Noahโs escape from the Flood in his ark with two of each animal. Compared with the relaxed rhyming couplets of Partridgeโs lyrics in the previous section, the lyrics of this section are breathless, broken up into short sections. Itโs a technique that goes back to โOpen Carโ from Porcupine Treeโs Deadwing (2005). After the withering invective of โThe Buddha Of The Modern Ageโ, only a few who warned about Earth’s destruction survived. Itโs easy to miss the story – and the message – here amongst the turbulence of the lyrics. Humanity is leaving the Earth, which is now destroyed and reduced to dust. Ironically, when Prasad asked Wilson if he would rather live on Mars, he replied, โMars is a planet of red dust. Earth is incredibly diverse, geographically, ecologically, and climate-wise.’
Wilson plays all the guitar parts at the beginning of this section. It starts with a gently contemplative acoustic guitar part, gorgeously recorded, that wouldnโt have been out of place on one of his early solo albums. After a rich keyboard wash, at about a minute in, the 19-note theme returns in a version for band and piano, and the section builds to a climax with repeated melody, with a similar feel to โEclipseโ, the epic finale to Pink Floydโs The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). Itโs also the emotional climax of the album’s first half, sung with gathering, hymn-like intensity, marking the historic significance of our decision to leave Earth after destroying it. The epic guitar solo marks the beginning of our journey to the stars, to begin a new life on the other side of the universe.
Cosmic Sons of Toil
The title of this instrumental section is intriguing. Wilson told Stรฉphane Rousselot of Amarok Magazine that itโs just a play on words. Perhaps he was thinking of the phrase โHorny-handed sons of toil.โ That phrase was first used by Lord Salisbury, three times British Prime Minister in the nineteenth century. The manual labourers described by Salisbury, with their horny (calloused) hands, have now been replaced by cosmic labourers. Perhaps that interpretation is incorrect, but as Wilson told Rousselot, โThatโs the fun of analysis.โ
This section is more up-tempo after the stately, anthemic pace of previous sections. The spacey electronic noises, sounding like a cosmic ray gun, are provided by the ARP 2600 analogue synthesiser. In a YouTube Reel, Wilson described it as โperfect for a space-themed album… It sounds like Hawkwind in 1973.โ The track begins with a tumbling, repeated piano theme, soon joined by jerky, melodic bass and frenetic guitar. The guitar solo at around 0:45 is the first of two on the album by Randy McStine. The solo is agitated and fragmented and unusual. McStine also plays guitar on the rest of the track. At around 2:00, thereโs a funky, jerky, distorted guitar riff, a variation on the fuzzy bass theme we heard earlier, with agitated drumming from Russell Holzman. At around 2:45, the track becomes so frenzied that it falls over itself. The whole section describes an out-of-control spacecraft hurtling through space. Itโs reminiscent of the scenes in Christopher Nolanโs 2014 film Interstellar when the spaceship flies with difficulty as it creaks, groans and shudders, reminding us that interstellar travel is difficult.
No Ghost on the Moor/Heat Death of the Universe
The first part of this section, โNo Ghost On The Moorโ, is a reprise of the opening section, with the same lyrics and melody. The difference is that we are now on the other side of the universe. The alien has taken us as far away from Earth as possible, and in this new context, Wilson is joined by a conventional rock band. The lyrics take on a new meaning, becoming achingly tender and emotional. Wilsonโs recurring nostalgia for childhood has been replaced by an existential nostalgia for the Earth we have left far behind. His previous anger about the reckless destruction of the Earth has been replaced by deep empathy for the human condition and the fragility of life
The Heat Death of the Universe. Image created by AI.
The second part of this section is an instrumental, The โHeat Death of the Universeโ – also known more prosaically as the Big Chill or the Big Freeze – refers to the scientific hypothesis about the ultimate slow demise of the universe. Eric Betz of Astronomy.com described it as a,
‘Long and frigid affair… the day when all heat and energy is evenly spread over incomprehensibly vast distances. At this point, the universeโs final temperature will hover just above absolute zero… the existence of our entire species registers as but a brief ray of sunlight before an infinite winter of darkness.’
The guitar solo at around 2:00 is McStineโs second on the album. Wilson told McStine that he didnโt want a classic rock solo of the kind played by David Gilmour on โComfortably Numbโ from Pink Floydโs 1979 album The Wall. This is no reflection on the quality of Gilmourโs playing โ he told Roie Avin and Geoff Bailie of The Prog Report that the โComfortably Numbโ solo is the โgreatest guitar solo of all time.โ McStineโs solo sounds like a synthesiser rather than a blues guitar, and the tone breaks up intermittently rather than constantly as it would with conventional distortion. Russell Holzmanโs languid drumming creates a feeling of gravitas beneath.
A Scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Touring Club Italiano
At around 2:45, thereโs a lovely harmonic turn and some filigree decoration reminiscent of the great Guthrie Govan. As the guitar solo fades to nothing, the track descends into noise. Wilson told Rousselot this was a nod to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the use of โvery atonal musicโ to describe both โwonderโ and the feeling that the universe is โterrifying… an immense void of death and nothingness.โ He told John Robb at the launch of the album in Manchester that there was a โnod to Ligetiโ. Wilson is referring to the orchestral piece Atmosphรจres (1961) by the Hungarian composer Gyรถrgy Ligeti, used by Kubrick in the film. The piece uses the technique he called micropolyphony, with large numbers of tiny musical themes woven together to create a constantly shifting composition with no discernible rhythm or melody. This music reminds us of, in Wilsonโs words to Humphries, โthe blackness and death of space… So you get an orchestra.โ The track ends with a wall of noise, a technique he uses compellingly on his first solo album, Insurgentes (2008), when noise rock brutally obliterates the end of various tracks. The track โGet All You Deserve ends with Ligeti-like noises. Wilson told Prasad that sounds from the most recent record by Bass Communion (his โambient/noise /experimental projectโ), The Itself of Itself (2024), fed into this section of the track.
Images from The Overview film by Miles Skarin of Crystal Spotlight Prasad, Anil, Steven Wilson Cosmic Perspectives (Innerviews, 25/02/25) Bernhardt, Todd, Andy discusses ‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’ (XTCโs Blog, 17 February 2008) Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) Rousselot, Stรฉphane, Interview โ Steven Wilson (Amarok Magazine, 4/3/2025) Betz, Eric The Big Freeze: How the universe will die (Astronomy.com) Avin, Roie and Bailie, Geoff Steven Wilson on The Overview, the upcoming tour, the future of AI, and more. (Interview) (The Prog Report Podcast, 7/3/2025) Robb, John, Steven Wilson: โThe Overviewโ Audio-Visual Experience + Q&A (Cultplex Manchester, 26/02/25)
This is an analysis of the second half, and title track, of Steven Wilson’s eighth solo album, The Overview. For an introduction to the album, click here. For an analysis of the first half of the album, ‘Objects Outlive Us’, click here.
Perspective begins with radio transmissions from deep space. They sound like the radio transmissions at the opening of another space rock song, โAstronomy Domineโ from Pink Floydโs 1967 album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In March 2024, Wilson said in a YouTube interview with Rick Beato that one of his favourite albums, by Pink Floyd – โstill my favourite bandโ โ is Ummagumma (1969), which includes a live version of the song (although without the spoken words). When The Piper was released, Pink Floyd were managed by Andrew King and Peter Jenner. The latter read out the names of planets, stars and galaxies through a megaphone.
โPerspectiveโ includes spoken word commentary from Wilsonโs wife Rotem, just like the two previous albums, The Harmony Codex and The Future Bites. She names various cosmic phenomena, and their distances from Earth. Wilson used a website called scaleofuniverse.com to provide scientific facts. The distances involved are hard to comprehend – see below:
A megametre = 10^6 = ten to the power of six = ten with six zeroes = 1,000,000 m = aย million m
A gigametre = 10^9 = ten to the power of nine = 10 with nine zeroes = 1,000,000,000 m = a billion mย
Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System and Callisto is Jupiter’s second largest moon:
Size beyond one megametre Ten to the power of six Ganymede, Callisto
A still from The Overview Film by Miles Skarin
Rotemโs voice is tuned down in pitch. Wilson told The Rockonteurs podcast that he wanted her voice to sound dispassionate, and โemotionally flatโฆ to recite these scientific facts.โ He had in mind HAL, the talking computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the spacecraft Discovery One, who memorably says, โIโm sorry, Dave, Iโm afraid I canโt do that.’
The red camera eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Source; Wikimedia Commons
What intrigues Wilson is not just the scientific facts about the space phenomena that Rotem describes, but also the effect such facts have on human consciousness. In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, he said that the sense of perspective shows who and what we are in relation to the vastness of the universe. He referred to Douglas Adamsโ Hitchhikerโs Guide to the Galaxy series and the Total Perspective Vortex. This machine allows the user to take in the whole universe, by extrapolating โthe whole of creationโฆ from one small piece of fairy cake.โ Built to annoy his wife, when the inventor turned the machine on, she saw โin one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to itโฆ to [the inventorโs horror] the shock completely annihilated her brain.โ Despite this, the inventor had proved to his satisfaction that โthe one thing [we] cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.โ The machine was later used as a punishment; the first person to survive it was the Betelgeusian, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who promptly ate the fairy cake.
The opening music is the most electronic on the album, following on from the more electronic sound of parts of The Future Bites and The Harmony Codex. Wilson told John Earls of NME that itโs something that the English electronic duo Autechre might have produced. Wilson isnโt the first musician to use electronic music on a prog rock album. Pink Floyd opened The Dark Side of the Moon with โOn the Runโ, which used the VCS3 analogue synthesiser to create the electronic sequence. Roger Waters can be seen manipulating the synth sounds, cigarette in hand, on Pink Floydโs Live at Pompeii (1972; re-released in 2025 as Pink Floyd at Pompeii โ MCMLXXII with new mixes by Wilson).
EMS Putney VCS 3 Synthesiser, of the Type Used by Pink Floyd on The Dark Side of the Moon. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The fiercely rhythmic, jerky synth tracks and electronic drums โ all played and programmed by Wilson – contrast with Rotemโs deadpan delivery of scientific facts. At the same time, they create a futuristic soundscape that suggests that science is more dominant on the second side of the album. Wilson told Dave Everley of Prog that Objects Outlive Us is more of a โhumanโ story, whereas in Everleyโs phrase, the title track โevokes the sparseness and coldness of space.โ At around 2:00, slower, more human-sounding chords begin to take over. We hear Wilsonโs voice at around 2:30, albeit partly stripped of its humanity in a wordless vocalise, transposed up an octave, so that it sounds more like a synthesiser than a human voice.
A Beautiful Infinity I/ Borrowed Atoms/A Beautiful Infinity II
The protagonist is now on the other side of the universe, reflecting on his life back on Earth. He considers the time it takes light to travel long distances across space to reach the Earth; we see stars as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. Thereโs a strong parallel with Christopher Nolanโs 2014 film Interstellar. The line โEach moment for me is a lifetime for youโ could apply to the film’s plot. It stars Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a widowed former NASA test pilot who leaves a devastated Earth on a mission to find other habitable planets, leaving his young daughter Murph behind. Cooper and his crew travel remarkably close to a black hole called Gargantua. The scientific adviser to the film, Kip Thorne, wrote in his 2014 book The Science of Interstellar that time reaches a complete halt at the surface of a black hole.
When Cooper travels near Gargantua, he ages only a few hours while Murph, on Earth, ages eight decades. Thereโs a profoundly moving moment when he receives a transmission from his daughter, and he realises that he has missed 23 years of his daughterโs life. They are now the same age. When he left Earth, she was a child. Wilson encapsulates the emotion of this moment in the simple but deeply poetic line, โBack on Earth, my loving wifeโs been dead for years.โ Although the title track concentrates on science, there is room for humanity, too. The protagonistโs distance from Earth puts everything in perspective: โwhat seemed important [is] now like dust inside the squall.โ Thereโs perhaps an echo of the dust storms in Interstellar, which make Earth uninhabitable.
โA Beautiful Infinity Iโ is the first time we hear Craig Blundell on drums. He plays in a more robust, rockier style than Russell Holzman on Objects Outlive Us; both drummers are superb. Wilsonโs vocals are treated with a delay effect; the final part of each phrase is repeated, โfrom hereโฆ from hereโฆ from here.โ Pink Floyd used this effect on โUs and Themโ from The Dark Side of the Moon to add emotional depth. Wilson used the same effect on โArriving Somewhere But Not Hereโ on Deadwing (2005).
The slide guitar adds to the Floydian feeling of the track, but the guitar solo isnโt Gilmour-esque. Wilson asked Niko Tsonev to play the solo โ his only solo on the album โ in a style that combined the classic with the contemporary.โ The acoustic guitar, played by Wilson, is an Ovation in Nashville tuning. He used the same guitar and tuning on โChimeraโs Wreckโ from the 2022 Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation. He told Amit Sharma of Total Guitar that he used his Ovation guitar in Nashville tuning โ the lowest four strings are tuned up an octave, creating โa very crystalline, musical box kind of tone.โ
‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’
The โBorrowed Atomsโ section begins at around 2:40 with a piano break. The delicate musical backdrop of piano and synthesiser accompanies one of the most poetic moments on the album, with the words โThe clouds have no historyโ, and ends ten lines later with the words โIs this a dream?โ Wilsonโs lyrics express profound complexity in simple language. He reverses the โpathetic fallacyโ, a poetic device where human emotions or characteristics are attributed to nature. (A good example is I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, which describes the daffodils as human dancers, โtossing their heads in sprightly dance.โ) Wilson does the opposite, stressing that nature has no human emotion: โThe clouds have no history/And the sea feels no sorrow.โ This is another aspect of the albumโs perspective theme. Nature ignores us, so we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. Wilson says our atoms are just โborrowedโ; when we die, they return to the universe. This is ambiguous โ if our atoms are only โborrowedโ, we are insignificant, but we should also take good care of our atoms, as we only have temporary stewardship. Wilsonโs meditation on the nature of selfhood ends with a moving expression of existential angst, warmly sung, โIs this a dream?โ
‘A Beautiful Infinity IIโ begins at around 4:00 with the words โThereโs no reason for any of this.โ Wilson’s personal view โ with which some would disagree – is that the universe was created out of chaos, not by design or by a supreme being,
โThereโs no reason for any of this Just a beautiful infinity No design and no one at the wheel Just an existential mystery.โ
The idea of no one being at the wheel is reminiscent of โThe Creator has a Master Tapeโ from the Porcupine Tree album In Absentia (2002). We discover that โthe creator had a master tapeโ, which suggests design, only to find that โ ironically – โhe left it in a cab.โ
After the massed backing vocals of Wilson and Randy McStine, there are some whimsical, almost scatting vocals from Wilson at around 4:05, in the same style as on โHarridanโ, the opening track of Closure/Continuation. At around 5:00, McStine closes the track with a richly analogue Moog solo.
Infinity Measured In Moments
This section is the climax of side two. Rotem Wilson returns, reciting another list of space statistics to create a further sense of awe about the vastness of the universe. Blundellโs drumming here is impressive. He adds subtle shifts to the rhythmic patterns here, building the epic feel of the track and bringing a human feel to the electronic parts. The track is built around arpeggiating analogue synth patterns, just as Wilson built up the title track on The Harmony Codex. Wilsonโs vocals are warm and rich, multitracked in unison rather than complex harmonies, as often in his Porcupine Tree songs. McStine provides backing vocals and a guitar solo at 2:15, which combines an angular, modern feel with the classic uplifting rock solo.
The Inner Sleeve of In Absentia by Lasse Hoile
Itโs followed by handclaps (Wilson) and ukulele (McStine). Porcupine Tree fans may recall a similar effect on โTrainsโ (In Absentia, 2002), a fan favourite with over 38 million plays on Spotify at the time of writing. There is some very Peter Hook-style bass in this section. Wilson is a massive fan of Hookโs former band Joy Division, listing the bandโs debut single Transmission (1979), in his book Limited Edition of One as one of his top 100 tracks. At around 3:20, the track reaches a climax with Adam Holzmanโs Moog solo, the first real opportunity Holzman has on the album to show the warmth and virtuosity of his jazz-tinged playing, which was a real highlight of The Overview Tour that came to London in May 2025.
Permanence
The final section of the album is a contemplative instrumental, beautiful, ambient and ethereal. We are now floating in space, billions of light-years away from Earth. The encounter with the alien on the moor at the beginning of the album now seems an infinite time ago.
Theo Travis. Photo by Mariia Korneeva
Theo Travis plays the soprano sax solo. Travis worked on some of Wilsonโs solo albums, and the two worked together on Travisโ 2024 solo album Aeolus. That album is a one-hour Theo Travis piece for duduk; the instrument Travis played on โBeautiful Scarecrowโ on The Harmony Codex. Wilson produced the recordings and created soundscapes from Travisโs alto flute playing. That album is gentle, meditative, introspective and quietly mesmerising. Travisโs playing has the same effect on ‘Permanence.’
The section begins with the evocative sound of the electric piano, processed through a reverse echo. Two new instruments are added. The first is the celeste or celesta, a keyboard instrument that looks like a small upright piano. Like a piano, a hammer is operated by pressing a key, but instead of striking strings, the hammer hits a metal plate like that of a glockenspiel. Appropriately, in the context of this track, the name means โcelestialโ or โheavenly.โ The second instrument is the Moog synthesiser on which Wilson created a sound like the theremin.
In the film by Miles Skarin, we move gradually closer to a green shoot of life. An out-of-focus creature gradually comes into focus. Our old friend, the alien from Objects Outlive Us, intently investigates the green shoot. We hadnโt forgotten that the alien exists. There is hope after all.
This post was updated at 18.02 on 29 December 2025 to correct the explanation of the terms megametre and gigametre, which had incorrectly referred to kilometres (km) rather than metres (m)
Beato, Rick, Steven Wilson Discusses His Favorite [Sic] Albums (Rick Beato 2, YouTube 24/03/34) Kemp, Gary and Pratt, Guy, Gary Kemp album special with Steven Wilson (The Rockonteurs, YouTube 26/01/25) Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Omnibus Edition, Boekerij 2018) Earls, John, Steven Wilson: โIโve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar soloโ (NME 18/02/25) Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) Images from The Overview film by Miles Skarin of Crystal Spotlight Beato, Rick, Steven Wilson Discusses His Favorite [Sic] Albums (Rick Beato 2, YouTube 24/03/34) Kemp, Gary and Pratt, Guy, Gary Kemp album special with Steven Wilson (The Rockonteurs, YouTube 26/01/25) Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Omnibus Edition, Boekerij 2018) Earls, John, Steven Wilson: โIโve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar soloโ (NME 18/02/25) Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) Sharma, Amit, Steven Wilson on Porcupine Treeโs triumphant return and his love of โguitar players that can play one note and break your heartโ (Total Guitar, August 2022) Wilson, Steven, Limited Edition of One (Constable, April 2022)
The Overview is Steven Wilsonโs eighth solo album, released on 14 March 2025. It charted at number three in the UK, the fourth of Wilsonโs albums (as a solo artist or with his band Porcupine Tree) in a row to reach the UK top five. On his website, Wilson described the album as โa Kubrickian journey into the darkness of outer space.โ
The Overview Effect
The album takes its title from the Overview Effect, a term coined by author and space philosopher Frank White in his book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution to describe the cognitive shift experienced by astronauts looking back on the Earth from space.
“[The Overview Effect] is the experience of seeing first hand the reality that the Earth is in space, a tiny, fragile ball of life, โhanging in the void,โ shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. The experience often transforms astronautsโ perspective on the planet and humanityโs place in the universe. Some common aspects of it are a feeling of awe, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.”
Frank White
The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (First Edition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987)
White, who interviewed astronauts about their experiences, wrote that during the initial stages of the Space Program, it was thought that, โAll the astronauts have religious or spiritual experiences and that they all had their lives fundamentally changed… The reality is far more complex than that.โ He quotes the astronaut Don Lind, who said that having spoken to many other astronauts, he concluded that space travel would intensify previously held religious convictions but wouldnโt make someone religious.
The Blue Marble. The Earth Seen from Apollo 17. Source: Wikimedia Commons
One of the most strikingly negative reactions to travelling into space, mentioned by Wilson in several interviews, was โ ironically โ from Captain Kirk, the actor William Shatner. In his 2022 book, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder, he wrote that when he was in space, he experienced profound sadness and grief. Eventually, this became a profound feeling of hope, inspiring him to say that we should โrededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us.โ
“There was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing… Everything I had expected to see was wrong… The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.“
Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria Books, 2022)
William Shatner as Captain Kirk. Souce: NBC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wilson coined his own phrase for the Overview Effect, โcosmic vertigoโ, meaning a sense of the fragility of the Earth, and the insignificance of our lives in relation to the vastness of the cosmos. The existential struggle to make something of our lives, to make them signify something, is a recurring theme in Wilsonโs lyrics, going back to Signify (Porcupine Tree, 1996). He told Dave Everley of Prog that ‘Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo.โ As an atheist, he said that to give life meaning, humankind had invented religion.
โThe Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesnโt matter, and itโs a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.โ
Steven Wilson
Wilsonโs solution to the apparent futility and insignificance of our lives, and of the Earth in relation to the vastness of the universe, is not to embrace religion, or misery. He told Musicwaves magazine that, โThe Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesnโt matter, and itโs a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.โ
White wrote, ‘ The impact of the [Overview] Effect is not limited to space travellers alone.โ Wilson described the effect of profound awe and a feeling of insignificance when he visited the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) in the Atacama Desert in Chile in early 2025. When completed, the ELT will be able to see further into space and further back in time than any previous telescope. At the album launch at IMAX in London in February 2025, a photo of Wilson standing next to the telescope was exhibited on the vast screen, and Wilson was a tiny orange dot wearing a hi-vis jacket. Thinking about the Overview Effect led him to consider our insignificance and how that creates a sense of perspective. During the roundtable discussion at the IMAX album launch, he said he could have called the album ‘Perspective … but itโs not as good a title as The Overview.’
The Gap Between Releases
The gap between the release of Wilsonโs previous album, The Harmony Codex, in September 2023 and the release of The Overview was just under 18 months, a relatively short period considering the gap between his previous solo albums was around two to three years. He told Paul Sinclair of Super Deluxe Edition that there was a pragmatic reason for this. The Harmony Codex was his first album after COVID, and he felt that the previous album, The Future Bites, had been โvery divisive amongst my fans.โ He didn’t book a tour supporting The Harmony Codex because he wasnโt sure how people would react to the album. By the time he realised that the album had gone down well, it was too late to book a tour for 2024. He decided that in the meantime, he might as well make another record.
The Concept
While he was looking for a concept, Wilson met up with Alex Milas, Editor-in-Chief of Metal Hammer and founder of Space Rocks. This organisation describes itself as โa celebration of space exploration and the art, music, and culture it inspires.โ Wilsonโs original idea was to collaborate with Milas on an exhibition or an installation for which he created the music. Then Milas mentioned the Overview Effect.
The idea immediately appealed to Wilson. As a teenager, he had a fascination with space. He used to go out on summer evenings to gaze up at the stars. He enjoyed space films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1972), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He wrote tracks about space on some of his previous albums, particularly for Porcupine Tree. At the IMAX album launch, he said that in a โsplit second momentโ during his conversation with Milas, he had the title and the concept and heard the music in my head.โ He saw it as a โpiece of cinema for the ears.โ
He told Stephen Humphries of Under The Radar that he had written several albums about โplanet Earth and human beings and the way we engage with each other.โ It was time to โwrite an album about something bigger than us.โ
Humphries asked him why he was โasking these bigger questionsโ now. Wilson admitted that perhaps he was having โmy own existential crisis… of wanting more perspective on my own lifeโ. Even so, he found it โfascinatingโ to consider the vast numbers and distances in the universe. He told John Earls of NME that having a concept for the album before he started writing it led him to produce something that โintuitively felt like something long-form, analogous to a novel or a film.โ
โThis record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.โ
Steven Wilson
Wilson said to Everley, โThis record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.โ Wilson has an uneasy relationship with the genre. His previous three albums certainly strayed from prog rock. To the Bone was an art-rock record with only one long track, โDetonationโ; it also contained a happy pop song, โPermanating.โ The Future Bites was resolutely electronic. Its longest track, โPersonal Shopperโ was more like dystopian disco than prog. That album brought some of the best reviews of his career, โfrom the more indie, hipster people that hadn’t really paid attention to me beforeโ, but it also lost some of his core prog audience. To an extent, he has always enjoyed challenging his prog audience, but he also respects that audience. Although the album does mark a return to prog rock, itโs far from the loving, nostalgic homage to prog of his 2013 solo album The Raven that Refused to Sing.
The Album’s Structure
The album is divided into two long tracks of about 20 minutes each, โObjects Outlive Usโ and โThe Overview.โ Wilson told The Prog Report that an album with only two long tracks was โa wilfully uncommercial gestureโ and that โthe reason there are two pieces is Iโm old and I still think in terms of vinyl.โ
Wilson referenced other records with the same structure, such as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells(1973), Miles Davisโ In a Silent Way (1969) and Tangerine Dreamโs Rubycon (1975). He told Tobias Fischer of Tonefloat Magazine that he has always liked โgreat double albums with just one track per side.โ He referred to Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973 UK, 1974 US) by Yes, which he remixed in 2016, as a โmuch maligned record, but I love it.โ
Writing the Album
Wilson told Anil Prasad of Innerviews that โthe idea and title came before I had written a single note of music… Itโs nice when something this strong falls into your lap.โ The album almost wrote itself. Wilson wrote it in the order we hear it, and the lyrics came last.
At a Q&A session at Cultplex in Manchester in February 2025, Wilson told John Robb that โone doorway led to the nextโ, and that the album flowed out of him, โit doesnโt always work that way.โ It took Wilson only eight weeks to record the album at this home studio. The process was quite different from recording The Raven That Refused to Sing in a studio, surrounded by other musicians. He played all the bass parts, as he did on the most recent Porcupine Tree album, Closure/Continuation (2022). When he toured with Porcupine Tree, Nate Navarro played the bass parts. When he toured The Overview, the bass parts were played by Nick Beggs.
The Musicians
As with all his albums, except the very early ones with Porcupine Tree, Wilson used real drummers rather than using electronic drums or playing them himself. For the first side of the record, he used Russell Holzman, son of his regular keyboard player, Adam Holzman. Wilson said he wanted a drummer with no obvious connection to the world of progressive rock, or even rock music in general. Holzman plays drums for the American singer Caroline Polachek. Wilson had also seen his renditions of classic drum and bass breaks on Instagram. For the second side, Wilson brought in his regular drummer Craig Blundell, partly because of his experience as a prog rock drummer with the likes of Steve Hackett, but also because of his wide-ranging knowledge of multiple musical genres.
Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) โStruck’, Steven Wilson (February 11st [sic] 2025 (MUSICWAVES, 11/2/2025) Sinclair, Paul, Steven Wilson: The SDE interview: SW on his new album, The Overview, (Super Deluxe Edition, 17/03/25) Humphries, Stephen, Steven Wilson on โThe Overviewโ Space, the final musical frontier, (Under the Radar, 21/2/2025) Earls, John, Steven Wilson: โIโve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar soloโ (NME 18/02/25) Avin, Roie and Bailie, Geoff Steven Wilson on The Overview, the upcoming tour, the future of AI, and more. (Interview) (The Prog Report Podcast, 7/3/2025) Fischer, Tobias, Interview with Steven Wilson/ Porcupine Tree (Tonefloat Magazine, undated) Prasad , Anil, Steven Wilson Cosmic Perspectives (Innerviews, 25/02/25) Robb, John, Steven Wilson: โThe Overviewโ Audio-Visual Experience + Q&A (Cultplex Manchester, 26/02/25)
“We look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is.” Miles Skarin
A still from The Overview film directed by Miles Skarin
Miles Skarin makes music videos for Steven Wilson and his band Porcupine Tree. He also designs websites such as Stevenwilsonhq with his brother, Rob Skarin. Miles has recently made a full-length animated film to accompany Wilson’s latest solo album, The Overview. The film has been shown during the tour to support the new album, and the track Objects: Meanwhile from the first song on the new album Objects Outlive Us has been released as an official video.
Nick Holmes Music has been given an exclusive insight into the making of the new film with Miles Skarin [MS].
Nick Holmes Music: How did you first meet and work with Steven?
MS: We go back about ten years or so. We originally started out as massive Porcupine Tree fans. We made the fan site starsdie.com. Being big fans of Porcupine Tree, Steven Wilson, and the other progressive rock bands at the time, we made a couple of fan sites. We really wanted to know everything about Steven and Porcupine Tree, and where the music was coming from because we just loved it so much. A lot of these bands hadn’t really taken off on social media at the time.
Miles Skarin
My brother wrote a load of the news articles for the website. I did a lot of the design work. And then one day we had an e-mail that dropped into the inbox. That was Steven saying, “Hey, you guys are doing this really well, do you want to come on board and help us out?” Which was incredible as fans, to have that message just land in your inbox, it was a fantastic day. And so we just jumped at the chance. We redesigned Steven’s website and tried to boost his presence on social media, and we’ve been helping with that ever since.
Nick Holmes Music: Didn’t he say at the time that your website was doing better than his?
MS: I think that was what he said. I think it was just because we were putting way more content onto our website. One of the things that we were thinking about was that every now and again you’d have an album release. And then after the album cycle there would be nothing posted online. Maybe a year, two years later, thereโd be another album and maybe there’d be some press.
Steven always did incredible box sets. There was always a massive wealth of artwork and stuff to complement the music. So it was just a way of keeping fans engaged with Steven, even outside of the album cycles. And also while on tour as well, making sure to post photos and updates from live shows and just build that online community.
We had a forum at one point which we really enjoyed doing because it was bringing fans together and talking about the music that we loved. Through that process we met a few more people in the progressive rock space, record labels like Inside Out Music, Sony and Kscope; Steven was on working with those guys through Blackfield and his own releases at the time.
Nick Holmes Music: How did you feel when you saw your film on a massive screen at BFI IMAX in London at the premiere of The Overview?
MS: Oh wow. It’s just the peak, isn’t it? As a filmmaker, it doesn’t get better than that, surely. It was such an incredible experience, to see your work on a screen that’s the size of a building is something that I didn’t think I’d ever experience. As I was delivering the DCP file you take to give to the cinema to put it on the screen, the projectionist, Michael, took me up into the projection room at the back of the IMAX. And that’s cinema history, because you’ve got all of Christopher Nolan films; these huge spools of film, and they’re just labelled with handwritten notes saying โTenetโ, โInceptionโ and โInterstellar.โ it was just an absolutely wonderful experience to know that my film was going to be on the same screen.
I feel so fortunate and lucky to have to have been able to do it and it’s all thanks to Steven, for creating the music and placing his trust in me to do a film, hopefully that does some sort of justice to the incredible music that he produces.
Nick Holmes Music: Steven himself has often talked about his albums or individual tracks being like a film and even described his last solo album The Harmony Codex as โcinema for the yearsโ Was The Overview always going to be a soundtrack for a film? Is that how he saw it?
MS: I think he always saw it as a piece that was two halves, side one and side two. When we were talking about visuals for it, one of the things that we were talking about was if you’ve got two 20-minute-long songs there isn’t really a concept of singles. So the idea of doing a promotional single didn’t really apply. Of course we went with the Objects Outlive Us section Objects: Meanwhile as a single.
Steven Wilson – Objects Outlive Us: Objects: Meanwhile
MILES SKARIN ON THE SHAPES IN ‘OBJECTS MEANWHILE’
“The shapes in Objects Meanwhile are constellations, connecting the stars into these shapes. The first one we see are constellation shapes based on the real star positions but later on we see this effect in 3D, where we see the connections forming between a โpoint cloudโ of stars.“
From the start, Steven wanted there to be visual material, a film to go across the entire audio, which is such an incredible challenge to have to try and think about, because especially in my style, which is animation that’s a big undertaking. It was always from the start, โlet’s make a film, let’s make a movie for this.โ
Nick Holmes Music: How much scientific research did you do for the film?
MS: I’ve always loved space. I’ve always been aware of space, been aware of missions into space and where we are in space, and galaxies and solar systems. So I think there’s a lot of knowledge I had already accumulated about space. I really wanted to build that kind of idea of scale into the film as well, because that was what we were trying to produce from the start, the idea of perspective.
And so I was looking up scales in numbers of how large planets are on Wikipedia. You can search any star or planet and it will tell you in astronomical units how large that planet or star is. And the numbers get big very quickly. I tried putting all those numbers into my computer software thinking, โthis will be great. I’ll just put all the numbers in and then I can just pull the camera out and that would show me the scale.โ But it starts to glitch physically on the screen. It can’t work out the coordinates for the polygons and the shapes you’re making to exist in a space that large because the computers can’t handle the sheer size of it.
So I was trying to find out as much as I could about space, and trying to keep it very scientific in a way. But as soon as I realised it was going to need a certain level of artistic direction, because the software couldn’t handle it, I had to kind of deviate. But I did definitely try to keep as much of the scientific information there, and I was also looking into different phenomena and objects in space; one of them is called a magnetar, which is these incredibly dense stars which have a very strong magnetic field. And it’s fascinating reading about these objects in space that just don’t seem real. And yet they are out there somewhere. It was very enjoyable doing that.
Sunrise seen from space. Illustration inspired by the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Image by Michael Melchinger. Source Wikimedia Commons
Nick Holmes Music: Tell me about the visual language of the film. How much were you influenced by space films like 2001 or Interstellar, which are fantastic films visually?
MS: Those films are incredible. I would say those films would be my main inspiration and reference points for The Overview. I remember watching Interstellar in the cinema and being absolutely blown away by it, not just visually from how it depicts space, but also the performance of the actors as well, and the emotion, and the effect that time dilation would have on people experiencing it. They did that very, very well.
I guess our challenge was to try and create a new visual language. But the person I have to thank for most of that is Hajo [Mรผller] who had already created all this incredible artwork. It’s so stark and beautiful in the way that he’s used real imagery and texture to create the pieces. I love the large format images that Hajo produced to really give you that sense of a wide screen or cinematic format. He sent through a load of the artwork quite early in the process. His artwork by the time that I was really working with it was already mostly there and just incredible images. I was looking at that and thinking he’s done it, he’s created the visual language of The Overview and if I can even get a small piece of that into my film then I’ll be happy because I love his work.
Nick Holmes Music: You have said the biggest challenge was to convey the scale of space?
MS: I think the main piece that really shows the scale would be Perspective, the first section of the second half. We’ve got Rotem [Wilson]’s voice, speaking through these incredible numbers such as ten to the power of twelve. But what does that mean? And so one of the things we were talking about was by putting up that number onto the screen, do people know that that’s going to be? The number of zeros that are at the end of these numbers, your brain can’t process it that well. And so when we were thinking of showing the scales, I had to split up those sequences and of course it has to be stylized to the music as well.
But there’s one moment where you can see the sun and you can see the different rings of the orbits of our planets in our solar system. And the camera bounces back and bounces forward quite fast. One of the things that I’m not sure if people quite catch is that our Sun just shrinks by a huge amount and then these absolutely colossal stars that are the next scale up swirl into the frame. So even on a 4K screen, placing these objects next to each other, our Sun suddenly becomes minuscule against these larger stars out there. So it’s actually very difficult to have a reference point when you’re looking at these sorts of visuals in a way that really puts it in perspective for us humans to understand.
‘The combination of analogue electronics and my wife Rotemโs narration, accompanied by Miles Skarin’s brilliant visuals depicting the sheer enormity of our known universe and the idea of cosmic vertigo, is proving to be an incredible high point of the current live show.’Steven Wilson on The Overview: Perspective (1 July 2025)
The other part of the film that talks about scale is the section called Cosmic Suns of Toil which is midway through the first half. For that we’ve got the camera that just pulls back and goes through all the different layers of space. I wanted to frame our solar system and then what’s outside of our solar system. This is where I was doing my research on what these layers are, if I set a course for the stars and kept going, what objects would I move through. As you get outside of our solar system, there’s The Local Bubble, and The Local Cluster.
It’s amazing to consider that there’s so many other stars and solar systems out there, and then it just keeps going and keeps going until we can’t see any further because light can’t travel. There’s a certain amount of light that it can travel compared to how fast the speed of light is and that’s elapsed. Then eventually at the end of that section, Cosmic Suns of Toil, we reach the edge of the Cosmic Web, which is these, almost like strand filaments of the matter of galaxies.
And then what’s on the outside? We don’t know. So we have a slightly more abstract, stylized section and then we just dive straight down. The thing that I find amazing about that is it’s set up to be relative scale, not absolute scale. So when the camera flies straight back through the Local Cluster of our solar system and then back onto Earth, all of that’s over in about like three or four frames of video. Itโs incredible that we cross so much distance in the space of a millisecond.
The Alien on the moor
Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a bit more detail about the film? It starts off with the alien, saying, โDid you forget I exist now?โ Steven himself has said that’s slightly tongue in cheek. How do you feel about the alien? There’s a beautiful section at the end of Part I, where the alien is floating around in space. What’s your reaction to that alien?
MS: I feel like it’s a great way to introduce where we are right now as a species. I think the key takeaway from the film is that we look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is. I don’t know how many people in the modern age are looking up at space and thinking, “I know what’s up there and I know what that means about where I am.”
MILES SKARIN ON THE DESIGN OF THE ALIEN
“The alien design came from Hajo [Mรผller‘s] artwork… thereโs the image of the alien, so using that as reference we designed it as a 3D modelled character. The image in Hajoโs artwork had lots of earthy textures over it, so our first design used only these same materials for quite a flat, matte look. Steven Wilson then suggested that it needed to look more alien and like it had just crawled out of the muddy depths of the moor, and that influenced the more organic looking final design of the alien and the animation at the start of Objects Outlive Us.”
Every time I go outside and walk down to the end of my road at night, and I’ve got stars above me, I’m always looking up and thinking, โthat’s all right there.โ I feel like that’s a great moment to start the record and say we’re not looking at humans this time around. We know we’re looking out at space, but then we are looking back at what that means for the human race.
A teenager with his first telescope
And there with his first telescope A teenager stands full of hormones and hope As he squints at the night, like a painting of light He doesn’t suppose that a black hole implodes In a trillion years from now.
The section Objects Meanwhile, discusses a black hole swallowing an entire galaxy. And when you think, were there people in that galaxy, did they know what was about to happen to them and if so, what would they be thinking? We get wrapped up in things that maybe we should have a little bit more perspective on. If every single human on planet Earth was able to recognise that we are all just trapped on a rock that’s being flung through space, maybe we’d have a different worldview. But the human race is so complex, I’m not going to go there.
Nick Holmes Music: Talking of the human race, The Buddha of The Modern Agefeatures a series of man-made disasters that lead to the destruction of the Earth?
MS: That section is looking at humans and what we’re doing on Earth before we go out into space. We meet the alien, and then after that we are presented with Earth. It’s not meant to be a future version of Earth. It’s meant to be a current version of Earth. I think it’s very easy to look at dystopian scenes of natural disasters, wars and climate change and think this is all set 20 years in the future, and we’ll work it out, we’ll be fine.
But actually, this stuff is happening now. It’s interesting that while all of these events are playing out and things are getting more and more serious, is enough being done by the human race to really set us on a course where we’re not just going to end up in that dystopian world of Interstellar, a global food crisis and dust storms that swirl around the planet, to the point where the planet is not habitable anymore. Are we barrelling towards that future, and is it too late to stop it? Thereโs a lot of those classic narratives tied up in that section.
But of course presenting it in such a stark way on screen and moving through all of those environments is one way of really showing this is the state of things right now. Of course it’s dramatized a little bit with animation, and at the end you’ve got all of the figures stampeding and falling off a cliff. I mean take what you want from that.
The message of that section is that maybe the human race could be doing more, but then of course the human race is massively complex in itself. And there’s a lot of problems we need to work out. And I don’t think I’m the person to be able to offer the answers; but hopefully collectively, we can put differences behind us and actually try to work out these things.
‘And now in her old wedding bed/A lady will dream that her husband is dead/ Of course he’s alive/He’ll be back around five’
Nick Holmes Music: Objects: Meanwhile is a very literal and specific description of small-town England with lyrics by Andy Partridge, contrasted with what’s going on in other galaxies. I was interested to see that you turned it into something almost magical with all these shimmering figures, but it’s not a detailed rendition of the lyrics.
MS: The lyrics tell a story, but I’m very mindful about not just taking the lyrics and putting that into visuals. The lyrics tell such a wonderful story and the way it flows from scene to scene, I felt that had to be the way forward for that section. And by setting these small sequences but made out of stardust and put them into these cosmic-looking scenes, I hopefully created a quite a nice way of showing that.
That was one of the things we were talking about first. Stevenโs note was he wanted to have everyday objects presented as though they were like a nebula or a galaxy out in space. So I was trying to build different ways of showing that. We had a Nebula Generator [which digital artists use to create configurable space nebula effects]. I could put a 3D model into it, and then it would render it as a galaxy or a nebula out in space.
Her shopping bag broke sending eggs and flour crashing Down to the ground, just like star clusters smashing.
And I wanted there to be moments like the opening where the shopping bag falls and then the flour spreads out and there’s stars inside of that. I really wanted it to look like we were seeing like the birth of a galaxy or the birth of stars or something like that, where an event on Earth has a parallel to events out in space, visually at least.
Nick Holmes Music: There are some very abstract instrumental sections on The Overview. How did you decide to illustrate those, because there are no stories in those sections?
MS: A lot of the designs come from Hajoโs artwork. There are various sections and we wanted to have a journey, especially in the section, where we’ve got Randy McStine’s fantastic guitar solo, just after the Ark sequence where we go into an alien planet and we see the ghost on the moor again. For that sequence, I really wanted to put the viewer into that environment. And the idea there is that we had launched ourselves towards the end of the galaxy into the end of the universe, and now we’re flying back and landing on some other planet somewhere else. That was definitely trying to bring in as many of the colourful possibilities that alien worlds could have and just trying to realise that, and trying to show what it could look like.
I think a lot of these things were so influenced by films that we’ve seen already and designs that have been made, but also there’s probably limits to what we can imagine these alien worlds would look like because we are only influenced by what we see directly around us.
Nick Holmes Music: And in Perspective where Rotem Wilsonโs spoken words provide all the perspectives of sizes of planets and galaxies, how much were you drawing on real images and how much was your imagination?
MS: The James Webb Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope have been taking some absolutely fantastic images which are available online where artists can use them. That was a massive resource to be able to look at and get inspiration from.
But for all of the scenes in โPerspectiveโ, especially the ones where we’re going through nebulas and the larger cosmic objects, what I’m doing there is creating what is called a Pyro simulation which creates these kind of smoke effects. And that is driven off images and source material that’s taken from these incredible pictures of space.
And because they’re only two-dimensional images that we’ve got from these telescopes, what I wanted to be able to do is create that, but in a 3D space so I can fly a camera through it and we can see there’s some depth to it. I’m sure there’s probably some very technical way we could scientifically accurately do that. But imagine there’s just a slice of the photo or the image of that galaxy or that nebula, and then smoke starts to rise from both sides of that piece of paper that then creates this 3D object that I can then fly a camera into. I can then scatter stars inside of that as tiny little spheres that can then emit light, and that creates the effect of this 3D nebula.
Nick Holmes Music: Iโm going to ask a slightly less serious question now, but I have to say when I saw Steven as an astronaut, which obviously he was very excited about, I had this image of Buzz Lightyear.
MS: Yes! [laughs] One of the early notes that Steven gave me was that we didn’t want it to almost come across like an action figure, floating in space; but the actual range of motion you get in those space suits, there is only a certain amount of movement that you can do in zero gravity. But we added a little bit more movement into the character to try and hopefully reduce any sort of, ‘Look, it’s Buzz Lightyear floating out in space.’
That was really good fun. I think the idea for came from Steven – looking across the Earth initially and then just being pulled across time and space and then experiencing the entirety of everything in a flowing strand across the screen, and what that’s meant to represent is the passage of time in this thin thread that’s going across space. Steven falls into that thread and then visits the earth and all these different places and then falls in and out of that in space, which is quite disorientating in a way for him.
Nick Holmes Music: Steven has been quite open about his fear of flying, but has also said that on balance, he probably would go into space given the opportunity. Would you go into space if you had the chance?
MS: I would probably share his fear of flying in a way, because I guess I think about it too much. You’re being rocketed in a tiny little capsule across the sky. But we’ve got ways of managing it, and everything’s tested. And when we know that the technology works, it’s amazing. We’ve had so many years of space exploration that it’s now coming to a point where weโve commercial astronauts going up and experiencing space. You don’t have to be a NASA-trained astronaut, you need a lot of money at the moment, but maybe one day it will be a point where we can maybe think about doing that, and maybe going on a trip to the moon won’t be something out of The Jetsons. It would be achievable for most people and a regular occurrence.
To answer your question, I think I’d have to think very carefully about whether I did it or not. I guess I like having my feet on solid ground. But I think if I were given the opportunity, I don’t think I’d be able to pass it up, because not many people get to experience something like that. So I probably would be saying yes.
Nick Holmes Music: The final section, ‘Permanence,’ with Theo Travisโ beautifulsaxophone solo. Can you describe what’s happening visually there? Is there a green shoot of hope?
MS: At the end, we’ve just had the Infinity Measured in Moments section, which is such a huge crescendo to the piece. There’s so much going on in that section and everything’s building up, and then we get this very soft end to the film where we’re floating in space.
After the visual onslaught of the ending section, because it is quite a lot and it is intended to make the viewer feel dizzy, it is blurry in sections where it is difficult to focus on it. That section was meant to be a ride through space where we can really just take a moment to consider the frame and see this asteroid that we’re flying down onto, and in the background of that scene, we have a huge black hole. And so we’re just one of the rocks that’s orbiting this black hole. Inevitably, these rocks are going to be sucked into that black hole and shredded.
And then as we reach the surface, we have this green shoot of life appearing in a place where it really shouldn’t. We really wanted to have some sort of ending where it wasn’t all about space as a cold, dark place, where it’s about death and nothing exists out there. I would like to think that there is more life out there and that the chances of there being life are quite high, especially when you look at how many solar systems and planets are out there. We wanted to leave it with somewhat of a positive view after diving into the darker aspects of it.
Nick Holmes Music: It’s also a very Steven Wilson way to end an album, isn’t it? So many of his albums with Porcupine Tree and his solo albums end on a gentle, quiet track rather than in a very loud climax. Is it a technique which he employs a lot?
MS: Well, thereโs always been the really big epic tracks at the end of Steven Wilson albums, but yes, it’s going in the opposite direction and putting something quiet has been very effective as well. It just feels like you’ve got that moment to just sit back and take in what you’ve just heard.
Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a more general question? Are you a musician? Because watching it again, it struck me how clever the editing is, and how beautifully it matches the pace, the rhythm, and the emotion as well. But from a technical point of view you’re matching the music really well. Where does that come from in your background?
MS: When I was at school, I took music, but mainly music technology and production rather than a classical musical education. I was a kid who was trying to learn as much as I could on guitar, but I found all of the photography, video production, and animation side, and that’s what I ended up doing more music production than guitar. But I still play from time to time, and I still want to try and do something musically because I’ve been so fortunate to work with a lot of my musical heroes.
At some point, maybe I’ll decide to give music another shot. But it’s interesting you mentioned that, because I spent a lot of time listening through the music and finding the moments and following the music, and a lot of the time I find that as a filmmaker, you normally have to build your narrative structure, but what I’ve found is that the musicians have done that job for me. They’ve done the hard job of working out the journey that they’re taking the listener on; all I’m doing is just putting visuals to that story that they’ve already produced. As long as I can follow where the music is going and the moods and the styles of it, then I guess that’s all I need to know musically.
Nick Holmes Music: How would you sum up the narrative of The Overview?
MS: I think the main thing with The Overview, as Steven will say as well, is the idea of having perspective on what we’re doing and our legacy on Earth. What if an alien was looking down at Earth, what would they see and what would they think about us and the way that we live?
It’s a story of sustainability and trying to really protect the home that we all have and trying to forge a path towards being a sustainable human race where we’re able to live in harmony with the planet. A lot of people have had that same dream. But we have to make that align with the way that civilization has to run; we’re going to be consuming a certain number of resources for the human race to exist.
But I think that as long as decisions are being made, we’re consuming the right resources in terms of animals, forests that we’re cutting down, what we’re putting in the oceans. It’s an environmental message, but also an animal rights message as well, where I think that humans, hopefully at some point in time, can look at our impacts on the world and hopefully see a nicer world around us.
Nick Holmes Music: But I think, as you’ve touched on, it’s also a very human message about perspective, isn’t it?
MS: Yes, definitely that. We all get wrapped up in our own lives and everything can feel very overwhelming. You look at the news these days and it’s difficult to think we’re heading in the right direction. We are all just floating on a rock that’s flying through space. And as long as we can just be nice to each other – and I know that’s quite a naive thing to say – but maybe that is the way that we have to look at the world, to take each problem as it comes and make the most empathetic response where we’re understanding our fellow humans on the planet, but also our fellow species on the planet, looking at animals and making sure that we’re providing the best world for us all to live in.
I feel like these days we have the technology to make a better world. And so it saddens me when I see that decisions are being made that are not maybe for the greater good of the planet, and it’s more just to make a bit more money, which only benefits a certain few.
I think there’s a lot of complexity in the human race, but I think that there’s definitely a message in The Overview, which is perspective; let’s try and forge a good path forward.
Nick Holmes Music: Is there anything you would like to add?
MS: I should also mention that I was assisted by my good friend Jack Hubbard, who helped me out with a lot of the more technical visual effects. We both worked on the film, and we were both there at the BFI IMAX show, and it was just an amazing thing to be able to share that experience with someone who has supported me massively over the years on pretty much every single project.
Jack is a visual effects artist who works at Framestore, one of the largest visual effects houses in London. He’s a very good friend and heโs always up for a challenge and he was amazing in answering a lot of the more technical visual effects questions because he uses a more advanced 3D software than I do.
Part of the process of putting it into the cinema is that you have to follow a certain amount of spec and quality control to be able to put it in that sort of environment. And so a lot of what I’ve been learning about in terms of video production and filmmaking is how to produce content to that kind of high-resolution, high-quality scale, and of course Steven works with Dolby Atmos and all of the high-end audio standard. So throughout the production of The Overview, I was really keen to bring that kind of high res, high end workflow towards the visuals as well.
Jack works in high end visual effects for TV, film, and advertising. I try to bring as many of those workflows from these high-end visual effects productions into the work that I do, which is much smaller scale, but it’s amazing what anyone can now access on YouTube software that’s freely available. And you can just follow these same standards and quality processes that feature films go through.
We had a test day at the Dolby showroom in London, where we screened the first version of the film and listened to it back in the Atmos mix. And it was fascinating talking to them about the Dolby Vision and the Dolby Atmos standards that they produce, the high-end HDR imagery. And then also the high-resolution surround audio.
Maybe that’s next on my list of things to do, to try and work out how I produce the highest quality image possible. I know that if you’ve got a Dolby Vision capable TV, there is a way that we could start to create a version of The Overview so that future projects could be Dolby Atmos, but also Dolby Vision as well. I’d love that.
Nick Holmes Music: Thank you very much for your time, and for spending so long talking to me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.All stills from the film provided courtesy of Miles Skarin, with thanks.
This post was edited on 2 August 2025 to include details about the design of the alien and the shapes in ‘Objects Meanwhile’ provided by Miles Skarinand again on 4 August 2025 to add a link to the Official Video for The Overview: Perspective.
“We look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is.” Miles Skarin
A still from The Overview film directed by Miles Skarin
Miles Skarin makes music videos for Steven Wilson and his band Porcupine Tree. He also designs websites such as Stevenwilsonhq with his brother, Rob Skarin. Miles has recently made a full-length animated film to accompany Wilson’s latest solo album, The Overview. The film has been shown during the tour to support the new album, and the track Objects: Meanwhile from the first song on the new album Objects Outlive Us has been released as an official video.
Nick Holmes Music has been given an exclusive insight into the making of the new film with Miles Skarin [MS].
Nick Holmes Music: How did you first meet and work with Steven?
MS: We go back about ten years or so. We originally started out as massive Porcupine Tree fans. We made the fan site starsdie.com. Being big fans of Porcupine Tree, Steven Wilson, and the other progressive rock bands at the time, we made a couple of fan sites. We really wanted to know everything about Steven and Porcupine Tree, and where the music was coming from because we just loved it so much. A lot of these bands hadn’t really taken off on social media at the time.
Miles Skarin
My brother wrote a load of the news articles for the website. I did a lot of the design work. And then one day we had an e-mail that dropped into the inbox. That was Steven saying, “Hey, you guys are doing this really well, do you want to come on board and help us out?” Which was incredible as fans, to have that message just land in your inbox, it was a fantastic day. And so we just jumped at the chance. We redesigned Steven’s website and tried to boost his presence on social media, and we’ve been helping with that ever since.
Nick Holmes Music: Didn’t he say at the time that your website was doing better than his?
MS: I think that was what he said. I think it was just because we were putting way more content onto our website. One of the things that we were thinking about was that every now and again you’d have an album release. And then after the album cycle there would be nothing posted online. Maybe a year, two years later, thereโd be another album and maybe there’d be some press.
Steven always did incredible box sets. There was always a massive wealth of artwork and stuff to complement the music. So it was just a way of keeping fans engaged with Steven, even outside of the album cycles. And also while on tour as well, making sure to post photos and updates from live shows and just build that online community.
We had a forum at one point which we really enjoyed doing because it was bringing fans together and talking about the music that we loved. Through that process we met a few more people in the progressive rock space, record labels like Inside Out Music, Sony and Kscope; Steven was on working with those guys through Blackfield and his own releases at the time.
Nick Holmes Music: How did you feel when you saw your film on a massive screen at BFI IMAX in London at the premiere of The Overview?
MS: Oh wow. It’s just the peak, isn’t it? As a filmmaker, it doesn’t get better than that, surely. It was such an incredible experience, to see your work on a screen that’s the size of a building is something that I didn’t think I’d ever experience. As I was delivering the DCP file you take to give to the cinema to put it on the screen, the projectionist, Michael, took me up into the projection room at the back of the IMAX. And that’s cinema history, because you’ve got all of Christopher Nolan films; these huge spools of film, and they’re just labelled with handwritten notes saying โTenetโ, โInceptionโ and โInterstellar.โ it was just an absolutely wonderful experience to know that my film was going to be on the same screen.
I feel so fortunate and lucky to have to have been able to do it and it’s all thanks to Steven, for creating the music and placing his trust in me to do a film, hopefully that does some sort of justice to the incredible music that he produces.
Nick Holmes Music: Steven himself has often talked about his albums or individual tracks being like a film and even described his last solo album The Harmony Codex as โcinema for the yearsโ Was The Overview always going to be a soundtrack for a film? Is that how he saw it?
MS: I think he always saw it as a piece that was two halves, side one and side two. When we were talking about visuals for it, one of the things that we were talking about was if you’ve got two 20-minute-long songs there isn’t really a concept of singles. So the idea of doing a promotional single didn’t really apply. Of course we went with the Objects Outlive Us section Objects: Meanwhile as a single.
Steven Wilson – Objects Outlive Us: Objects: Meanwhile
MILES SKARIN ON THE SHAPES IN ‘OBJECTS MEANWHILE’
“The shapes in Objects Meanwhile are constellations, connecting the stars into these shapes. The first one we see are constellation shapes based on the real star positions but later on we see this effect in 3D, where we see the connections forming between a โpoint cloudโ of stars.“
From the start, Steven wanted there to be visual material, a film to go across the entire audio, which is such an incredible challenge to have to try and think about, because especially in my style, which is animation that’s a big undertaking. It was always from the start, โlet’s make a film, let’s make a movie for this.โ
Nick Holmes Music: How much scientific research did you do for the film?
MS: I’ve always loved space. I’ve always been aware of space, been aware of missions into space and where we are in space, and galaxies and solar systems. So I think there’s a lot of knowledge I had already accumulated about space. I really wanted to build that kind of idea of scale into the film as well, because that was what we were trying to produce from the start, the idea of perspective.
And so I was looking up scales in numbers of how large planets are on Wikipedia. You can search any star or planet and it will tell you in astronomical units how large that planet or star is. And the numbers get big very quickly. I tried putting all those numbers into my computer software thinking, โthis will be great. I’ll just put all the numbers in and then I can just pull the camera out and that would show me the scale.โ But it starts to glitch physically on the screen. It can’t work out the coordinates for the polygons and the shapes you’re making to exist in a space that large because the computers can’t handle the sheer size of it.
So I was trying to find out as much as I could about space, and trying to keep it very scientific in a way. But as soon as I realised it was going to need a certain level of artistic direction, because the software couldn’t handle it, I had to kind of deviate. But I did definitely try to keep as much of the scientific information there, and I was also looking into different phenomena and objects in space; one of them is called a magnetar, which is these incredibly dense stars which have a very strong magnetic field. And it’s fascinating reading about these objects in space that just don’t seem real. And yet they are out there somewhere. It was very enjoyable doing that.
Sunrise seen from space. Illustration inspired by the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Image by Michael Melchinger. Source Wikimedia Commons
Nick Holmes Music: Tell me about the visual language of the film. How much were you influenced by space films like 2001 or Interstellar, which are fantastic films visually?
MS: Those films are incredible. I would say those films would be my main inspiration and reference points for The Overview. I remember watching Interstellar in the cinema and being absolutely blown away by it, not just visually from how it depicts space, but also the performance of the actors as well, and the emotion, and the effect that time dilation would have on people experiencing it. They did that very, very well.
I guess our challenge was to try and create a new visual language. But the person I have to thank for most of that is Hajo [Mรผller] who had already created all this incredible artwork. It’s so stark and beautiful in the way that he’s used real imagery and texture to create the pieces. I love the large formats images that Hajo produced to really give you that sense of a wide screen or cinematic format. He sent through a load of the artwork quite early in the process. His artwork by the time that I was really working with it was already mostly there and just incredible images. I was looking at that and thinking he’s done it, he’s created the visual language of The Overview and if I can even get a small piece of that into my film then I’ll be happy because I love his work.
Nick Holmes Music: You have said the biggest challenge was to convey the scale of space?
MS: I think the main piece that really shows the scale would be Perspective, the first section of the second half. We’ve got Rotem [Wilson]’s voice, speaking through these incredible numbers such as ten to the power of twelve. But what does that mean? And so one of the things we were talking about was by putting up that number onto the screen, do people know that that’s going to be? The number of zeros that are at the end of these numbers, your brain can’t process it that well. And so when we were thinking of showing the scales, I had to split up those sequences and of course it has to be stylized to the music as well.
But there’s one moment where you can see the sun and you can see the different rings of the orbits of our planets in our solar system. And the camera bounces back and bounces forward quite fast. One of the things that I’m not sure if people quite catch is that our Sun just shrinks by a huge amount and then these absolutely colossal stars that are the next scale up swirl into the frame. So even on a 4K screen, placing these objects next to each other, our Sun suddenly becomes minuscule against these larger stars out there. So it’s actually very difficult to have a reference point when you’re looking at these sorts of visuals in a way that really puts it in perspective for us humans to understand.
The other part of the film that talks about scale is the section called Cosmic Suns of Toil which is midway through the first half. For that we’ve got the camera that just pulls back and goes through all the different layers of space. I wanted to frame our solar system and then what’s outside of our solar system. This is where I was doing my research on what these layers are, if I set a course for the stars and kept going, what objects would I move through. As you get outside of our solar system, there’s The Local Bubble, and The Local Cluster.
It’s amazing to consider that there’s so many other stars and solar systems out there, and then it just keeps going and keeps going until we can’t see any further because light can’t travel. There’s a certain amount of light that it can travel compared to how fast the speed of light is and that’s elapsed. Then eventually at the end of that section, Cosmic Suns of Toil, we reach the edge of the Cosmic Web, which is these, almost like strand filaments of the matter of galaxies.
And then what’s on the outside? We don’t know. So we have a slightly more abstract, stylized section and then we just dive straight down. The thing that I find amazing about that is it’s set up to be relative scale, not absolute scale. So when the camera flies straight back through the Local Cluster of our solar system and then back onto Earth, all of that’s over in about like three or four frames of video. Itโs incredible that we cross so much distance in the space of a millisecond.
The Alien on the moor
Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a bit more detail about the film? It starts off with the alien, saying, โDid you forget I exist now?โ Steven himself has said that’s slightly tongue in cheek. How do you feel about the alien? There’s a beautiful section at the end of Part I, where the alien is floating around in space. What’s your reaction to that alien?
MS: I feel like it’s a great way to introduce where we are right now as a species. I think the key takeaway from the film is that we look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is. I don’t know how many people in the modern age are looking up at space and thinking, “I know what’s up there and I know what that means about where I am.”
MILES SKARIN ON THE DESIGN OF THE ALIEN
“The alien design came from Hajo [Mรผller‘s] artwork… thereโs the image of the alien, so using that as reference we designed it as a 3D modelled character.ย The image in Hajoโs artwork had lots of earthy textures over it, so our first design used only these same materials for quite aย flat,ย matte look. Steven Wilson then suggested that it needed to look more alien and like it had just crawled out of the muddy depths of the moor, and that influenced the more organic looking final design of the alien and the animation at the start of Objects Outlive Us.”
Every time I go outside and walk down to the end of my road at night, and I’ve got stars above me, I’m always looking up and thinking, โthat’s all right there.โ I feel like that’s a great moment to start the record and say we’re not looking at humans this time around. We know we’re looking out at space, but then we are looking back at what that means for the human race.
A teenager with his first telescope
And there with his first telescope A teenager stands full of hormones and hope As he squints at the night, like a painting of light He doesn’t suppose that a black hole implodes In a trillion years from now.
The section Objects Meanwhile, discusses a black hole swallowing an entire galaxy. And when you think, were there people in that galaxy, did they know what was about to happen to them and if so, what would they be thinking? We get wrapped up in things that maybe we should have a little bit more perspective on. If every single human on planet Earth was able to recognise that we are all just trapped on a rock that’s being flung through space, maybe we’d have a different worldview. But the human race is so complex, I’m not going to go there.
Nick Holmes Music: Talking of the human race, The Buddha of The Modern Agefeatures a series of man-made disasters that lead to the destruction of the Earth?
MS: That section is looking at humans and what we’re doing on Earth before we go out into space. We meet the alien, and then after that we are presented with Earth. It’s not meant to be a future version of Earth. It’s meant to be a current version of Earth. I think it’s very easy to look at dystopian scenes of natural disasters, wars and climate change and think this is all set 20 years in the future, and we’ll work it out, we’ll be fine.
But actually, this stuff is happening now. It’s interesting that while all of these events are playing out and things are getting more and more serious, is enough being done by the human race to really set us on a course where we’re not just going to end up in that dystopian world of Interstellar, a global food crisis and dust storms that swirl around the planet, to the point where the planet is not habitable anymore. Are we barrelling towards that future, and is it too late to stop it? Thereโs a lot of those classic narratives tied up in that section.
But of course presenting it in such a stark way on screen and moving through all of those environments is one way of really showing this is the state of things right now. Of course it’s dramatized a little bit with animation, and at the end you’ve got all of the figures stampeding and falling off a cliff. I mean take what you want from that.
The message of that section is that maybe the human race could be doing more, but then of course the human race is massively complex in itself. And there’s a lot of problems we need to work out. And I don’t think I’m the person to be able to offer the answers; but hopefully collectively, we can put differences behind us and actually try to work out these things.
‘And now in her old wedding bed/A lady will dream that her husband is dead/ Of course he’s alive/He’ll be back around five’
Nick Holmes Music: Objects: Meanwhile is a very literal and specific description of small-town England with lyrics by Andy Partridge, contrasted with what’s going on in other galaxies. I was interested to see that you turned it into something almost magical with all these shimmering figures, but it’s not a detailed rendition of the lyrics.
MS: The lyrics tell a story, but I’m very mindful about not just taking the lyrics and putting that into visuals. The lyrics tell such a wonderful story and the way it flows from scene to scene, I felt that had to be the way forward for that section. And by setting these small sequences but made out of stardust and put them into these cosmic-looking scenes, I hopefully created a quite a nice way of showing that.
That was one of the things we were talking about first. Stevenโs note was he wanted to have everyday objects presented as though they were like a nebula or a galaxy out in space. So I was trying to build different ways of showing that. We had a Nebula Generator [which digital artists use to create configurable space nebula effects]. I could put a 3D model into it, and then it would render it as a galaxy or a nebula out in space.
Her shopping bag broke sending eggs and flour crashing Down to the ground, just like star clusters smashing.
And I wanted there to be moments like the opening where the shopping bag falls and then the flour spreads out and there’s stars inside of that. I really wanted it to look like we were seeing like the birth of a galaxy or the birth of stars or something like that, where an event on Earth has a parallel to events out in space, visually at least.
Nick Holmes Music: There are some very abstract instrumental sections on The Overview. How did you decide to illustrate those, because there are no stories in those sections?
MS: A lot of the designs come from Hajoโs artwork. There are various sections and we wanted to have a journey, especially in the section, where we’ve got Randy McStine’s fantastic guitar solo, just after the Ark sequence where we go into an alien planet and we see the ghost on the moor again. For that sequence, I really wanted to put the viewer into that environment. And the idea there is that we had launched ourselves towards the end of the galaxy into the end of the universe, and now we’re flying back and landing on some other planet somewhere else. That was definitely trying to bring in as many of the colourful possibilities that alien worlds could have and just trying to realise that, and trying to show what it could look like.
I think a lot of these things were so influenced by films that we’ve seen already and designs that have been made, but also there’s probably limits to what we can imagine these alien worlds would look like because we are only influenced by what we see directly around us.
Nick Holmes Music: And in Perspective where Rotem Wilsonโs spoken words provide all the perspectives of sizes of planets and galaxies, how much were you drawing on real images and how much was your imagination?
MS: The James Webb Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope have been taking some absolutely fantastic images which are available online where artists can use them. That was a massive resource to be able to look at and get inspiration from.
But for all of the scenes in โPerspectiveโ, especially the ones where we’re going through nebulas and the larger cosmic objects, what I’m doing there is creating what is called a Pyro simulation which creates these kind of smoke effects. And that is driven off images and source material that’s taken from these incredible pictures of space.
And because they’re only two-dimensional images that we’ve got from these telescopes, what I wanted to be able to do is create that, but in a 3D space so I can fly a camera through it and we can see there’s some depth to it. I’m sure there’s probably some very technical way we could scientifically accurately do that. But imagine there’s just a slice of the photo or the image of that galaxy or that nebula, and then smoke starts to rise from both sides of that piece of paper that then creates this 3D object that I can then fly a camera into. I can then scatter stars inside of that as tiny little spheres that can then emit light, and that creates the effect of this 3D nebula.
Nick Holmes Music: Iโm going to ask a slightly less serious question now, but I have to say when I saw Steven as an astronaut, which obviously he was very excited about, I had this image of Buzz Lightyear.
MS: Yes! [laughs] One of the early notes that Steven gave me was that we didn’t want it to almost come across like an action figure, floating in space; but the actual range of motion you get in those space suits, there is only a certain amount of movement that you can do in zero gravity. But we added a little bit more movement into the character to try and hopefully reduce any sort of, ‘Look, it’s Buzz Lightyear floating out in space.’
That was really good fun. I think the idea for came from Steven – looking across the Earth initially and then just being pulled across time and space and then experiencing the entirety of everything in a flowing strand across the screen, and what that’s meant to represent is the passage of time in this thin thread that’s going across space. Steven falls into that thread and then visits the earth and all these different places and then falls in and out of that in space, which is quite disorientating in a way for him.
Nick Holmes Music: Steven has been quite open about his fear of flying, but has also said that on balance, he probably would go into space given the opportunity. Would you go into space if you had the chance?
MS: I would probably share his fear of flying in a way, because I guess I think about it too much. You’re being rocketed in a tiny little capsule across the sky. But we’ve got ways of managing it, and everything’s tested. And when we know that the technology works, it’s amazing. We’ve had so many years of space exploration that it’s now coming to a point where weโve commercial astronauts going up and experiencing space. You don’t have to be a NASA-trained astronaut, you need a lot of money at the moment, but maybe one day it will be a point where we can maybe think about doing that, and maybe going on a trip to the moon won’t be something out of The Jetsons. It would be achievable for most people and a regular occurrence.
To answer your question, I think I’d have to think very carefully about whether I did it or not. I guess I like having my feet on solid ground. But I think if I were given the opportunity, I don’t think I’d be able to pass it up, because not many people get to experience something like that. So I probably would be saying yes.
Nick Holmes Music: The final section, ‘Permanence,’ with Theo Travisโ beautifulsaxophone solo. Can you describe what’s happening visually there? Is there a green shoot of hope?
MS: At the end, we’ve just had the Infinity Measured in Moments section, which is such a huge crescendo to the piece. There’s so much going on in that section and everything’s building up, and then we get this very soft end to the film where we’re floating in space.
After the visual onslaught of the ending section, because it is quite a lot and it is intended to make the viewer feel dizzy, it is blurry in sections where it is difficult to focus on it. That section was meant to be a ride through space where we can really just take a moment to consider the frame and see this asteroid that we’re flying down onto, and in the background of that scene, we have a huge black hole. And so we’re just one of the rocks that’s orbiting this black hole. Inevitably, these rocks are going to be sucked into that black hole and shredded.
And then as we reach the surface, we have this green shoot of life appearing in a place where it really shouldn’t. We really wanted to have some sort of ending where it wasn’t all about space as a cold, dark place, where it’s about death and nothing exists out there. I would like to think that there is more life out there and that the chances of there being life are quite high, especially when you look at how many solar systems and planets are out there. We wanted to leave it with somewhat of a positive view after diving into the darker aspects of it.
Nick Holmes Music: It’s also a very Steven Wilson way to end an album, isn’t it? So many of his albums with Porcupine Tree and his solo albums end on a gentle, quiet track rather than in a very loud climax. Is it a technique which he employs a lot?
MS: Well, thereโs always been the really big epic tracks at the end of Steven Wilson albums, but yes, it’s going in the opposite direction and putting something quiet has been very effective as well. It just feels like you’ve got that moment to just sit back and take in what you’ve just heard.
Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a more general question? Are you a musician? Because watching it again, it struck me how clever the editing is, and how beautifully it matches the pace, the rhythm, and the emotion as well. But from a technical point of view you’re matching the music really well. Where does that come from in your background?
MS: When I was at school, I took music, but mainly music technology and production rather than a classical musical education. I was a kid who was trying to learn as much as I could on guitar, but I found all of the photography, video production, and animation side, and that’s what I ended up doing more music production than guitar. But I still play from time to time, and I still want to try and do something musically because I’ve been so fortunate to work with a lot of my musical heroes.
At some point, maybe I’ll decide to give music another shot. But it’s interesting you mentioned that, because I spent a lot of time listening through the music and finding the moments and following the music, and a lot of the time I find that as a filmmaker, you normally have to build your narrative structure, but what I’ve found is that the musicians have done that job for me. They’ve done the hard job of working out the journey that they’re taking the listener on; all I’m doing is just putting visuals to that story that they’ve already produced. As long as I can follow where the music is going and the moods and the styles of it, then I guess that’s all I need to know musically.
Nick Holmes Music: How would you sum up the narrative of The Overview?
MS: I think the main thing with The Overview, as Steven will say as well, is the idea of having perspective on what we’re doing and our legacy on Earth. What if an alien was looking down at Earth, what would they see and what would they think about us and the way that we live?
It’s a story of sustainability and trying to really protect the home that we all have and trying to forge a path towards being a sustainable human race where we’re able to live in harmony with the planet. A lot of people have had that same dream. But we have to make that align with the way that civilization has to run; we’re going to be consuming a certain number of resources for the human race to exist.
But I think that as long as decisions are being made, we’re consuming the right resources in terms of animals, forests that we’re cutting down, what we’re putting in the oceans. It’s an environmental message, but also an animal rights message as well, where I think that humans, hopefully at some point in time, can look at our impacts on the world and hopefully see a nicer world around us.
Nick Holmes Music: But I think, as you’ve touched on, it’s also a very human message about perspective, isn’t it?
MS: Yes, definitely that. We all get wrapped up in our own lives and everything can feel very overwhelming. You look at the news these days and it’s difficult to think we’re heading in the right direction. We are all just floating on a rock that’s flying through space. And as long as we can just be nice to each other – and I know that’s quite a naive thing to say – but maybe that is the way that we have to look at the world, to take each problem as it comes and make the most empathetic response where we’re understanding our fellow humans on the planet, but also our fellow species on the planet, looking at animals and making sure that we’re providing the best world for us all to live in.
I feel like these days we have the technology to make a better world. And so it saddens me when I see that decisions are being made that are not maybe for the greater good of the planet, and it’s more just to make a bit more money, which only benefits a certain few.
I think there’s a lot of complexity in the human race, but I think that there’s definitely a message in The Overview, which is perspective; let’s try and forge a good path forward.
Nick Holmes Music: Is there anything you would like to add?
MS: I should also mention that I was assisted by my good friend Jack Hubbard, who helped me out with a lot of the more technical visual effects. We both worked on the film, and we were both there at the BFI IMAX show, and it was just an amazing thing to be able to share that experience with someone who has supported me massively over the years on pretty much every single project.
Jack is a visual effects artist who works at Framestore, one of the largest visual effects houses in London. He’s a very good friend and heโs always up for a challenge and he was amazing in answering a lot of the more technical visual effects questions because he uses a more advanced 3D software than I do.
Part of the process of putting it into the cinema is that you have to follow a certain amount of spec and quality control to be able to put it in that sort of environment. And so a lot of what I’ve been learning about in terms of video production and filmmaking is how to produce content to that kind of high-resolution, high-quality scale, and of course Steven works with Dolby Atmos and all of the high-end audio standard. So throughout the production of The Overview, I was really keen to bring that kind of high res, high end workflow towards the visuals as well.
Jack works in high end visual effects for TV, film, and advertising. I try to bring as many of those workflows from these high-end visual effects productions into the work that I do, which is much smaller scale, but it’s amazing what anyone can now access on YouTube software that’s freely available. And you can just follow these same standards and quality processes that feature films go through.
We had a test day at the Dolby showroom in London, where we screened the first version of the film and listened to it back in the Atmos mix. And it was fascinating talking to them about the Dolby Vision and the Dolby Atmos standards that they produce, the high-end HDR imagery. And then also the high-resolution surround audio.
Maybe that’s next on my list of things to do, to try and work out how I produce the highest quality image possible. I know that if you’ve got a Dolby Vision capable TV, there is a way that we could start to create a version of The Overview so that future projects could be Dolby Atmos, but also Dolby Vision as well. I’d love that.
Nick Holmes Music: Thank you very much for your time, and for spending so long talking to me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.All stills from the film provided courtesy of Miles Skarin, with thanks.
***** Steven Wilson’s Epic Return to Solo Performance
Steven Wilson last performed as a live solo act in England seven years ago at the Royal Albert Hall in London, in a series of three concerts, one of which was later released as the concert film Home Invasion. That tour supported his fifth studio album, To the Bone, released in 2017. Since then, he has released three solo albums: The Future Bites (2021), The Harmony Codex (2023) and The Overview, released earlier this year. He tried twice to tour The Future Bites, but was twice thwarted by COVID-19.
In the meantime, to the surprise of many, he returned in 2022 with a new Porcupine Tree studio album, Closure/Continuation. Recent tours have been in support of that album โ he played at Wembley Arena in London in late 2022, and at Castlefield Bowl in Manchester the following summer. He now has two touring bands: Porcupine Tree with Gavin Harrison on drums, Richard Barbieri on keyboards and Nate Navarro on bass; his solo band with Craig Blundell on drums, Nick Beggs on bass, and Adam Holzman on keyboards. The only common denominator, apart from Wilson himself, is the versatile American guitarist and backing vocalist Randy McStine.
Wilson did a short solo performance of tracks from The Harmony Codex at EartH in Hackney to mark the release of that album, but apart from that, this concert marks his return to his home town to play a solo gig. And he seems very happy to be home. Modestly describing himself as the worst musician in his band (if thatโs true, thatโs only because heโs surrounded by a group of phenomenal musicians), he acts as lead vocalist, and sometimes guitar and keyboard player. At other times, heโs more like the leader of a jazz band, bringing the other musicians in and at one point joining Beggs in a forensic but benign examination of Blundellโs drumming.
And the jazz analogy doesnโt end there. We are lucky enough to see the jazz saxophonist, flautist and regular Wilson collaborator Theo Travis performing for one night only (โno expense spent’ quips Wilson) on two songs from Grace For Drowning: No Part of Me and Remainder the Black Dog. His playing is as inventive as it was in the stunning solo set he did at the Prog the Forest festival last December. He also plays in Permanence, the final section of The Overview, one of those gorgeous, profoundly contemplative songs with which Wilson has often ended his albums โ Collapse the Light into Earth from Porcupine Treeโs In Absentia (2002) springs to mind. The latter song contemplates the aftermath of 9/11, while the former considers whether there may be green shoots of life on other planets or in other galaxies after mankind has destroyed the Earth; both are weighty subjects.
The jazz theme of the music continues into Adam Holzmanโs keyboard playing. He shows his full jazz pedigree tonight (he was Miles Davisโs Music Director in the mid-to late 1980s), with lovely Fender Rhodes chords, exhilarating Moog runs, as well as rich Mellotron harmonies for the prog purists. Nick Beggs plays upright jazz bass on a couple of songs, and Craig Blundellโs drumming is fiercely syncopated, with some jazzy cymbal work. He drives the band with intense snare beats, and the physicality is visceral. Itโs high but deserved praise to say that he has become to Wilsonโs solo band what drummer Gavin Harrison has become to Porcupine Tree. Both drummers are amazing.
The concert begins with a complete performance of the two-part new album, The Overview. Projected behind the band is Miles Skarinโs stunning new film, which explores and illuminates the themes of the album. Seeing it at the IMAX launch in London revealed its pristine quality, but with strong concert lights and dry ice in front of it, the animated film seems to take on an almost 3-D quality. Having a live band playing in front of it makes this a truly immersive experience, of which both Wilson and Skarin can be justly proud. The pristine visuals are matched by the clarity of the live sound, which is superb throughout the gig.
From the opening few bars, itโs clear that Wilson is in excellent voice; his falsetto on the words โI incline myself to spaceโ is as powerful as it has ever been live. Three hours later, in the encores, his voice is as strong as ever. Instrumentally, despite his protestations, he is a powerful player. Itโs great to see him showcasing his skills on the PRS guitars, which are beloved by his prog fans for their mellow and versatile tones. McStine matches his virtuosity, the two of them coming onto the apron of the stage to duet close to the audience.
Beggs is on stunning form too. The opening of Luminol from The Raven That Refused to Sing reminds us of the robust virtuosity and rhythmic precision of his playing. His sound is reminiscent of Chris Squire, the bedrock on which the sound of Yes was built for so many years. The song is an opportunity for Wilson and McStine to join Beggs in mellifluous three-part harmonies. It also showcases another jazzy element of tonightโs band: an extended improvisation at the end of the song. Beggs also shines in the driving instrumental Vermillioncore from the EP 4+1โ2 . But perhaps the biggest surprise is that he and drummer Blundell perform the only Porcupine Tree song of the evening, Dislocated Day (from the early space-rock LP The Sky Moves Sideways) in such a blisteringly funky version.
Earlier, space rock is represented in a very different way, with Wilson playing analogue synths, spreading himself from one bank of synths to another like Rick Wakeman without the cape. His wife Rotem joins him on an evocative spoken word description of the Earth viewed from space, tying in neatly with the view of Earth from space described in the Overview Effect, in which astronauts are emotionally and sometimes spiritually affected when viewing the Earth from space.
This is a resolutely proggy evening. Itโs fascinating to speculate what the abandoned tour for The Future Bites would have been like, with its much more electronic sound, but only one song has survived the Pandemic into this set list, King Ghost. Wilson graciously accepts that some members of the audience may be there with friends or family who are less prog-minded. His concession to them is to play the rocky ballad, What Life Brings (from The Harmony Codex), which he announces is only four minutes long.
But Prog Widows and others who like short songs shouldnโt be lulled into a false sense of security. Wilson announces at the end of the concert that there will be two encores, but one of them is fifteen minutes long. This is the prog epic Ancestral from Hand. Cannot. Erase. which is performed here in an uplifting version. On earlier tour dates, Wilson ended with an emotional song, Pariah from To the Bone. Tonight, he chooses an equally emotional song, the title track from The Raven, with Jess Cope’s powerful video behind him.
The audience pays rapt attention throughout the concert, aided by Wilsonโs insistence that phones shouldnโt be used for photos or videos, which is largely respected. So we live in the moment, revelling in the joy of musicians playing at the very pinnacle of their game. It’s a privilege to be here.
The standing ovation at the end of the gig.
This post was updated on Thursday 15 May 2025 to add Theo Travis’s name,ย and to credit Jess Cope for the video of TheRaven That Refused to Sing
This post was further updated on 13 September 2025 to confirm that Adam Holzman worked with Miles Davis in the mid-to late 1980s, not the 1990s as previously stated
Steven Wilsonโs 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 โThe Overview Effectโ. 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.
The cover of Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015)
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, โI barely know my brother. I know he has a wife and two children, but I have no idea if heโs happy or what is important to him.โ Poignantly, she refers to the annual Christmas card she has just received from him and the invitation to visit that she knows she wonโt take up, โfor some reason this time it made me cry.โ 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, โIโm feeling kind of drowsy now/So Iโll finish this tomorrow.โ This could be a note of hope, a suggestion that her life will continue the next day. Her words, โI bet you thought that I was dead but Iโm still hereโ contrast with Joyce Carol Vincentโs tragic death. But on Twitter Wilson said, โJust like Joyce wrapping Christmas presents on the evening she died, things left unfinished.โ
So what happens next? In contrast with the words in the letter, in her final blog dated 28 February 2015 her last words are, โI told them Iโm ready, itโs time to leave now.โ Presumably, โtheyโ 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, โYou can make up your own mind where the character goes.โ
Wilsonโs wordless vocalising at the start is haunting. Although the song is seen entirely from the protagonistโs 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, โdoo doo doo…โ The song becomes subtly epic, as instruments surround Wilsonโs 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.
โAscendant Here On…โ (Hand. Cannot. Erase. 2015)
On Twitter, Wilson said โAscendant Here On…โ is an almost anagram of Hand Cannot Erase.โ Heโs right โ there’s a missing letter โAโ but the rest of the letters are all used. Itโs strange to end the album with an instrumental, but as Wilson said, โIt’s a reprise of the theme from Happy Returns arranged for piano and the boy choristers.โ 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.
The Cover of To the Bone (2017)
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 โsix feet undergroundโ; 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 โweโ of the verses) floats in space feeling a โrushโ of the love that no longer exists on Earth. Looking down at Planet Earth, it now appears โluminousโ, 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 Bowieโs Space Oddity (1969), which Wilson played live as a tribute to Bowie, who died in January 2016. Wilson reacted initially with slight surprise to Gradyโs suggestion, but soon accepted that he was right, as both songs share โa sense of someone drifting high above the Earth, and seeing it as a beautiful thing far removed from all the politics and terrorism.โ
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 Cover of The Harmony Codex (2023)
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 thereโs 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 Iโm 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 โThemโ in the title). With its eerie, slow synths, it could be the theme tune to a horror film. Itโs given a touch of the avant-garde with โrandom radio transmissions.โ
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 Treeโs 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 canโt imagine there is any rock or pop musician on earth that hasnโt been influenced by Bowie, either directly or indirectly, and Iโm 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 didnโt fit the To The Bone album because itโs a โ60s psychedelic-sounding song.โ 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 whะตn 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, โI think Iโll 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
NB not all songs mentioned are availabe on streaming services
Sources
Twitter (now X) Ken Grady, INTERVIEW: STEVEN WILSON, PROGRESSIVE ROCKโS BIGGEST STAR TALKS ABOUT TRUTH, TOURING AND โTO THE BONEโ (Upside Adelaide September 2018)โฏ Anil Prasad, Perceptions of Reality (Innerviews.org 2017)โฏ
For Part I of Steven Wilsonโs Space Songs: The Procupine Tree Years, click here
Lyrically I arrived at a point where I was no longer interested in writing about abstract concepts, like war, religion, space… etc. These are very personal and emotionally raw songs.
Steven Wilson, on Porcupine Tree’s Lightbulb Sun (2000)
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’. Wilson often used space as a theme, particularly in the early years of Porcupine Tree, when the band was essentially a solo project. But on later Porcupine Tree albums, from Lightbulb Sun (2000) onwards, Wilson’s lyrical preoccupations turned first towards the profoundly personal on that album, and then to his broader concerns about modern society on later albums from In Absentia (2002) to The Incident (2009). The band then went on hiatus for over ten years while Wilson launched his successful solo career. This article reflects on Porcupine Tree’s space songs, album by album, and track by track. For Part II: The solo years, click here.
The cover of On the Sunday of Life (1992)
Space Transmission (On the Sunday of Life, 1992)
This is not really a song, but more a message from outer space. It’s a genuinely creepy monologue, uttered by a creature thatโs been trapped on another planet, โfor many eonsโ by โYou know whoโ, in complete darkness since going blind or โsince the sun exploded fourteen centuries agoโ. It could have come from a Doctor Who episode โ itโs not difficult to imagine the songโs monster causing children to hide behind the sofa. We know nothing about โHe who keeps me hereโ, but he regards himself as a competitor to God, so is apparently a supreme being. The protagonist appears to be a creature with โscalesโ, whose threats of revenge upon returning to Earth are as dark as the black liquid that seeps uncontrollably from its mouth.
It Will Rain for a Million Years(On the Sunday of Life, 1992)
This track is mainly instrumental; the lyrics are spoken, rather than sung. The protagonist is leaving Earth, presumably because a war or natural disaster has left the planet in such a dystopian state that the rain will never stop. Heโs leaving in a spaceship, and in the opening lines, there are echoes of the David Bowie persona, Major Tom (from Space Oddity and others),
โI locked myself inside the capsule And watched the planet slowly turning blue.โ
Bowieโs song describes the lonely Major Tom as being in a โcapsuleโ, and the protagonists of both songs observe that planet Earth looks โblueโ. The two songs share a sense of melancholy due to the inability to return to Earth, though for different reasons. The protagonist in the Porcupine Tree song will visit โworlds of crystal beautyโ but will never find answers, suggesting that his quest is existential rather than simply an escape from a ruined planet,
‘I’ve seen the past, I’ve seen the future Beyond dimension and into empty space Finding questions, never answers Living time behind another face.’
The cover of The Sky Moves Sideways 1994
The Sky Moves Sideways Phase 1: II. I Find That Iโm Not There (The Sky Moves Sideways 1993)
This is the only section of the largely instrumental track The Sky Moves Sideways (from the 19994 album of the same name) that includes lyrics. It has a lovely, desolate feel, as the protagonist seems to disappear; first going off the map, before not being there at all. The lyrics blend the surreal and the poetic, suggesting space travel while evoking a journey to the inner consciousness. The vocals possess a contemplative introspection, enhanced by the use of echo, and a desperate, almost angry tone of despair.
‘We lost the skyline We stepped right off the map Drifted into blank space And let the clocks relapse.’
Moonloop (The Sky Moves Sideways 1993)
Wilson was inspired to record a song about the Moon when, in an Oxfam shop, he found a vinyl copy of the spoken word recording, Man On The Moon, narrated by Walter Cronkite, the American broadcaster who anchored CBS Evening News for nearly twenty years. This instrumental track was recorded in July 1995, 26 years after the Apollo 11 Moon landing. In July 1969, as the Moon landing took place, Pink Floyd were in a television studio, improvising another Moon-themed piece. Floyd guitarist, David Gilmour, wrote in The Guardian in July 2009,
โThey were broadcasting the Moon landing, and they thought that to provide a bit of a break, they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called โMoonheadโ โ itโs a nice, atmospheric, spacey, 12-bar bluesโ.
The sample near the end of Moonloop is a NASA recording of the Apollo 11 Astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, at Tranquility [sic] Base on the Moon, communicating by radio with Bruce McCandless, an astronaut at Mission Control in Houston. In a heavily edited recording, Neil Armstrong can be heard climbing down the Lunar Module ladder, describing the Moonโs surface as he sets foot on it. It was at this point that he made his most famous quote, which is not present in the sample, โThatโs one small step for man; one giant leap for mankindโ
The track begins with what could be the sound of an ocean on the Moon. Early astronomers thought the sea of tranquillity, or Mare Tranquillitatis, was actually a sea, though closer inspection revealed it to be a dry plain created by ancient volcanic eruptions. Wilsonโs distorted guitar provides space-rock stylings until around fifteen minutes in, when the song reaches a stasis point, and the above-quoted samples appear. The song has a trance-like, hypnotic feel, making it part of the space rock that began in the 1960s, with bands like Gong and Hawkwind, and resurfaced in the 1990s.
The cover of the Moonloop EP (1994)
Stars Die (Moonloop EP 1994)
The concept of stars dying suggests that, in the long term, everything dies; that humanity is fragile and ephemeral, and that the Earth itself will eventually perish,
โTree cracked And mountain cried Bridges broke And window sighed.โ
The sample at around 2:30 is of President Richard Nixon speaking from the White House Oval Office to the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin when they were on the Moon. In what he describes as โthe most historic telephone call ever madeโ, the President says the astronautsโ achievements have inspired mankind to โredouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to Earthโ. Perhaps the Moon mission brought hope. But the song itself doesnโt suggest peace and tranquillity will come to Earth. It ends with an image of humanity blasting off into space โ astronauts in โhypersleepโ, the deep coma-like sleep thatโs essential for long-distance space travel.
The cover of Stupid Dream (1999)
A Smart Kid (Stupid Dream, 1999)
A quietly melancholy song about the infinite loneliness suffered by the protagonist, the last remaining human being stranded on planet Earth after what seems to have been a five-year nuclear winter. After โa chemical harvest was sownโ, nuclear clouds obscure the sun. It appears there was a nuclear war, which the protagonist โmust have wonโ: making the song title profoundly ironic. He has won an empty victory.
The nuclear war theme is related to Radioactive Toy (from On the Sunday of Life), in which the โtoyโ grants โthe freedom to destroyโ. It would perhaps be foolish to describe Robert Oppenheimer โ credited as the โfather of the atomic bombโ โ as merely a โsmart kidโ like the songโs protagonist. The reality is much more subtle, but Oppenheimer later did express regret about the โsinโ that he and other physicists had committed: that once the knowledge that created the atomic bomb had been gained, it could never be lost again.
In A Smart Kid, the protagonist is waiting for an alien spaceship to arrive to rescue him from Earth. He will wait โuntil the sky is blueโ. The implication is that it will never be blue again.
‘A spaceship from another star They ask me where all the people are What can I tell them? I tell them I’m the only one There was a war but I must’ve won Please, take me with you.’
The Cover of Lightbulb Sun (2000)
Last Chance To Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled (Lightbulb Sun, 2000)
The first part of this song is called โWinding Shot (Summer 1981)โ, part of the more personal lyrical themes Wilson began writing songs about on Lightbulb Sun. It refers to the time when childhood turns into adolescence. In the summer of 1981, Wilson was thirteen and living in Hemel Hempstead, an English town about 24 miles northwest of London. Winding Shot is the name of a small cul-de-sac off Spring Lane in Hemel Hempstead. The nostalgia in the song is tinged with regret as summer comes to an end,
โSummer went away And we just werenโt the same.โ
This part of the song ends with his childhood friend kissing him on the lips, as they reach that strange limbo of adolescence, suspended between childhood and adulthood; โNot grown-ups but not kidsโ. A rhythmic acoustic riff drives a short bridge, leading to an instrumental passage from which the song title is derived.
The title could convey an environmental message, something thatโs become even more critical in the two decades since the song was written. But Wilson told Joakim Jahlmar of DPRP.net in March 2001 that, Last Chance To Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled is not about ecology. It takes its title from the edited transcript of a videotape dated 29 September 1996, from the leader of the Heavenโs Gate religious cult, who called himself Do (real name: Marshall Applewhite).
‘This planet is about to be recycled, refurbished, started over. That doesnโt mean itโs going to be destroyed; it doesnโt mean itโs the end of the world. And whether or not you believe that this civilization is going to be recycled or refurbished is up to you. Now, the purpose of this tape is to warn you that this is about to happen and that itโs going to happen very soon. At the End of the Age, the planet is wiped cleanโฆ refurbishedโฆ rejuvenated.‘
On 22 March 1997, Heavenโs Gate published a macabre press release,
โHEAVENโS GATE โAway Teamโ Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space
By the time you receive this, weโll be gone โ several dozen of us. We came from the Level Above Human in distant space, and we have now exited the bodies that we were wearing for our earthly task, to return to the world from whence we came โ task completed.‘
Applewhite told his followers that they could leave Earth on a spaceship that would accompany the comet Hale-Bopp, which was due to approach the planet in early 1997. Tragically, despite a claim on the Heavenโs Gate website that the group was strongly against suicide, 39 cult members (including Applewhite) were found dead in a San Diego house on 26 March 1997. The track ends with the song titleโs chilling words, spoken by Applewhite before he joined his followers in a mass suicide, achieved by consuming a mixture of apple sauce, vodka and barbiturates.
The cover of Closure/Continuation (2022)
Herd Culling (Closure/Continuation 2022)
This track opens with the visceral lines,
โSon, go fetch the rifle now, Thereโs something in the yard.’
These words throw us immediately into a compelling psychodrama. Wilson has the ability of a poet or scriptwriter to enter a story halfway through โ the narrative gradually unfolds as the song progresses, teasing the listener to extract the meaning of the song, wondering who the ‘strange gods’ are,
‘Did you fall to earth to cull a herd? Strange gods above the earth These are things you just won’t believe.
In the shackles of the night There are lights up in the sky…’
Wilson revealed the songโs meaning to Anil Prasad of Innerviews before he later retracted, saying he would prefer listeners to make up their own minds. Those who prefer not to have their views influenced by Wilsonโs thoughts should skip the next paragraph.
Wilson told Prasad that the story of Skinwalker Ranch, near Ballard, Utah, inspired the song. Several accounts suggest that the ranch has been plagued by paranormal activity and UFO sightings, and several books, films, and documentaries have been published about it. The song describes the familyโs attempts to defend themselves against aliens, โstrange gods above the earthโ who may have landed to โcull a herdโ of cattle on the ranch. He told Prasad: โI remain sceptical when it comes to the UFO stuff and government coverups. But I love the stories.โ His scepticism is echoed in the chorus of the song, which consists of the single word โliarโ, resentfully muttered at first, then viciously spat out as his venom increases.
Sources
Gilmour, D., My moon-landing jam session (The Guardian, 2 July 2009) Press release, HEAVENโS GATE โAway Teamโ Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space (22 March 1997) Applewhite, M., Last Chance to Evacuate Earth Before Itโs Recycled; Edited Transcript of Videotape (Heavenโs Gate website, 29 September 1996) Jahlmar, J., An Interview with Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree (DPRP.net, March 2001) Prasad, A., Porcupine Tree Collective Action (Innerviews, 2022)
For Steven Wilsonโs Space Songs Part II: The Soloย Years, click here
