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.
THE OVERVIEW
Perspective
Perspective begins with radio transmissions from deep space. They sound like the radio transmissions at the opening of another space rock song, ‘Astronomy Domine’ from Pink Floyd’s 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 – ‘still my favourite band’ – 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.
‘Perspective’ includes spoken word commentary from Wilson’s 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 = a million m
A gigametre = 10^9 = ten to the power of nine = 10 with nine zeroes = 1,000,000,000 m = a billion m
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
Rotem’s voice is tuned down in pitch. Wilson told The Rockonteurs podcast that he wanted her voice to sound dispassionate, and ‘emotionally flat… to recite these scientific facts.’ He had in mind HAL, the talking computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the spacecraft Discovery One, who memorably says, ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.’
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 Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series and the Total Perspective Vortex. This machine allows the user to take in the whole universe, by extrapolating ‘the whole of creation… from one small piece of fairy cake.’ Built to annoy his wife, when the inventor turned the machine on, she saw ‘in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it… to [the inventor’s horror] the shock completely annihilated her brain.’ Despite this, the inventor had proved to his satisfaction that ‘the one thing [we] cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.’ 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 it’s something that the English electronic duo Autechre might have produced. Wilson isn’t the first musician to use electronic music on a prog rock album. Pink Floyd opened The Dark Side of the Moon with ‘On the Run’, 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 Floyd’s Live at Pompeii (1972; re-released in 2025 as Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII with new mixes by Wilson).
The fiercely rhythmic, jerky synth tracks and electronic drums – all played and programmed by Wilson – contrast with Rotem’s 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 ‘human’ story, whereas in Everley’s phrase, the title track ‘evokes the sparseness and coldness of space.’ At around 2:00, slower, more human-sounding chords begin to take over. We hear Wilson’s 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. There’s a strong parallel with Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. The line ‘Each moment for me is a lifetime for you’ 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.
A Still from The Overview Film by Miles Skarin
When Cooper travels near Gargantua, he ages only a few hours while Murph, on Earth, ages eight decades. There’s a profoundly moving moment when he receives a transmission from his daughter, and he realises that he has missed 23 years of his daughter’s 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, ‘Back on Earth, my loving wife’s been dead for years.’ Although the title track concentrates on science, there is room for humanity, too. The protagonist’s distance from Earth puts everything in perspective: ‘what seemed important [is] now like dust inside the squall.’ There’s perhaps an echo of the dust storms in Interstellar, which make Earth uninhabitable.
‘A Beautiful Infinity I’ 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. Wilson’s vocals are treated with a delay effect; the final part of each phrase is repeated, ‘from here… from here… from here.’ Pink Floyd used this effect on ‘Us and Them’ from The Dark Side of the Moon to add emotional depth. Wilson used the same effect on ‘Arriving Somewhere But Not Here’ on Deadwing (2005).
The slide guitar adds to the Floydian feeling of the track, but the guitar solo isn’t Gilmour-esque. Wilson asked Niko Tsonev to play the solo – his only solo on the album – 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 ‘Chimera’s Wreck’ from the 2022 Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation. He told Amit Sharma of Total Guitar that he used his Ovation guitar in Nashville tuning – the lowest four strings are tuned up an octave, creating ‘a very crystalline, musical box kind of tone.’
The ‘Borrowed Atoms’ 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 ‘The clouds have no history’, and ends ten lines later with the words ‘Is this a dream?’ Wilson’s lyrics express profound complexity in simple language. He reverses the ‘pathetic fallacy’, 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, ‘tossing their heads in sprightly dance.’) Wilson does the opposite, stressing that nature has no human emotion: ‘The clouds have no history/And the sea feels no sorrow.’ This is another aspect of the album’s perspective theme. Nature ignores us, so we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. Wilson says our atoms are just ‘borrowed’; when we die, they return to the universe. This is ambiguous – if our atoms are only ‘borrowed’, we are insignificant, but we should also take good care of our atoms, as we only have temporary stewardship. Wilson’s meditation on the nature of selfhood ends with a moving expression of existential angst, warmly sung, ‘Is this a dream?’
‘A Beautiful Infinity II’ begins at around 4:00 with the words ‘There’s no reason for any of this.’ Wilson’s personal view – with which some would disagree – is that the universe was created out of chaos, not by design or by a supreme being,
‘There’s no reason for any of this
Just a beautiful infinity
No design and no one at the wheel
Just an existential mystery.’
The idea of no one being at the wheel is reminiscent of ‘The Creator has a Master Tape’ from the Porcupine Tree album In Absentia (2002). We discover that ‘the creator had a master tape’, which suggests design, only to find that – ironically – ‘he left it in a cab.’
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 ‘Harridan’, 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. Blundell’s 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. Wilson’s 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.
It’s followed by handclaps (Wilson) and ukulele (McStine). Porcupine Tree fans may recall a similar effect on ‘Trains’ (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 Hook’s former band Joy Division, listing the band’s 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 Holzman’s 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 plays the soprano sax solo. Travis worked on some of Wilson’s solo albums, and the two worked together on Travis’ 2024 solo album Aeolus. That album is a one-hour Theo Travis piece for duduk; the instrument Travis played on ‘Beautiful Scarecrow’ on The Harmony Codex. Wilson produced the recordings and created soundscapes from Travis’s alto flute playing. That album is gentle, meditative, introspective and quietly mesmerising. Travis’s 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 ‘celestial’ or ‘heavenly.’ 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 hadn’t 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)
Links
Sources
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: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo” (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: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo” (NME 18/02/25)
Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025)
Sharma, Amit, Steven Wilson on Porcupine Tree’s triumphant return and his love of “guitar players that can play one note and break your heart” (Total Guitar, August 2022)
Wilson, Steven, Limited Edition of One (Constable, April 2022)
