Steven Wilson Goes Solo Again With The Harmony Codex
An exclusive chat with the Porcupine Tree frontman
On September 29, acclaimed English rock musician Steven Wilson released his seventh solo album, The Harmony Codex (via Spinefarm Records) – something that his fans have perhaps been wondering if he’d do again.
After all, in 2021, his beloved former band Porcupine Tree reunited after a 12-year hiatus, and the following year put out a much-anticipated album, Closure / Continuation, and toured the world. But, Wilson says, this was never meant to be a permanent reformation.
“My solo career is, to all intents and purposes, the primary strand of my creativity, and has been for some time, so there was never a question that it would be put aside,” Wilson says during a recent Zoom video call from his London home.
“The Porcupine Tree album that came out last year was written ten years ago,” he continues. “It was only really because of [the pandemic] lockdown that we got it together to finally finish it and put it out. But it was always intended to be a temporary reunion to finish the record, to create a more satisfying closing chapter.” Still, he adds, “We haven’t specifically said that this is the end. We may well get back and do something again in a couple of years.”
But for now, being a solo artist suits Wilson more. “It has a lot more creative freedom,” he says. “Someone like me that loves to do all sorts of different things, and collaborate with different musicians, and try and do something different with each album, that’s very hard within the context of a group. It’s harder to move quickly and change direction quickly in a band.”
He took full advantage of his solo freedom while he was writing and recording The Harmony Codex.
“I didn’t edit myself. I didn’t try and over-curate it,” he says, “and so there is a record now which has got a ten minute ambient piece alongside electronic pop, acoustic tracks, more progressive elements, industrial beats and jazz elements.”
Wilson began crafting these new solo songs in 2020, when he was trying to find a useful way to fill his days soon after the COVID pandemic had forced him to cancel all his tour dates for that year. Looking back at that time, Wilson can see how unexpectedly finding himself in the studio forced him to approach his songwriting with more spontaneity.
“Usually, I do have an agenda at the beginning of a project,” he says. “Like, with my last album, The Future Bites [2021], my very loose agenda was, ‘I want this to be my more direct electronic pop record.’ And on previous records, I’ve accentuated the more progressive side of me, or the more alternative side.”
In contrast, with The Harmony Codex, “I found myself creating music really for the sake of creating music, without any particular end goal in mind, and going off in all these different directions. I wasn’t second guessing myself in terms of what could potentially go together, and I think that’s one of the reasons the album is all over the place, stylistically, because I wasn’t trying to curate the direction that the record would go in. It’s quite a surprising musical journey.”
As a way to push himself even further, Wilson avoided his usual method of writing using the guitar or piano. Instead, he says, “I went out and bought a load of analog synthesizers to muck about with, and in doing so, that made me more naive in the way I was approaching these things. When you’re very familiar with an instrument, you find yourself always going to the same sort of comfort zone – [but] analog synths, I know nothing about. I don’t know how they work. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just turning knobs and [saying], ‘Oh, that’s an interesting sound.’ I think that’s a very useful way of confronting those cliches and comfort zones.”
The album title emerged out of one of Wilson’s other lockdown projects: writing the book Limited Edition of One, which was published in 2022 by Little, Brown and Company. The book is, Wilson says, “half autobiography, a quarter ideas and thoughts about music, and the last part was fiction. So there’s a short story in there called ‘The Harmony Codex,’ which is a piece of dystopian science fiction.”
Previously, Wilson has been nominated for Grammy Awards because of the lavish packaging he often uses for his releases, and The Harmony Codex is no exception. This time, along with the standard release, there will also be a deluxe three-disc limited edition, which includes a 100 page book. This version features alternate versions of the album tracks featuring guest musicians such as Roland Orzabal (Tears for Fears) and members of Interpol, Manic Street Preachers and Meat Beat Manifesto.
VIDEO: Steven Wilson “The Harmony Codex”
“I always have different versions of songs that I don’t think are right, and I want to either throw them away or develop them or change them or shake it up a bit – but very often these days, in the back of my mind, I’m like, ‘This isn’t the version you want for the album, but let’s finish it anyway because it might be exactly the kind of thing that you would want to put on a bonus disc, the sort of thing the fans would find really interesting,’” Wilson says.
When the album was nearing completion, Wilson reached out to artists he knew and admired, “I wanted people that would maybe be less obvious choices – people that don’t get asked to do that kind of thing very often, rather than go down the normal route of asking very experienced remixers. I knew they’d twist the material into some different shapes which I wouldn’t expect. And I think that’s part of the nature of the whole project, trying to be experimental. So I said [to them], ‘Take the song, do whatever you want with it. Rewrite it, reimagine it, remix it. Record your own version of it.’”
Despite such efforts to explore different musical landscapes, Wilson’s music is always layered, refined and luxurious, though. This distinctive sound is, he admits, something that can vex him.
“Sometimes I play a song to my friends or my wife and I’ll say, ‘You won’t recognize me, this is really different, I’ve never done anything like this before!’” he says. “And they just look at me like I’m mad and say, ‘It sounds like you.’ It frustrates me sometimes. But of course, at the end of the day, I have to embrace it as a good thing because finding your own musical style and sound is a very important thing.”
He concedes that part of this common thread through his work comes from the simple fact that his vocals are instantly recognizable, “but I think it’s more than that. I find myself always coming back to certain chords, certain ways to structure music, certain production techniques, certain sounds. A sonic signature, if you like, which I’m not even aware of, necessarily, but I suppose I constantly gravitate to it without even thinking about it.”
Wilson has been refining his sound ever since he first began releasing albums with Porcupine Tree more than three decades ago; their debut, On the Sunday of Life, came out in 1992, and the band have released eleven studio albums to date. His full-length solo debut album, Insurgentes, came out in 2008. Through the years, he has participated in a number of side bands. All of this prolific and high-quality output has won him an exceptionally dedicated and zealous international fan base, even as he has avoided large-scale commercial exposure.
In a way, Wilson believes that his under-the-radar approach is precisely what earns him such loyalty from his listeners. “I’m not in the mainstream, and I think musicians that exist in this netherworld where they’re not familiar to most people on the street, they tend to attract a more obsessive fan base because the fans that discover those artists tend to feel like they’re in on some kind of private secret. They’re very loyal. They can be extremely critical, as well.”
VIDEO: Steven Wilson “What Life Brings”
That criticism doesn’t bother him, though. “I don’t allow it to intrude on the actual creative process,” he says. “One thing I always say is, ‘If you’re not upsetting your fans, then you’re probably not doing the right thing.’ I think it’s part of the deal, in a way, that you have to almost expect to disappoint and upset some of your fans, and to lose some of your fans – but that’s what being an artist is.”
He points to musicians he admires who have used this same approach: David Bowie, Frank Zappa, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Neil Young, Nick Cave.
“These are artists that constantly reinvented themselves, and in most of those cases, continue to do so – and always risked confronting the expectations of their fans,” he says. “You don’t entertain if you are an artist. You entertain if you’re an entertainer, but if you’re an artist, you don’t try to entertain. You try to get people engaged in what you do.”
Hence Wilson’s desire to deliberately reinvent himself with each album. “I’m very reluctant to repeat myself, so I’m always looking for new things I haven’t done before, trying to avoid that ‘more of the same thing.’ I think, ‘OK, I’ve done that – now let’s do something completely different,’” he says.
Wilson believes he has achieved this with The Harmony Codex – but he also says he’s far from finished, as far as his evolution as an artist goes: “I do think I’m still learning all the time. I learn from everything I do, and I feel like I’ve got a little more ability and knowledge and wisdom to try and make a better record every time.”
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