“I love the guitar, but essentially it’s an instrument that belongs to the 20th century in many ways. So it’s a question of, what can you do to try to reinvent that vocabulary to make it seem relevant?”: Steven Wilson on the making of a cosmic pro

“It’s a big chunk of conceptual rock music about the cosmos, and why not?” Steven Wilson says as we settle in on our Zoom call. His past couple of albums, The Future Bites (2021) and The Harmony Codex (2023), veered instrumentally more towards electronica, with the guitar taking a back seat.

But The Overview sees the instrument return to central focus, and even includes a four-minute long epic guitar solo from Wilson’s Porcupine Tree touring companion, Randy McStine.

The central concept on which the album is based concerns the effect that viewing our planet from space has on both astronauts and space tourists alike. It’s a mammoth work, with just two tracks spanning its 43-minute duration.

What was it that brought you back to progressive-rock concept albums?

“Well, to be honest, I’ve always had a concept around every record. That was true of the last record, the one before that, too. I think the difference here is that it’s structured into a single flow of music. So if the question is, ‘What drew me back to that?’ I think the answer is, the concept itself kind of suggested it.

“I think when you’re dealing with a subject like this, it didn’t make sense to me to write 10 separate songs. It made sense to create a feature film for the ears; something in the long-form that would really allow me to take the listener on a musical journey, conceptually, from Earth onto the other side of the universe.”

(Image credit: Kevin Westenberg)What was your starting point for the album, from a writing point of view?

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“The starting point is always the same for me. Whatever I do, it’s ‘What can I do that’s different? What can I do that is not going to be simply more of the same? What can I do that is a reaction against what I’ve done before? What can I do that will confront and surprise the expectations of the audience?’ And I think one of the things I’d not done for a while was something more in the long-form.

“The second part of that answer would be the actual starting point for the concept – deciding that I wanted to do something, perhaps as a collaborative work, where I could maybe create music for a video or an installation or a film of some kind. I set up meetings with a few people and one of the people I met with was Alex Milas from Space Rocks, which is an organization dedicated to bringing together the worlds of astronomy and science and music.”

“During those conversations, Alex said to me, ‘Have you heard of this thing called the Overview Effect?’ And he went on to explain that it’s a recognized phenomenon: the first time that astronauts go into space and they look back at the Earth, they have this very profound moment of understanding and perspective. For some people it’s very negative, and for some people it’s very positive.

“I was immediately fascinated with that idea and straight away it was kind of a light bulb moment. ‘You know what? I’ve got the title, I’ve got the concept, and this is a situation where I’ve got both of these things in place before I’ve written a single lyric and a single note of music.’ So the music flowed fairly swiftly and over about a six-week period I mapped out the basic shape of these two long pieces.”

How The Artwork for The Overview Was Made – Part 1 – YouTube

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The album sounds like it was always going to be best appreciated in spatial audio. Did you have a Dolby Atmos version in mind when you were putting the album together?

“Yes and no. I’m always aware that I’m going to be doing an Atmos mix, and I’m trying to raise the bar in terms of what’s possible with spatial audio. But at the same time I’m always having to acknowledge to myself that 99 per cent of people will only ever get to hear this in stereo, and so I’m primarily focused on making an audiophile stereo experience.

I do believe there’s an audience out there that still cares about dynamics. They care about the quality of sound, they care about the texture of music, and they’re prepared to immerse themselves

“I do believe there’s an audience out there that still cares about dynamics. They care about the quality of sound, they care about the texture of music, and they’re prepared to immerse themselves in listening to an album from beginning to end and really engage with it. So I’m very committed to this idea of making records that sound beautiful.

“And I think it would be naïve to concentrate too much on the spatial audio aspect of that at the expense of creating something that sounds beautiful in stereo, which is what most people ultimately are going to hear. But I’ve always got this thought, ‘Oh, you’re going to be doing an Atmos mix,’ and does that influence some of the production decisions I make? You know what? Probably, subconsciously, I’m making decisions, knowing that these things will sound great when I get to that stage of the process.”

Steven Wilson – The Harmony Codex – YouTube

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Last time we spoke you said you thought the guitar had very little relevance in modern music and yet you’ve made a return to it with The Overview. There’s a lot of acoustic and electric guitar on there, and you have Randy McStine playing some epic guitar solos.

“Randy pretty much came in towards the end to basically be the solo voice of the record. Most of the other guitar parts I played myself, but in terms of the solo voice, my instruction to Randy was quite simple. For example, there’s a very long guitar solo at the end of the first piece. I said to Randy, ‘We’re going to reinvent the notion of the extended classic rock guitar solo – we’re going to do the ‘not Comfortably Numb solo.’

“Now, there’s nothing wrong with Comfortably Numb; I think it’s the greatest guitar solo of all time. But the point is, we need to reinvent this notion. We need to create something that has the same sense of drama, but we’re going to do it in a way that sounds like it could only have been done in 2025. So the goal here was to try to bring back the guitar but in a more modern context.”

Steven Wilson – What Life Brings – YouTube

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It sounds like a great deal of digital processing has been used with the guitar sounds.

“It’s a gift for someone like me, who thinks of himself primarily as a producer, that there’s never been more ways to process, twist, and mutate sound. It’s just extraordinary, particularly when you bring together, as I have on this record, the two worlds of the vintage and the modern.

“I’m not a purist. I’m not interested in getting vintage tones for the sake of it. I like vintage tones, of course I do, and there are some on this record. But I’m a massive fan of what you can do in the digital realm, with processing and plug-ins, particularly with an old-fashioned – quote, unquote – instrument like guitar.

“I love the guitar, but essentially it’s an instrument that belongs to the 20th century in many ways. So it’s a question of, what can you do to try to reinvent that vocabulary to make it seem relevant? And Randy, being the young whippersnapper that he is, understands that. It was really fascinating to go down that road with him, where we tried to create something in the tradition of the epic guitar solo, but in a way that perhaps was fresher to people who’ve heard that before.”

Steven Wilson – The Overview Album Teaser 4K – Out 14th March 2025 – YouTube

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So are you principally playing acoustic guitar on the album, or do you play electric as well?

“No, I play most of the electric parts, too, but the solos are Randy and he also contributes a few other parts. Because the album came together so quickly and I had such a strong idea about what I wanted, I pretty much ended up playing all the bass, most of the guitar parts and most of the keyboard parts myself. It was just easier to do that than try to explain to somebody else what I wanted.

“Adam Holzman, the keyboard player, came in at the end to provide those kind of solo voices. And obviously I’m not a drummer, so I needed the drums to be done as well. In a way, the collaborative side of things was pretty much the last part of the process.”

(Image credit: Kevin Westenberg)Which guitars did you use for the album?

“I used my Takamine, my regular acoustic, and I used an Ovation in Nashville tuning – and there’s a lot of that on the record. I usually tend to combine the two, a regular acoustic and a Nashville-strung, to create that really big sound. The electric was mostly all Tele. I fell in love with Telecasters about seven or eight years ago, and I bought myself a beautiful Custom Shop 1963 Telecaster.

“I still use my PRS, too, but what I love about the Telecaster is that you don’t have to drive it very hard for it to sound aggressive. It’s just got that natural kind of bite. It’s that Townshend/Syd Barrett/Joe Strummer type thing, where you don’t have to drive it very hard for it to cut through. And so these days, I find myself putting less and less gain on the guitars when I’m tracking them, and I think a lot of that is down to the Tele just having a naturally aggressive, biting sound.”

How The Artwork for The Overview Was Made – Part 2 – YouTube

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How did you process the acoustics and the electrics that you played?

“I love processing. My favorite plug-in these days, which I use on almost all the guitars and a lot of the keyboards, is one that makes things sound like they’re coming off a cassette tape. It’s a very lo-fi thing.

“It’s a $20 plug-in made by Aberrant DSP called SketchCassette [SketchCassette II is currently $36]. You can choose the brand of tape, you can choose Ferric, Chrome, or Metal, how much wow and flutter, how much saturation, how much hiss, how old the tape is…

Sometimes the problem with digital sounds is they just lack a little bit of character, and a little bit of what you would think of as an imperfection can make things have character

“I love it because sometimes the problem with digital sounds is they just lack a little bit of character, and a little bit of what you would think of as an imperfection can make things have character.

“So very often, I just load up this cassette plug-in and add a little bit of flutter or warble or saturation, or just make it sound like it’s coming off a tape that’s been recorded over three or four times, and suddenly it gives the sound character. It gives the sound just a little bit more grain and that organic quality that you associate with analog tape.

“This is what I mean when I’m talking about using the best of both worlds: using the best of digital technology, but then also bringing in some of the characteristics of analog that we love so much. On a lot of the guitars I do, I used that plug-in just to give them a little bit more grain and character.”

The Overview is out now via Fiction.This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.