STEVEN WILSON
“I think we could be on the cusp of a new [revolution]... Let’s see… I hope there’s more protest in music, because music has always thrived on protest and rebellion and anger...” engagement from those pop artists with these problems, because it seems to me almost irresponsible of them to continue to pretend that this is not happening. So, I think we could be on the cusp of a new [revolution]... Let’s see... I hope there’s more protest in music, because music has always thrived on protest and rebellion and anger, and as you kind of pointed out, that’s one of the basic principles of what great pop music and rock music was all about. There’s a spoken word passage in the beginning of the title track “To The Bone” that directly addresses these subjects of truth and truth distortion. Where did this quote came from and who can be heard talking? She’s a good friend of mine, she’s a school teacher in Texas and she’s a black school teacher in Texas. So, she understands something about the nature of truth and reality and prejudice, and it’s a very tough job to be working in a school in Texas and to be a black school teacher in Texas. I just asked her one day and said “Can you talk a little bit about truth? The nature of truth?” and I think with that quote she just summed it up so perfectly, particularly that
idea that one of the problems with a lot of people who have hate in their heart and the people who have a lot of issues with racism and sexism and religious fundamentalism, part of the problem with those people is that when they have arrived at their own truth, which we’ll call perspective, once they have arrived at their own perspective, in the way that they believe the world works, the problem is that their impulse is just to go and kill everyone else or fuck everyone else up who doesn’t share their view. Unfortunately, that’s one of the cancers at the very heart of the human species, that if you don’t agree with me, I’m going to destroy you. That is religious fundamentalism in a nutshell, that’s terrorism in a nutshell. It’s the same with racism, it’s the same with any prejudice, whether it’s homophobia, sexism or whatever it is, that is a cancer and I think that the human race really should have evolved beyond by now, but we haven’t, and I think that’s what that quote kind of sums of perfectly in the beginning of the album. You’ve also have some songs centered around some characters in some cases like “Refuge” where you’re telling a story from an outsider’s perspective, but would
you say that some of the other characters might be autobiographical and based on your own experiences? I think the thing is, whenever you write any song, even when you’re playing a character or playing a role, you always kind of draw from your own experience and your own autobiography to an extent. I mean, the thing is, some of these people on this record are definitely characters. The terrorist is not me, the religious fundamentalist is not me, the refugee is not me, but of course I am drawing from a lot of my own thoughts and experiences to explore those characters. It would be very hard for me to sit down and analyse and tell you exactly what parts of the lyrics are from personal experiences and what parts are pure imagination, because I think it’s a very grey area and everything I’ve written has been a product of my own personal experience, the experiences of my friends and family, every movie I’ve ever seen, every book I’ve ever read, every album I’ve ever listened to, all of the new stories I’ve kind of seen over the years, so it’s all in there. I can’t really say for sure how the process of filtering all that out into a song works, but my whole life is in all of these songs essentially. musicandriots.com
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