Steven Wilson Brings Humanism to Dallas

by Andrew Petiprin

The English progressive-rock legend Steven Wilson does not visit America often. In fact, on a recent early-autumn night, on the stage of the historic Majestic Theatre in the city of Dallas, he confessed that it had been seven years and three albums since he last toured the States. I was delighted to be in attendance for what proved to be a rare experience of intense, contemplative art.

As the long-time leader of the influential band Porcupine Tree, Wilson became well-known for his virtuosic musicianship and studio wizardry, accompanied by lyrics that are critical of the modern world in various ways. On his most recent solo album, The Overview, which he played in its entirety in Dallas, he has built on this legacy, inviting listeners to the vastness of outer space before bringing them back down again to the elusiveness of encountering the real in the modern world. On the album’s eighteen-minute title track, his second song of the night, he sang, “When once we reached to touch the sky, Now we have no need to try, The blurred photos of ghosts of men, Such permanence, we don’t comprehend.”

Wilson is an obvious heir to the great English progressive rock tradition of Pink Floyd, Yes, and Genesis, along with heady pop outfits like Brian Wilson and XTC, and heavier influences from Scandinavian metal. True to the lyrical tradition of his forefathers, Wilson’s words venture into the realm of the metaphysical, evoking a sense of exploration. Prog-rockers, like mystics, often attempt to go deep, or better yet, to lead us somewhere – somewhere more enriching than where we currently are; somewhere that requires patience and focus to experience fully. 

Along for the ride in Dallas was a top-shelf cast of musicians surrounding Wilson, including Nick Beggs on bass, Adam Holzman on keyboards, Randy McStine on guitar, and a truly extraordinary performance by drummer Craig Blundell. The progressive rock genre has always prided itself on superior musical technique appealing to fans who look down on garden-variety metalheads, and Wilson’s set was true to form. Five of the thirteen songs clocked in at over ten minutes, and the crowd was fully engaged for the two-and-a--half hour total performance time. 

Additionally, Wilson’s long-developing songs were ripe for a cinematic backdrop, and the vivid video-art productions accompanying most of the songs were particularly important for the presentation of his major theme: the magnitude of the astronomical realm. The first six minutes of the previously mentioned title track, “The Overview,” for example, featured a robotic female voice rattling off calculations of mass and distance related to celestial bodies, as the audience felt as if we were traveling through the stars. “Size beyond one yottametre,” the voice said. She continued, “ten to the power of twenty-four, Virgo Super Cluster, Eridanus Supervoid, Super Cluster Complex.” Wilson’s voice then humanized the scope and scale as we looked on wide-eyed, “Snow is falling but it can’t be seen from here, and back on Earth, my loving wife’s been dead for years.”

The Christian or Jew in the audience likely jumped mentally to the book of Genesis, the Psalms, Job, or Daniel. Wonderfully, we believe God reveals himself to us in the most terrifying celestial phenomena, “the works of thy fingers,” as the Coverdale translation of Psalm 8 puts it. Sadly, Wilson’s lyrics concluded the opposite: “No design and no one at the wheel, just an existential mystery.” 

Just an existential mystery! 

Accordingly, on “Ancestral,” the first of two encore songs at the end of the concert, Wilson sang blithely about people “distracted by their faith, ignoring every proof.”

Wilson’s more facile, Godless moments aside, the lyrics to many of the other pieces he performed, like many of the songs in his catalog, broadly posit man as a special creature, compromised by impersonal forces of technology and money. Again, the person of faith perks up, and this time he may not be disappointed by Wilson’s conclusions, provided he can stomach a dose of pessimism. At the start of the song “Staircase,” the sixth song he performed in Dallas, Wilson declared, “automaton drone, you’re lost with no phone,” and later, “insidious tech, you’re up to your neck, why don’t you give it a rest?” Hear, hear. Diversions are wrecking humanity.

 In a 2017 essay in the Imaginative Conservative, Bradley Birzer described Wilson as something of an anonymous Christian Humanist. Longtime fans of Porcupine Tree in the Dallas at least affirmed the Humanist part, calling out to hear arguably Wilson’s most famous and most humane song, “The Sound of Musak,” a protest anthem against the computerization of creativity. He did not oblige their request, but he did sing “The Raven that Refused to Sing,” where God is clearly not out of the human picture. “Heal my soul, make me whole,” he cried into the microphone.

At another point in the concert, however, Wilson hedged somewhat on the primacy of humanity, perhaps conveying the same creeping sense of doom many of us have had trouble shaking off in recent years. On the opening song, “Objects Outlive Us,” he sang, “We interlopers, the inferior species, Wallow in our own feces.” Notwithstanding this pessimistic streak, which is not altogether alien to the humanism of Erasmus in the sixteenth century or T.S. Eliot in the twentieth, Wilson’s music finds a way of occupying a place on the philosophical horseshoe looking straight back across a chasm at theism, even Catholicism. Again in “Objects Outlive Us,” after seeming to relativize man’s existence for almost twenty minutes, he ends with an unexpected and hope-inducing encounter in which a divine being asks him, “Did you forget I exist?”

For my part, I admire Steven Wilson the way a Pascalian looks with appreciation upon Albert Camus. It’s awfully hard not to. Our finishing moves may be different, but we are certainly playing on the same board, with the same pieces.

It was a rare treat to see Wilson perform. I hope to see him back in the New World before long.