2017 - August 28 - Pariah

Steven Wilson has a new album out. So far I like it, but I need some more time with it before I deliver my final judgment. But the first track released still really hits home... Pariah is a duet with Ninet Tayeb, and her voice cracks just perfectly. The new album is To The Bone - and if you like this song, it is not a bad idea to take a listen...

November 26 - The Day Before You Came

Sometimes you need a new take on a song to fully realize it's genius, and today's song is an example of that for me. I was familiar with Abba's original, but I didn't fully realize how brilliant this song was before I heard Steven Wilson's version. What really stands out to me is the lyrics. I think this is the perfect way to describe an earth shattering meeting - without talking about the meeting at all. Instead, the song describes a series of assumptions based on the fact that life before this meeting was simply dull routine all along. "It's funny, but I had no sense of living without aim the day before you came." It is brilliant. Simply brilliant.

I went back to listen to the original as well, and I must say that to me, this is the highlight of Abba's career when it comes to songwriting. I can even deal with a very dated production. But there is a purity to the vocals, and there is a certain soreness there as well. However, I think Steven Wilson's take on it lifts it even further. He released it on his album Cover Version in 2014 - and that is an album that is well worth exploring. But to me, the highlight, the song that stops me dead in the tracks and simply makes me listen, is The Day Before You Came. I included the lyrics below the video. Please read them. It is so extremely beautiful, haunting, and mundane, all at the same time. Genius.

I must have left my house at eight, because I always do
My train, I'm certain, left the station just when it was due
I must have read the morning paper going into town
And having gotten through the editorial, no doubt I must have frowned
I must have made my desk around a quarter after nine
With letters to be read, and heaps of papers waiting to be signed
I must have gone to lunch at half past twelve or so
The usual place, the usual bunch
And still on top of this I'm pretty sure it must have rained
The day before you came

I must have lit my seventh cigarette at half past two
And at the time I never even noticed I was blue
I must have kept on dragging through the business of the day
Without really knowing anything, I hid a part of me away
At five I must have left, there's no exception to the rule
A matter of routine, I've done it ever since I finished school
The train back home again
Undoubtedly I must have read the evening paper then
Oh yes, I'm sure my life was well within its usual frame
The day before you came

I must have opened my front door at eight o'clock or so
And stopped along the way to buy some Chinese food to go
I'm sure I had my dinner watching something on TV
There's not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn't see
I must have gone to bed around a quarter after ten
I need a lot of sleep, and so I like to be in bed by then
I must have read a while
The latest one by Marilyn French or something in that style
It's funny, but I had no sense of living without aim
The day before you came

And turning out the light
I must have yawned and cuddled up for yet another night
And rattling on the roof I must have heard the sound of rain
The day before you came

August 26 - Raider II

Steven Wilson is so clearly one of my absolute favorite musician these days, and he is no stranger to long songs. Today's song, Raider II, was originally on the album Grace for Drowning, which so far is unsurpassed as his crowning achievement - although I am positive he has more up his sleeve. I really like that it really has a jazzy quality to it, along with featuring an array of stellar musicians, rooted in the drums of Marco Minneman, who was completely unknown to me prior to his work with Steven Wilson.

My relationship to the music of Steven Wilson is a testament to the power of liner notes on records. I have said before that the reason I am listening to him and Porcupine Tree is that he produced Opeth, and this is not unique in my musical exploration. The above mentioned Marco Minneman, for instance, formed a trio with Tony Levin, whose session work I mainly know of because of reading record covers (I have followed him since before the world wide web made it really easy to find all this information) and Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess. I also discovered Emmylou Harris because she worked with the producer Daniel Lanois - I had, of course, heard the name before, but it was country and I was uninterested. But I was a big enough fan of Lanois' productions that I gave her a shot and I was hooked. I love her voice. I could go on - but reading record covers and finding connections has been so rewarding for me over the years. That is one of the reasons I tried for as long as I could to hang on to the physical copies of music - most recently in cd form - but it's getting more and more difficult to hold on to that - it takes way too much space.

Anyway, back to Steven Wilson. I am lucky enough to have a live document of the Grace for Drowning tour in the bluray/cd box set Get What You Deserve, and Steven Wilson himself gets a chance to introduce this beautiful and long song. AND - we get to watch great musicians perform great music!

February 25 - Drive Home

I don't really need to look too far for reasons to play Steven Wilson, and today's plan of events made the choice really easy: Chris is supposed to be discharged, and we will Drive Home. Drive Home is a song from the fantastic album The Raven That Refused To Sing, which was released in 2013. It was engineered by none other than Alan Parsons of Alan Parsons Project fame - as well as having worked with Pink Floyd on The Dark Side Of The Moon. My favorite track from the album was also released as an EP with an accompanying music video that is as haunting as the song. Talk will not do this song justice - here is Steven Wilson with Drive Home.

January 22 - Index

We're only about three weeks into the new year, and I am expecting the second really great album of the year. Steven Wilson is releasing 4 1/2 today, a collection of songs recorded over the past 4 1/2 years that didn't quite fit on his albums. Since his quality has been outstanding on all the records released in this timeframe, I am convinced that this will be a great album as well.

The thing that really impresses me about Steven Wilson is that he has a spectacular command of musical history, especially within more progressive rock, yet he continually moves his music forward. He is great with a song structure where there is stark contrasts between chaos and harmony, and he collaborates with spectacular musicians. At first, I was worried when I saw that Gavin Harrison wouldn't play drums with him - but then I discovered Marco Minneman. In short, his band is absolutely spectacular, which is why today's song is an officially released live track.

Index is a song that to me shows that he has taken massive cues from one of the giants of progressive rock. The mood of this song is to me very similar to the mood Peter Gabriel often was able to evoke, and I am in particular thinking about Intruder here. Also, playing the chord structure over and over again while adding and subtracting elements is sometihng Mike Oldfield did on Tubular Bells, but it is here drawing even more from Trent Reznor's work with Nine Inch Nails, such as the ending of Closer - yet here it is all Steven Wilson. The song Index was originally on the stellar Grace For Drowning album - but here it is from the Get All You Deserve dvd, which is well worth owning!

January 11 - Nobody To Blame (Best Albums of 2015)

It's taken a while... Although 11 days into the new year isn't really that long, I could have started earlier in 2015, but my #2 selection wasn't released until December 18... As usual, it is really hard to rank them individually, but I tried ranking my top 10. In reality, I am dead set on my favorite album being Chris Stapleton - and I think that #2-5 are better than #6-10, but I could easily change order within those groupings.

1. Chris Stapleton - Traveller
2. Baroness - Purple
3. Iron Maiden - The Book of Souls
4. Gavin Harrison - Cheating The Polygraph
5. Steven Wilson - Hand Cannot Erase
6. Motorpsycho - En Konsert for Folk Flest
7. Faith No More - Sol Invictus
8. Torche - Restarter
9. Sunn O))) - Kannon
10. Kylesa - Exhausting Fire

After the first 10, there are 15 additional recordings that really deserve to be mentioned - they are all albums I really liked over the course of the year. I have listed them alphabetically - but there are no individual preferences here:

Alabama Shakes - Sound & Color

Chris Cornell - Higher Truth

Clutch - Psychic Warfare

Echolyn - I Heard You Listening

Steve Earle & The Dukes - Terraplane
Elder - Lore

Elephant9 - Silver Mountain

Enslaved - In Times

Ghost BC - Meliora

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress

Robert Earl Keen - Happy Prisoner The Bluegrass Sessions

Otis Taylor - Hey Joe Opus Red Meat

Richard Thompson - Still

Steve Von Till - A Life Unto Itself

Chelsea Wolfe - Abyss

Since Chris Stapleton's Traveller reached the first place on my list, I really feel like I need to let him be represented again - and this is a very country country song, which he plays with in the lyrics. Here is Nobody To Blame.

January 4 - Routine

Steven Wilson. I was introduced to this English genius through Opeth, who I most certainly will be addressing later this year - and in all likelihood I will do so more than once as well. But let's talk about Steven Wilson. He started the band Porcupine Tree, which he initially created as a fictional band with a long backstory and album titles before starting to record as the band. The first album, On the Sunday of Life, was a compilation of the best songs he had released on several cassettes in the late 80s, and for the second album, Up on the Downstair, was also largely a solo project, but featured guest appearances by Richard Barbieri (keys) and Colin Edwin (bass), who later joined the band full force. He did expand the band further, first with Chris Maitland on drums, who was replaced by Gavin Harrison, and finally adding John Wesley as a touring member on vocals and guitar.

Porcupine Tree started gaining notoriety in progressive rock circles, and Steven Wilson's visions led him to recognition both within traditional progressive rock and in progressive metal. He produced Fish (of Marillion fame from the 80's) on both his Sunsets on Empire and Raingods with Zippos albums in 1997 and 1999, lent some of his talents to help produce Marillion's marillion.com album in 1999 (they have had Steve Hogarth as their lead singer since they got rid of Fish in 1988), and even worked with Norwegian singer Anja Garbarek, producing her 2001 album Waving and Smiling.

However, I did not know any of this at the time. I had given up on both Fish and Marillion (very prematurely, as it turns out), and Anja Garbarek was of no interest to me (I had heard some of her early work, and while it was ok, it wasn't my bag). Neither had I heard of Opeth yet, although Steven Wilson in 2001 produced one of their masterpieces, Blackwater Park. I actually stumbled across Opeth through sheer dumb luck, about 5 years later.

Fall 2006 through the summer of 2007 was a pretty grueling year for me. I was working full time at Alma College, and I was finishing up my Master of Arts degree in counseling at Spring Arbor University. On the face of it, it doesn't seem so bad, but finishing my counseling degree meant completing a practicum and internship, which was on top of the full time job. So my weekly schedule consisted of leaving home around 7 am and not coming home again until 9 pm or so Monday through Wednesday, then being home at "normal" time so I could be with the girls on Thursday evenings while my then wife worked, and "normal" time on Fridays - but with additional internship hours on Saturday mornings, which let me to miss several of Emma's soccer games. I know there are many people out there who have schedules that are harder than mine was, but for me, this year was still tough, and the only reason I could do it was that I knew that there was a light at the end of the tunnel - and I was hoping it wasn't a train.

So while I was doing this internship, I also walked the aisles of Meijer from time to time, and I always looked in their CD section (this was when they actually still took in CDs outside of the best sellers). While looking, I found this very interesting looking CD called Ghost Reveries by a band called Opeth. I had no clue what it was, so I put it back. However, I kept coming back to it, looking at it, thinking that this looks like something I will like. I eventually got to the point that I remembered the name after leaving the store, and during one of my no-shows sitting in one of the back rooms in the computer lab at MCCs Greenville M-Tec building (that was the name at the time - and yes, it had several study rooms in the computer lab back then), I searched YouTube for their music, and I found the song The Grand Conjuration from Ghost Reveries - and love affair was born. As usual, I filled in the back catalogue, album by album, and that's how I started seeing the name Steven Wilson pop up. He was the producer for the three albums leading up to Ghost Reveries: Blackwater Park (2001), Deliverance (2002), and Damnation (2003). The chain effect had begun...

So now we are at the beginning of 2016, looking back at 2015, and Steven Wilson released Hand. Cannot. Erase. It is his fourth proper solo album, and while it is not as good as Grace for Drowning (2011), it is still easily in my top 5 for 2015 - and yes, the list will eventually be published... To get you all started, I have selected what for me is the emotional centerpiece of Hand. Cannot. Erase., a song about loss and grief (this is starting to look like a theme here) called Routine.