The “companion” to my Song of the Week last week. Steve Hackett provides guitar on this amazing track from Steven Wilson’s second solo album. Lasse Hoile gives the song a visual element in his traditional dark and surreal style.
Who am I kidding? The video is nightmare fuel. You have been warned. š
One of my favorite Genesis songs, revisited by Steve Hackett forty years after its original release on the Genesis album Foxtrot, featuring vocals by Steven Wilson. In the early 2010s, the two Steves were in the same social circle for a while, and they appeared on each other’s albums. (Hackett provides guitar for Wilson’s “Remainder the Black Dog” on Grace for Drowning.)
I don’t usually feature the same artist two weeks in a row, but I heard this again last week (though from the Last Day of June soundtrack, with the alternate title “Some Things Cannot Be Changed”) and was so taken by it again that I wanted to share it. It is a simple yet beautiful song, but also has a bit of a mysterious atmosphere to it.
It’s been a decade since Steven Wilson set out on his own, free from the expectations that went along with releasing music with his longtime band Porcupine Tree. With a new group of musicians and no expectations attached to a name, he has gone on to release new and different exciting music which went in directions that Porcupine Tree never could have.
Insurgentes was the first record released under his own name, around the same time as the final Porcupine Tree album, The Incident, and the two sound nothing alike. Insurgentes found Wilson exploring sounds from the ’90s, with shoegaze and drone influences aplenty. One of the many highlights for me from that album is this song, “Significant Other”. It harkens back to the ’90s sound with the highly reverbed clean electric guitar line throughout the song (which reminds me of The Sugarcubes, oddly enough), as it eventually builds to a shoegazey finale.
The final track on Steven Wilson’s second solo album, which was my favorite album of his until The Raven that Refused to Sing and Hand. Cannot. Erase. came along. Grace for Drowning is still a fantastic musical journey across two discs. This song is the perfect finale, and I think I could listen to the last three minutes go on for hours and never tire of it.
A beautiful and tragic song with a beautiful and tragic film to go with it, animated by Jess Cope. What may be my favorite guitar solo not performed by Steve Hackett is in the second half of the song. (Guthrie Govan has earned that second step on the podium.)
in the Wired 