Nick Deriso hatte die Chance, für das Online-Magazin Something Else! Reviews ein Interview mit Steven Wilson zu führen. Darin spricht Steven über die Motive seines neuen Albums The Raven That Refused to Sing (and other stories)  und die progressive Rockmusik in ihrer Entwicklung von den 70′er Jahren bis hin zum Neo Prog. Er spricht auch über die Zusammenarbeit mit Alan Parsons und das Songwriting für seine neue Studio- und Liveband.

Steven Wilson im Something Else! Interview

Hier ein Auszug des Interviews, das komplette Gespräch mit Steven könnt ihr hier lesen.

NICK DERISO: Take us into the creative beginnings of The Raven, which is very much about loss and how we deal with it. Does that relate to something specific going on in your own life, or was it simply a topic that intrigued you?
STEVEN WILSON: It’s a bit of both. I don’t think there is anyone on the planet that can say they are not at least familiar with the idea of obsessing with their own sense of mortality. We’re all, in a way, slaves to this idea — well, not an idea; it’s a reality. The reality is, we know that one day we will cease to exist. And I think, in that sense, we measure everything we do in life against the fact that time is tick, tick, ticking away. I think those things, loss and the concept of regret, for me, are very poignant. To have gotten to the end of your allotted time on Earth, and to look back and feel you didn’t do what you should have done, and you weren’t with the person you should have been with, and the job wasn’t the one you enjoyed — all of those things make for an extremely sad, but again rather poignant human condition. So, this idea of loss, the idea of regret, the idea of a fear of mortality, the idea that time is always ticking away, and how happiness and unhappiness are measured against that fact, for me that’s all at the root of the concept of a ghost story, or the story of the supernatural. These are people that have passed on but who, in a way, have refused to let go of life for various reasons. So, they are very humanistic stories.

NICK DERISO: There are moments when it’s as if you’re bringing listeners into one of those ages-old ghost stories — and even the title seems to reference Poe. Did you go back to those books for inspiration?
STEVEN WILSON: Not so much Poe. I mean, “The Raven” is a very famous Edgar Allan Poe story, but the symbol of the raven is ubiquitous in lots of supernatural and horror fiction. It’s a symbol of mortality, it’s a symbol of impending death. And there are many other symbols, too — things like the moon. The ghost itself is a symbol of various paranoias. I think what’s nice about those classical ghost stories is that they are ultimately stories about human beings, about people in situations and relationships and jobs that are not completely satisfactory. I certainly did go back and read a lot of short stories from the early 20th century — in fact, some time after Poe. There’s a school of British writers from that time, people like M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen — who I guess, in their own way, were inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. But they had a very peculiarly British twist, a kind of intellectual approach to the idea of the ghost story — very understated, as only the British can do. I loved that. I started out, in fact, by trying to do my own kind of stories in that kind of vein and style.

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