News

Steven Wilson: New Album Out This Month

• 7th Feb 2013

Highly respected, four-time Grammy-nominated British artist Steven Wilson will release his third solo album via Kscope on February 25, 2013. Titled ‘The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories)’, the much anticipated new album was written between January – July and recorded in Los Angeles in September. It contains some of his darkest and most accomplished work yet.

Steven’s current band is a collection of stellar musicians: lead guitarist Guthrie Govan, bassist Nick Beggs, Marco Minnemann on the drums, Theo Travis playing saxophone/flute, and Adam Holzman on keyboards. The record has been engineered by legendary producer/engineer Alan Parsons and consists of 6 songs, 3 of which are 10+ minute epics and all are inspired by tales of the supernatural / ghost stories from the Victorian era.

“It’s less about what you see and more about what you imagine,” Steven told Prog Magazine recently. “I love those stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Machen. They’re macabre fairy tales. They have much more atmosphere than what we see in Hollywood horror cinema. It’s about a creeping sense of dread rather than something more explicit.”

Expanding on the story behind opening track ‘Luminol’, Steven explained, “There’s a busker I pass every day in my local town centre – and he’s rubbish! He can’t play, he can’t sing, he peddles out the same Oasis and Beatles covers every day. People just ignore him. But it doesn’t matter because he is relentless in his enthusiasm. I started to think, what would happen if he just dropped dead? Would anyone notice – and would anyone notice if he just carried on busking?”

“Death becomes almost incidental; there’s that sense of somebody having such a strong attachment to a place or activity that death doesn’t stop them. You see a lot of attachment to locations in old-fashioned stories – the haunted house. But there’s something about an activity being part of a routine. Not just for the individual, but for the people that are used to that individual. Even in death that continues.”

The limited deluxe 4-disc edition of the album comes in the form of a 128-page hardback book containing lyrics and ghost stories illustrated by Hajo Mueller and written by Steven Wilson. Mueller also designed the album’s front cover artwork. In addition to the deluxe edition, there will be regular CD, CD/DVDV media book, Blu-Ray, and 2LP vinyl editions, with the DVDV and Blu-ray editions featuring a 5.1 mix of the album and other bonus material. Pre-orders for the limited deluxe edition will start in early January.

Steven and his band hit the road touring the new record from March 1, beginning in the UK and moving into Europe. The tour will continue throughout 2013, visiting many other countries for which the dates are yet to be revealed. Shows are currently announced in the UK, Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Tickets are nearly sold out already for these UK dates: Friday 1 March – MANCHESTER Academy, Saturday 2 March – GLASGOW ABC, and Monday 4 March – LONDON Royal Festival Hall.