Steven Wilson

A tireless musician whose idiosyncratic taste and immense production talent made him one of the most respected if under-the-radar record makers of his time, Steven Wilson was born on 3 November 1967 in Kingston-upon-Thames, London. He taught himself numerous musical instruments as a child, and even made his first experimental forays into recording techniques as a teenager. Claiming Donna Summer and Pink Floyd as equal lifelong influences, he began Altamont, his first of many bands, at age 15. Before he was 20 he launched a pair of bands that began to establish him, the prog-oriented art pop duo No-Man and the rock band Porcupine Tree. As those projects evolved through the 1990s, he released solo work in a wide variety of musical styles under a series of stage names. Steven Wilson became an in-demand producer, leading to him remixing classic albums by XTC, Yes, King Crimson, and many others over the years. He launched a solo career in the 21st century with a series of singles that featured a cover of a famous pop tune on the A-side and an original on the B-side. His solo debut LP, 2008’s Insurgents showcased his masterful production skill, as well as his knack for alt-rock hooks and his prog-rock chops. To promote the 2011 double album Grace for Drowning, Steven Wilson mounted his first extensive solo tour. 2013’s The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories) was a concept album where every song was like a supernatural short story, and Steven Wilson talked one of his record-making idols, Alan Parsons, into engineering the LP. 2015’s Hand. Cannot. Erase. was another concept album based on the true story of a woman whose death went unnoticed for years. Those albums steadily climbed higher and higher on the charts, leading to 2017’s To the Bone, an album steeped in the 1980s art-pop style of Peter Gabriel, Tears for Fears, and Kate Bush, going top 5 in the UK, Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands, giving him his best charting solo album. In 2020 he dropped a series of singles including “Personal Shopper” and “12 Things I Forgot” that would all appear on his 2021 LP The Future Bites. Steven Wilson dropped his genre-defying seventh solo album, The Harmony Codex, in 2023 and landed himself a number-four UK album.

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