In a recent interview with Australia’s Sense Music Media, six-time Grammy-nominated musician, songwriter, and producer Steven Wilson opened up about the deeper meaning behind his latest album, The Overview. The record, released in March via Fiction Records, includes the track “Objects Outlive Us,” which serves as a springboard for Wilson’s thoughts on perspective, technology, and humanity’s place in the universe.
“I could have easily called [the album] Perspective instead of The Overview. I called it The Overview because there is a recognized scientific phenomenon called ‘the overview effect,’ and that is what astronauts experience when they go into space and look back at Earth. They are experiencing the overview effect. That’s what it’s called. So I called the album The Overview, but more broadly than that, it is about this idea of perspective and reminding people just how insignificant we really are, but trying to do it in a way that’s not negative,” Wilson explained (via Blabbermouth)
Wilson continued by pointing out that our insignificance does not need to be discouraging. Instead, he sees it as liberating: “I know that sounds like a really negative thing to do, but to me, when you remind people, ‘Look, the universe doesn’t care about you. Your life is a blip on a blip on a blip on a blip,’ it’s kind of saying in a way, ‘For fuck’s sake, enjoy it.’ [Laughs] ‘For fuck’s sake, make the most of it. Do something extraordinary. Have profound experiences. Travel, communicate, and engage with other human beings.”
“Don’t spend all day long on this fucking thing [lifting up his phone], looking at banal bullshit. And this, of course, is a kind of existential crisis that we’re kind of facing now, particularly with kids, although I’m just as guilty of it as anyone. Actually, no, that’s not true — I’m not as guilty of it as some people that I see, and my kids included,” he added.
For Wilson, the issue ties directly into how social media has changed the way younger generations experience the world: “I think, for the younger generation, they’ve got used to the idea that they experience the world, the whole world, through the prism of social media, through Snapchat, through Instagram, through whatever it is they’re on. And they almost, in a way, don’t engage with reality. So that’s a kind of big step towards us just simply becoming a brain floating in plasma plugged… I mean, it’s The Matrix [film franchise], isn’t it? It’s Neo [fictional character and the protagonist of The Matrix] in The Matrix — a brain or a body floating in sort of plasma plugged into a matrix.”
“I mean, for fuck’s sake, we’re almost there. We’re almost there. And this is so sad because, to me, this is the very antithesis of what humanity is supposed to be. Humanity is supposed to be engaging with the world around us and with the other people around us, and with the rest of the species,” he mused.
As someone who is vegan, Wilson also reflected on the arrogance of assuming humans sit at the top of the natural order: “I’m a vegan, as you probably know, so I’m a great believer — all these other species we share the planet with, we think we’re more important than all of them. We’re not. We’re not — we are no more important. In fact, again, to follow The Matrix thing, in many ways, we behave like a virus. We really do. So in many respects, you could say we’re one of the least important species on Earth, and yet we somehow behave as if we’re somehow the curators of our planet. And again, we’ve been here 300,000 years out of four billion.”
“Relatively speaking, that’s like the last five minutes. And so we have an extraordinary arrogance and an extraordinary lack of perspective about our own importance, not only in relation to the universe, but even in relation to our own planet. We are not as important as we think we are. And again, I think it’s a really beautiful and positive thing to remind or try to remind people of this, because it can only help them, in a way, to process, I think, what we’re all going through. Things that seem to matter really don’t, really don’t. And to remind ourselves of that every day, I think, is fundamental to happiness and contentment,” Wilson reasoned.
When the interviewer admitted to being “pretty much a straight-up nihilist,” Wilson sympathized but also shared his own conflict: “Well, and I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you for being [like that]. I have a lot of that. It’s funny — I don’t know if this resonates with you, but I have a conversation with my bass player sometimes, Nick, and he’s kind of a little bit the same. And we both kind of agree that the best thing that could possibly happen to this planet is the human race will just wipe itself off the fucking Earth — the best thing that could be for this planet.”
“And a part of me really believes that, and it’s so sad that I would believe that, because we are capable of such extraordinary things,” Wilson continued. “And you only have to hear an incredible piece of music or see a gymnast and what we can do, or a dancer, these incredibly beautiful things that we can do. So I’m constantly fighting my own instinct to be what you said, like a nihilist, but I completely get that too. It’s hard not to be some days, isn’t it?”
Despite the weight of these reflections, Wilson continues to channel these ideas into his art. His The Overview tour — his first full-band solo headline run in North America in over seven years — began September 9 at San Francisco’s The Masonic and will carry on through mid-October.
