Steven Wilson

Musician

1967-11-03

Quotes by Steven Wilson

• I feel I'm living in parentheses

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• I feel I'm living in parentheses

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• People who like progressive music tend to sneer at the idea of a kind of punk aesthetic, and people who like alternative indie rock or punk rock tend to sneer at what they see as the pretentiousness and pomposity of progressive music.

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• I really love the combination of Israel and England. They are completely different. The British are very private and keep things to themselves, while Israelis aren't that way. In England, I couldn't make friends with people in the supermarket or people who work at my bank or post office, but in Israel I can, and I like that.

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• I grew up with vinyl records and remember the pleasure and the kind of buzz that I got from buying a beautiful vinyl record with the sleeve and the lyrics - all that kind of tactile experience that you could get from an old vinyl record.

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• The one thing I do believe is, if you make the songs about the human aspects of things, you've got a much better chance of having the music transcend the times. If you make them very political and very topical, it's going to date very quickly.

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• I grew up listening to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance - these are the bands that I actually grew up with, and I always had these things in my taste, too. And I always loved industrial music as well: I listened to Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire. And shoegaze bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine.

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• The nature of music fandom and music fans is that, very often, they fall in love with a band or a particular artist, and they really would like... I'm talking generally; that's not everyone. But a vast majority of the fan base would prefer the band to keep making the same record and the same style of music over and over again.

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• I grew up at the very tail end of the vinyl era, and at the time, I remember, we couldn't wait for CD to come along because vinyl was so frustrating. You would buy the record, take it home, and it would have a scratch, and you would have to take it back again.

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• Owning vinyl is like having a beautiful painting hanging in your living room. It's something you can hold, pore over the lyrics, and immerse yourself in the art work.

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• Every time the mainstream media talk about progressive rock, they wheel out a clip of Rick Wakeman in a cape. For me, it's one of the most ambitious forms of music. The problem is that when it doesn't work, you end up with Emerson, Lake and Palmer doing symphonies with 60-piece orchestras and revolving pianos, which I think is ridiculous as well.

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