photo: Lasse Hoile
Ray McClelland interviewed Steven Wilson for guitarguitar.co.uk. On playing all the solos using a 1963 Telecaster on his latest album The Future Bites:
I can’t think of anything that wasn’t played on the Tele. It’s interesting, you talked about solos and actually, there are... when I think about it, there’s actually quite a lot of guitar solos on this record! There’s one on Eminent Sleaze, there’s one on Follower, there’s one on Personal Shopper, there’s one on 12 Things I Forgot. There are a lot of guitar solos on this record! At least 4 or 5 across the 9 tracks. But none of them are what you might call traditional guitar solos. It’s almost like trying to approach the guitar in the form of a character. Now, this is something I’ve talked about before and I want to talk about it with you because I think it’s really important on this record particularly.
There’s a very big difference between hiring a guitar player – someone extraordinary as I have done, like Guthrie Govan or Dave Kilminster or Alex Hutchings – hiring a guitar player to play a solo on your track and playing it yourself as the songwriter. What is the difference? I’ll tell you what I think the difference is. The guitar player comes in and they listen to the music. The songwriter comes in and they respond more to the lyrics than the music. When I mean by that is, if I take a solo like Eminent Sleaze as an example, that solo, which is very angular, very choppy and very atonal, is me in the form of the character, in the guise of the character in the song. He’s a very sleazy, unreliable, insidious person. It’s me as that character, thinking, ‘How would this character play that guitar solo?’ And that’s a completely different mentality to the mentality that somebody like Guthrie or Alex would have, coming to play the solo on that song. Do you see what I mean?
