Deadwing

Concept

The complete concept and story has never been entirely announced by the band, and this is likely due to Wilson's intentions of attempting to turn it into a movie, and not wanting to spoil any portions of the story.

Wilson said it is a surreal "ghost story," and "the idea's ultimately that this album will form a kind of companion with the feature film." He stated that David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick were major influences for the script.

On 1 September 2006, Steven Wilson announced in his blog that Mike Bennion (Co-writer of the Deadwing screenplay) had released the first fifteen pages of the story. It is available for reading on Mike Bennion's myspace blog and on the [Deadwing microsite][1]. The film script thus far has made several connections to the album in various ways; such as a reference to the line in Mellotron Scratch 'A tiny flame inside my hand', the man mentioned in Lazarus 'My David don't you worry', and to the artwork in the album's cover insert (more specifically the page with the lyrics to "Halo" scrawled in it).

While introducing the song Lazarus during the Shepherds Bush Empire concert in December 2005, Steven Wilson explained that this song was about a mother communicating with her young son - 'from the grave'.

Note on loudness war

In a comment on the loudness war, Steven Wilson mentioned how he considered placing a message on record sleeves that reads as follows: "Please note that this record may not be mastered as loudly as some of the other records in your collection. This is in order to retain the dynamic range and subtlety of the music. Please, use your volume knob." Conversely, the CD version of the album has been proved to contain clipping and dynamic range compression, whereas the 5.1 surround mix on the DVD-A version does not. However, subsequent releases Fear of a Blank Planet and Nil Recurring are mastered at lower levels, preserving more of their original dynamic range.

Track listing

The band stated that 15 songs were recorded during the Deadwing sessions. The initial release, for Europe, contained only 9 tracks. All versions contain those initial 9 tracks in the same order. For the later U.S. release, an additional track was added on, the 2004 re-recorded version of "Shesmovedon", which was originally released on their 2000 Lightbulb Sun, bringing the total to 10.

The album was also released as a DVD-Audio disc on 10 May 2005 by DTS Entertainment. The disc contains 5.1-channel surround versions of all the tracks from the US CD ("Shesmovedon (2004)" was included as an unlisted extra track.) plus three bonus tracks: "Revenant," "Mother and Child Divided" and "Half-Light", bringing the total to 13 songs.

One more song, "So Called Friend", was released on the "Lazarus" single, bringing it up to 14 songs. There is another song titled "Christenings": while it was never released as a Porcupine Tree song, it was eventually released on Steven Wilson's side project, Blackfield's 2007 album Blackfield II. An instrumental demo made in 2003 during writing sessions for Deadwing, but never recorded by the band is called "Collecting Space". A proper version of this piece was released on the limited edition of Wilson's first solo album, Insurgentes, while its demo appears as an extra track on the Insurgentes movie DVD. Another possible song from this time is "Godfearing", which was later released on the web and that Wilson doesn't recall its exact recording period, but it was either during Deadwing or In Absentia.

10. "Shesmovedon (2004)" – 4:59

10. "Revenant" (Barbieri) – 3:04
11. "Mother & Child Divided" (Harrison/Wilson) – 4:59
12. "Half-Light" – 6:20
13. "Shesmovedon (2004)" - 4:59 (easter egg track)

10. "So Called Friend" (Barbieri/Edwin/Harrison/Wilson) – 4:49
11. "Half-Light" – 6:20

Awards

Deadwing won the "Best Made-For-Surround Title" award for the 2005 Surround Music Awards, and was voted number 2 album of 2005 in Sound & Vision, which is the most widely distributed US magazine in the field of home electronics and entertainment. In addition to this, the album won the "Album of the Year" award for the 2005 Classic Rock magazine awards. The album was named as one of Classic Rock‘s 10 essential progressive rock albums of the decade.

Chart positions

Personnel