Fear of a Blank Planet
Fear of a Blank Planet is the ninth studio album by British progressive rock band Porcupine Tree and their best selling before 2009's The Incident. It was released on 16 April 2007 in the UK and the rest of Europe by Roadrunner, 24 April 2007 in the United States by Atlantic, 25 April 2007 in Japan by WHD, and 1 May 2007 in Canada by WEA. Steven Wilson has mentioned that the album's title is a direct reference to the 1990 Public Enemy album Fear of a Black Planet; while the former tackled race issues, the latter is about the fear of losing the current generation of youth to various common threats to their mental and social wellbeing, including broken homes, excessive "screen time", and narcotic overuse (prescribed and otherwise) to the point of mental and spiritual "blankness".
Not to be confused with Fear of a Black Planet.Fear of a Blank Planet
16 April 2007
- London, England
- Tel Aviv, Israel
October–December 2006
No Man's Land (Hemel Hempstead)
Bourne Place
New Rising
The Artillery
Nightspace
Mark Angelo
Red Room Recorders
DGM
50:48 (CD and remastered vinyl)
79:32 (original vinyl)
- Roadrunner (Europe)
- Atlantic (US)
The album was written in Tel Aviv and London between January and July 2006. The promotion of the record included a premiere performance of the songs during the shows in support of the Arriving Somewhere... DVD tour between September and November 2006,[1] and a series of listening parties at New York's Legacy Studios,[2] and London's Abbey Road Studios[3] during January 2007.
Fear of a Blank Planet was followed later the same year by release of the Nil Recurring extended play. An additional track titled "Always Recurring" was demoed yet did not receive a formal release on any of the four records (the Fear of a Blank Planet LP, the Fear of a Blank Planet single, the Way Out of Here single, and the Nil Recurring EP) released by Porcupine Tree during this era. With the release of Insurgentes, Wilson's debut solo album, Wilson would further develop some of the ideas on which Fear of a Blank Planet is conceived.
The album charted in almost all European countries and entered the U.S. Billboard 200 at #59. The album was highly acclaimed by critics and was awarded "Album of the Year" by Classic Rock magazine in 2007.
Writing and recording[edit]
Steven Wilson started writing the album in early 2006 in Tel Aviv, while he was recording the second Blackfield album. One of the first songs that Wilson wrote for the album during this period, called "Always Recurring" (which is an unreleased track), would later be recycled lyrically and sonically, for use in the track "What Happens Now?". In the meantime, while Wilson was in Tel Aviv, Richard Barbieri wrote most of the music for the song "My Ashes". "Cheating the Polygraph" was a Harrison/Wilson composition whilst "Way Out of Here", "What Happens Now?" and "Nil Recurring" were written by all four band members. The Blackfield album was finished in June, so Wilson travelled back to London and met the other band members to work on the material he had been writing. These sessions took place between July and August and produced a good number of songs from which just six were picked for the record.[4]
Porcupine Tree's first DVD, entitled Arriving Somewhere..., was released in August of the same year. The band started a short tour in September to promote it, during which the six new songs selected for the forthcoming album were performed at the first half of the shows.[1] Along the tour, which lasted until November, the band began recording the album, eventually rejecting the song "Cheating the Polygraph" since they felt it was somewhat weak when compared to the other five of the live set list; they wrote a new song called "Way Out of Here" to replace it.[5] "Way Out of Here" was a collaboration between all band members and resulted in the only full-band composition of the record. They contacted King Crimson's guitarist Robert Fripp, who provided soundscapes to the song[6] as well as lead guitar for the track "Nil Recurring", an instrumental song not included in the album but later released in the EP of the same name (which also included "Cheating the Polygraph").[7]
Around the time of the recording, Wilson read an interview in Classic Rock magazine in which Rush's guitarist Alex Lifeson had mentioned he was a big fan of Porcupine Tree. Wilson quickly got in touch with Alex to ask him if he would like to play on the album. Lifeson was pleased to contribute[6] so Wilson wrote a section of the song "Anesthetize" for him to play a solo on. Alex recorded the solo in his own studio and sent it to Wilson.
The album recording process was finished in December of the same year.[4] In January 2007 it was revealed that the album title would be Fear of a Blank Planet.[3]
Porcupine Tree
Additional musicians
Production