If you’ve ever heard Porcupine Tree, a band that mixes both experimental and traditional progressive rock with metal and a plethora of other styles (electronica, new wave, metal, film soundtrack), they might first seem like an odd fit for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. As lead singer/guitarist Steve Wilson and I discussed, things have changed for the better both in the festival and the label world. Minds are beginning to open a bit, and Porcupine Tree is one of several more experimental and sui generis groups that have found festival billing this big. If anything, Coachella 2010 proved it”ll be the first of many for them.

So now that you’ve signed to Roadrunner, can you talk about how they’ve reacted to your style of music, the sort of proggier end of things?

Steve Wilson: Well, we’re on Roadrunner in America, though we’ve been on Roadrunner in Europe for a while. But they’ve been great to us. A lot of it is the fact that there’s people there who believe in us, and who are fans of progressive music. And on Roadrunner you’ve got Opeth and Dream Theater, so I think that now that the climate has changed a bit and progressive music has sort of come around a bit.

So looking back at your musical career, which has always sort of followed this trajectory, do you ever see a point in time when you felt like giving up? You’ve been around since the early nineties, and things weren’t easy with this genre of music.

Wilson: Well back then there was nu metal and trip hop; our type of music wasn’t big at all. But now, with bands like Mastodon and Sigur Ros, so the climate had changed and people seem a lot more open to this type of music, and it seems to be coming around again. But at the end of the day, I don’t think this can be about money. It’s simply about writing your music and sharing it with people.

You’ve departed a bit from the metal influence on the new album. Was that a totally conscious maneuver on your part?

Wilson: There’s a lot of metal bands now. So yeah, I sort of did find myself straying away from that when I was recording. I tried to bring in more of a classic rock influence.

You’ve remarked in the past that you had a really wonderful childhood. Yet a lot of your music can be fairly melancholy at times, and you manage to get that feeling across without it sounding pretentious or forced. I guess my question is really, how you manage to capture that emotion with such a trauma-free past…

Wilson: It’s like the whole emo thing — a lot of these kids are really well-adjusted kids who just decide they’re going to listen to darker, heavier music. I’m sure I said the same thing back then, but for some people, and for me, I don’t know. There’s just that want to sort of explore the darker side of life.

What’s the writing process like? Do you sort of lock yourself in your studio until you come up with an album?

Wilson: Writing The Incident was very much like writing a novel for me. For a novelist, there’s the certain characters the novelist wants to have, and for them to go somewhere. It was written linearly, as a sort of start-to-finish sort of thing. And that’s how I wrote songs like “Occam’s Razor,” and “The Blind House”, moving along as a story towards songs like “I Drive the Hearse.” Film really influences my music more than other music does. That’s why I love David Lynch. His movies are very much like a dream, more the work of a visual artist. That’s sort of how I do my music.

How do you felt the crowd reacted to you here today? You haven’t played many alternative festivals, especially in America…

Wilson: Really well. A lot of people hadn’t heard us before, and I think a lot of them heard different things they liked. It’s a shorter set, obviously, and we weren’t able to have the screen (Porcupine Tree regularly use a movie screen, displaying the film imagery of band artist/filmmaker Lasse Hoile). So it wasn’t something we were used to. But I think things went great here, and the reaction was terrific.

Interview by Jeff Nau, Photos courtesy of Kevin Flinn/OC Register