Stupid Dream
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| Stupid Dream | ||
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| Studio album by Porcupine Tree | ||
| Released | March, 1999 | |
| Recorded | January, 1998-November, 1998 | |
| Genre | Progressive rock | |
| Length | 59:55 | |
| Label | Snapper | |
| Professional reviews | ||
|---|---|---|
| Porcupine Tree chronology | ||
| Metanoia (1998) |
Stupid Dream (1999) |
Piano Lessons (1999) |
| 2006 Reissue | ||
 |
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| Digitally Remastered CD-DVDA | ||
Stupid Dream is the fifth studio album by British progressive rock band Porcupine Tree, first released in March, 1999. It became the band's best selling album up to the time of its release.
Steven Wilson said of the album: "I just wrote about myself this time, certain insecurities and feelings - all the usual miserable singer-songwriter stuff. I've come round to the idea that the most affecting lyrics are always written from a personal point of view."
"When I was writing some of the songs of the album I was very much aware of this contradiction between being an artist, being a musician, trying to be creative and write songs and, then, at the point you finish an album, the music is finished, the creative side is finished, you then have to go out and sell and market and promote. And that's like a completely different experience. It's not a very creative process. It's quite - in some ways - a cynical process going on having to sell your music. But you have to do it. I mean, if a modern musician is going to survive as a musician, you have to - in a sense - 'prostitute yourself' to try and sell your music and your art. And I was very much aware of that contradiction. If you think about that too much, it can drive you crazy, you know. It's an absurd thing to be doing. That kind of led me thinking about when I was a teenager, when I was just starting out and I was interested in being a musician. And I think a lot of teenage kids have this dream of being pop stars, of being a professional musician. This 'stupid dream' of being famous and 'life is a ball and everything is wonderful'. And, of course, actually the reality is that being a professional musician is a very hard work. It can be very heartbreaking, there's a lot of disappointment, there's a lot of hard work, there's a lot of travelling."
The album cover is linked to this concept as well.
Wilson: "Like sitting down with the record company to discuss how we're gonna market this album. And at that point your record becomes a product. And I just had this image of these CD's just coming off this conveyor belt. And obviously it's at complete odds with the music. But I wanted to have this kind of contradictory feel to the color. The bottom line is, the people that get into Porcupine Tree know that we're exactly not the kind of band that ever consider our music in terms of product and shifting units. So I thought it would kind of be fun to put an image on the album which is a comment on that. What could be a more stupid dream than wanting to make music and sell it."
The album was re-released on May 15, 2006. It was released as both a 2 disc CD/DVD-A set, and double vinyl LP, but the double vinyl LP is only available through Burning Shed, the official Porcupine Tree store. The CD contains a new mix of the album by Steven Wilson, and the DVD-A contains a 5.1 surround mix, two bonus tracks and the video for "Piano Lessons" A standard reissue version of Stupid Dream is planned later in 2006.
Contents |
[edit] Track listing
- "Even Less" – 7:11
- "Piano Lessons" – 4:21
- "Stupid Dream" - 0:28
- "Pure Narcotic" - 5:02
- "Slave Called Shiver" - 4:40
- "Don't Hate Me" - 8:30
- "This Is No Rehearsal" - 3:26
- "Baby Dream in Cellophane" - 3:15
- "Stranger by the Minute" - 4:30
- "A Smart Kid" - 5:22
- "Tinto Brass" - 6:17
- "Stop Swimming" - 6:53
[edit] Even Less
Even Less was played live in 1998, as a 15+ minute epic.
Steven Wilson said of "Even Less": "That track originally was seventeen minutes long and was recorded as a seventeen minute long track, and it had everything on it. Just ridiculous amounts of overdubs on that track."
Eventually, Wilson only used the first half of the song on the album (Stupid Dream). The second part of the song was added as a bonus track on the CD single of "Stranger by the Minute", and the full-length version can be found on the Recordings album.
At the end of the track a woman can be heard reading out some mysterious numbers. About them, Wilson stated: "The counting in 'Even Less' is taken from a recording of a shortwave numbers station. It is understood that these stations are used by intelligence agencies to transmit coded messages to overseas operatives, although no government agency has ever acknowledged the existence of these stations or what their actual purpose might be. They are virtually impossible to decode without the key since the message and it's key are generated at random." [1]
[edit] Piano Lessons
Steven Wilson has described Piano Lessons as "the most psychedelic Porcupine Tree recording since the early days."
The weird video for the song showed the band shambling around in weird masks and holding up signs with obvious marketing terminology. It therefore fitted in quite well with Wilson's concept for the album (Stupid Dream), as did the lyrics for this first single from the album, "Forget you own agenda, Get ready to be sold (...) I come in value packs of ten, (in five varieties)."
[edit] Stupid Dream
Stupid Dream is a little mood piece of 28 seconds with a tuning orchestra and some sound effects.
[edit] Pure Narcotic
Pure Narcotic is the second single from the album. This track featured acoustic guitars, close harmony vocals, glockenspiel, pastoral piano and lyrics. The CD single also featured a live version of "Tinto Brass", another track from Stupid Dream.
Also, the lyrics make a reference to Radiohead's album The Bends: "You keep me hating, You keep me listening to 'The Bends'."
[edit] Slave Called Shiver
Steven Wilson said of Slave Called Shiver: "It's a very perverse love song, yeah. I mean, it's an unrequited love song. It's a love song with somebody who's obsessed with someone else, but none of that affection is returned. It relates very closely to 'Don't Hate Me', which is a song again about someone who's obsessed with someone from afar. 'Don't Hate Me' is an even more extreme version, because here this person actually begins to follow and make phone calls and, you know, it becomes very unhealthy. 'Slave Called Shiver' is slightly less extreme. It's about someone who's very much in love and obsessed with somebody else. That love is not returned and so there's a slightly violent perverse undercurrent. 'Pure Narcotic' also is very much the same subject".
[edit] Don't Hate Me
Don't Hate Me featured the first use of saxophone in the music of Porcupine Tree, courtesy of Theo Travis.
[edit] This Is No Rehearsal
This Is No Rehearsal is a mixture of semi-acoustic segments with desperate vocals and heavy metal raves, this number was already played live during the 1998 European tour.
Steven Wilson said of "This Is No Rehearsal": "This song was directly inspired by a tragic UK event a few years ago. A child was taken from a shopping mall while his mother was momentarily distracted and was later found dead and tortured near a railway track. The most disturbing thing about the story was that the two abductors/murderers turned out to be children themselves."
[edit] Baby Dream in Cellophane
Baby Dream in Cellophane is a short psychedelic track and sounds a lot like early Pink Floyd, especially the rare Floyd track The Embryo and the middle piece of Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.[citation needed]
Steven Wilson has said of "Baby Dream in Cellophane": "The baby in the song is basically singing the song: 'I am in my pram'. And it's quite a cynical song because he's basically saying that the boy's life is almost mapped out already as the child is born, it's already predetermined by society and the baby's kind of singing from the pram if you like, saying 'well, actually no, I'm not going to go down this path that's been laid out for me. I'm gonna break out.' It's almost like a very surreal teen rebellion song. If you imagine Nirvana, if they wrote about rebellious teenagers, I write songs for rebellious babies."[citation needed]
[edit] Stranger by the Minute
Stranger by the Minute became the second single from the album. The CD single of this song is a very interesting item since it doesn't only contain the second part of "Even Less" but an enhanced PC section with the promotion video of "Piano Lessons" as well.
The song itself features a poppy harmonization in the chorus.
[edit] A Smart Kid
With A Smart Kid Steven Wilson returns to a topic he has touch on before in "Radioactive Toy" (a track from their first album, On the Sunday of Life.... The lyrics deal with a sole survivor after a possible nuclear war that gets picked up by an exploring spaceship.
It is Opeth frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt's favorite Porcupine Tree song, along with Yahweh.
[edit] Tinto Brass
Tinto Brass is the only band composition on the album. This typical piece of instrumental Porcupine Tree was seemingly inspired by Italian director Tinto Brass and starts out with some Japanese spoken text.
Regarding the Japanese spoken part of the song, Steven Wilson said: "Oh, yes, it's spoken in Japanese! It's my girlfriend who's Japanese and she's got a film book. I tell you it's so difficult to find anything on Tinto Brass in England. He's completely unknown. I mean, I didn't know who he was. I just saw his name by accident on a video cover. So I'm gradually finding out more and more about him. I kept looking for stuff about Tinto Brass on English film-books and film-guides, but I couldn't find anything at all. And then my girlfriend has some Japanese film-books and so I asked her to have a look in them to see if she could find Tinto Brass' name. And she did. She found this little biography: where he was born, the films he made. So she said 'well, should I translate that for you?' (Because I wanted it to be spoken in the track) and I said 'No, it's great' - I thought - 'I'll have it in Japanese'. So she just read it in Japanese. But it's just a list of his films and where he's from... It's nothing interesting".
[edit] Stop Swimming
According to some Stop Swimming song was heavily inspired by one of Steve Wilson's favourite bands, Talk Talk.
Wilson said of this song: "I found that when I was writing the music for this album a lot of the songs were about me and my relationship with the music industry and how I felt about where I was going in the music business and all that. Things like 'Stop Swimming'... maybe it's time to stop swimming... and this kind of whole impulse to just give up and go with the flow can be very strong sometimes. I mean I've never given into it. I never will."
[edit] New DVD
The new DVD-A, and the new vinyl release of the album also contained the following tracks:
- "Even Less" (full version) – 14:07
- "Ambulance Chasing" – 6:41
On the DVD-A these tracks are only in 5.1 format.
