"One of the reasons why think it doesn't happen in the rock- and pop- music world is that the musicians are just not good enough, and I include myself in that category," Wilson admits. "If I was in a band of people all at my level, there would be no way we would consider making a record like this, in this way. I think that's another thing that was brought home to me by working on all those records [surround remixes]: how good the bands were and how they could do it. This band can definitely do it; I'm going to be in the control room a lot of the time for these sessions—I'm not even going to be playing. I'm writing the material, and I'll sing the material, but I'm going to be taking more of a director's role a lot of the time because they're way better musicians, and in a way, I have always dreamed of being in this position. Zappa was so good at it; his players were always much better musicians than he was. He had the ideas, and he wrote the music, but he got other people to play it who were better at playing it than he was. At the same time, it was kind of mutually beneficial; they all enjoyed playing music by the guy who had the ideas—those fantastic ideas.
"What this has done is make me raise my game as a writer," Wilson concludes. "Because the stuff I've written for this band to play—I mean, it's not complicated, but it's more complex than anything I've written before—I think that to be able to write for musicians of this caliber does make me start to think, really, at the very peak of what I'm capable of imagining and writing. That's been great to challenge myself. What can I write that Marco will actually find difficult to play? Not a lot. I'm not trying to suggest I'm writing difficult stuff just for the sake of it, because I really loathe that whole concept of complexity for its own sake. But at the same time, I like stuff that works on both levels. I like good songs that also have a level of intricacy, which means you can appreciate them from a musical perspective as well. And that's something I'm definitely doing for this record that I've never been able to do before. I mean, Gavin [Harrison, Porcupine Tree drummer] is extraordinary, but myself, Richard [Barbieri, keyboardist] and Colin [Edwin, bassist], are all more restricted in terms of our musical technique, so we have to limit ourselves in terms of what we can play and what we can pull off in a live context. With this band, it's a whole different ballgame, and I'm loving that."
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