Songfacts®:

• This epic 11-and-a-half minute number is a track from British progressive rock band Porcupine Tree's 10th studio album, The Incident. It is part of a 55-minute song cycle, which occupies the whole of the album's first disc. Vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Steven Wilson described it as "a slightly surreal song cycle about beginnings and endings and the sense that 'after this, things will never be the same again.'"
• Wilson described this song as "sentimental" and the "centerpiece" of the album. An edited version was released as a single.
• Gavin Harrison of Porcupine Tree is recognized by those in the know as one of the world's premier drummers. He is the author of a couple of instructional drum books and won the Modern Drummer magazine readers' poll for "best progressive drummer of the year" consecutively in 2007, 2008 and 2009. At around the 10:30 mark on this song, Harrison shows his skills when he takes the song's recurrent beat and flips it around so it almost sounds like he's playing it backwards. In an interview with examiner.com, he was asked if this was something he just thought of doing on the fly. Harrison replied: "Well, I always think like that. I actually wrote a book in the late 1980s called Rhythmic Illusions, which is about literally creating illusions with percussion rhythms – the way it sounds like you're playing backwards, or when you're messing around with the perception of where the "1" is, or making it sound like you're playing a different tempo even though you're not playing a different tempo.
  
  There are all sorts of clever tricks you can do with rhythm if you truly understand people's common perception of rhythm. If you understand what people are expecting, then you can mess around with that and that's when you can create some really rhythmical illusions."
• The original inspiration for the song cycle came to Wilson as he became caught up in a highway traffic jam while driving past an accident. He explained in publicity materials: "There was a sign saying 'POLICE – INCIDENT' and everyone was slowing down to rubber neck to see what had happened," he recalls. "Afterwards, it struck me that 'incident' is a very detached word for something so destructive and traumatic for the people involved. And then I had the sensation that the spirit of someone that had died in the accident entered into my car and was sitting next to me. The irony of such a cold expression for such seismic events appealed to me, and I began to pick out other 'incidents' reported in the media and news. I wrote about the evacuation of teenage girls from a religious cult in Texas, a family terrorizing its neighbors, a body found floating in a river by some people on a fishing trip, and more. Each song is written in the first person and tries to humanize the detached media reportage."
• In this song Wilson reflects on his mortality and celebrates 1967, which was not only a milestone 12 months for rock music, but also the year he was born.