Steven Wilson talks much like he makes music: in long, intricately structured passages, showing evidence of careful thinking about what, exactly, he wants to get across.

As a result, we’re only going to get to skim the surface of a 25-minute conversation that ranged from the creative uses of solitude to the genius of the real Dave Stewart. (The astounding keyboardist, arranger, and Wilson collaborator, that is, not the guy who was in a band with Annie Lennox.)

Mostly, though, we discussed Wilson’s new solo effort, Hand. Cannot. Erase., for the simple reason that the busy musician intends to present it in its entirety at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

Hand. Cannot. Erase. is a concept album, and that once-reviled format has allowed Wilson to create a work of novelistic depth. More surprising is that by using someone else’s life and death as his starting point, he’s made the most personal, perhaps even the most revealing, album of his career.

The 47-year-old musician, whose CV includes 10 albums with his band Porcupine Tree, based his latest release on the grim fate of Joyce Carol Vincent, a recluse who died of unknown causes in her London flat, and whose absence went unremarked for more than two years.

“Like a lot of people, I immediately dismissed the story, because the inclination, when you hear a story like that, is to assume that the victim is some kind of lonely little old lady,” Wilson explains, on the line from a Chicago tour stop. “And it wasn’t until about three years ago, when I saw a documentary film made by a British filmmaker called Carol Morley, called Dreams of a Life, that I understood that the opposite was true—that Joyce Carol Vincent was an attractive and popular young woman. So then the question arises in your mind, ‘How on earth could this possibly happen? How could someone who was young, attractive, and popular disappear so completely?’ And the more I thought about it, the more I understood exactly how this is possible.

“We live in a world dominated by fear and paranoia,” he continues. “If you live in the city, you only have to look out your window to see enough that would make you feel that you don’t want to step outside your front door ever again. You turn on the news, you see war, you see pedophiles, you see terrorists, you see religious fundamentalism… There’s enough in the world to engender a sense of paranoia, of confusion, of fear and withdrawal. So I could begin to understand how someone like Joyce Carol Vincent could feel. To me, it became symptomatic of life in the 21st century, and particularly life in the city.”

Once Wilson began writing Hand. Cannot. Erase.’s 11 songs, however, he discovered something else: taking on Vincent’s identity allowed him to delve deeper into his own memories, dreams, and fears.

“I’ve kind of asked myself this question: ‘Why have I put more of myself into a female character than I ever have with a male character?’ ” he says. “And of course the answer is obvious: writing through a female character makes it less obvious if I give it some of my personal experience. People don’t necessarily make the connection if it’s a female character, so in a sense I’ve been a little bit braver in giving my female character some of my own autobiography. The fact that she’s female is a bit of a smoke screen; actually, she’s a lot closer to me than any other character I’ve ever written.”

There’s a real, beating heart behind Wilson’s story of a dead Englishwoman, making Hand. Cannot. Erase. the kind of concept album even prog-rock skeptics might love.

Steven Wilson plays the Vogue Theatre on June 20.