I Wanted To End Humanity!

It's the end of the world as we know it, but Arjen Lucassen feels fine. So fine, in fact, that he's written what's described as "the soundtrack to humanity's final days". Thirteen years after his last proper solo album, the Dutch polymath has gone apocalyptic on Songs No One Will Hear with a little inspiration from some of his favourite sci-fi-themed records. He tells Prog what he'll be doing when the asteroid hits and his future plans for Ayreon.

- Johnny Sharp

It's one of many popular suggestions we hear these days to promote a healthier, more carefree approach to life: dance like no one's watching. Similarly, the idea of making music like no one is listening is surely an attractive one to any artist who labours under the weight of audience expectation.

Arjen Anthony Lucassen's primary creative vehicle, Ayreon, have built a substantial following over the course of 30 years and 10 studio albums, increasingly on the back of grand overarching concepts, multiple voices and rock opera-style narratives, so it's little wonder that he relished the idea of taking a break from that self-created arena to make a record with fewer expectations surrounding it. His desire to make a solo album was only heightened by working on a range of different collaborative projects in recent times. While putting together the Ayreon live album 01011001 – Live Beneath The Waves for release in April last year, he was also working closely with Simone Simons on the Epica singer's solo debut, Vermillion, and resurrecting his early 90s act Plan Nine to release The Long Lost Songs with longtime vocalist friend Robert Soeterboek.

“At some point I said, 'I've got to do something for myself,'” he explains. “I need to be an egomaniac, and make a solo album where I can just do whatever I want - I don't have to take into account what other people expect."

Which is one way in which the title of Lucassen’s third solo album proper, Songs No One Will Hear, sounds appropriate. But then you find out the concept informing it, and that phrase takes on a new meaning. It’s the kind of question that comes up in social conversation every so often, in various guises: what would you do if you were told you only had a few months left to live?