Incubus – Brandon Boyd

Incubus – Brandon Boyd

By: Lori Smerilson Carson

Tickets & Info: https://www.incubushq.com/

When you have a good thing, you keep it going. This is exactly what incubus has done with their recently released album Morning View XXIII which is basically a re-recording of their double platinum album Morning View originally released in 2001. This extremely talented rock band made their mark in the alternative music world with their debut LP fungus among us in 1995, and continued to reach Gold and Muti-Platinum status with their following records which led them to achieve six consecutive Top five debuts on the Billboard 200 chart, and sell over twenty-three million albums worldwide. Now, in support of their new album, they are touring this Summer (with special guests Coheed and Cambria), and Florida fans will be able to catch this sure to be amazing show on September 3^rd at the Amalie Arena in Tampa.

Catching up with Lead Vocalist Brandon Boyd, he revealed some details about the record and the tour that he and bandmates Guitarist/Pianist/Vocalist Mike Einziger, Bassist Nicole Row, Drummer José Pasillas II and Turntables/Keyboardist Chris Kilmore have embarked on, as well as some past experiences, and what fans can look forward to.

SFL Music Magazine: What can fans look forward to with the new show?  What is new and different with this tour?

Brandon Boyd: What is new and different about this tour? This one’s sort of old and different I suppose (he laughed) ‘cause we’re performing our record from front to back that’s twenty-three years old. It was sort of born at the experience we had at the Hollywood Bowl this past October in celebration of our album Morning View. We announced that we were going to give it a shot to perform it from front to back. A little bit like someone sort of pushing play on the record, but doing it live, and with all the potential and fun and chaos that, that brings. It was very well received and people seemed wonderfully enthusiastic about it, so we decided to kind of present it as a limited tour run experience. We said, let’s do it ten times, call it a day and we did that. It seems like people are still excited about it.

SFL Music Magazine: You released that a couple of months ago in May. It has songs “Nice to Know You” and “Wish You Were Here”? The songs were re-recorded? Tell me about the album Morning View XXIII.

Boyd: Yes. We did a re-release of our album Morning View which came out in 2001. So, we re-recorded. It’s called Morning View XXIII. It’s the same songs, but re-imagined twenty-three years later.

SFL Music Magazine: What inspired that? 

Boyd: We like to try lots of stuff in this band. It’s one of the fun parts about being in a band is that you have the freedom to sort of test the boundaries of your creative insights and things like that. Much of the time that results in new music for us, but then we also like to celebrate certain milestones and anniversaries. Most of the time it’s sort of quietly, but then there are certain records that stick out a little bit more. Our album Make Yourself which came out in 1999 was sort of our first big look that we got across the world. It was the first time we had singles that charted, and the first time that we reached a big audience. So, we did a twentieth anniversary tour where we played that album from front to back across the United States. It was received very well, though we were quietly musing about doing the same thing with Morning View. Morning View, being another album that kind of catapulted us into a different stratosphere of our career, so to speak. Also, it being the record that came after Make Yourself. So, we did a livestream during the pandemic where we went back to the house in Malibu where we wrote and recorded Morning View, and we did the livestream from there.  We started talking about the possibility of putting out that recording as ‘Morning View Live’ as a sort of twentieth anniversary idea. Then actually mixed it. Started to go down that path of ok, we’re gonna do this, and listening to some of the mixes, it was occurring to me that it sounded good, but it wasn’t necessarily achieved greatness as far as I was concerned. So, I started to do my best to infect the general conversation with the idea at least that maybe  we should re-record this properly, and it seems to ring everyone’s bell enough that everyone got excited about the idea. So, we went back into the studio and we just re-recorded the album entirely. We’re very happy with how it came out, and now there are two versions of our album Morning View.  There’s Morning View from 2001 and there’s Morning View XXIII.

SFL Music Magazine: What would you say inspires Incubus’s music in general?

Boyd: That’s a tough question to answer. I suppose it’s relatively complex to just trying to approach in short form, I suppose. I’m doing my best as a lyricist and as a singer to be a sort of interpreter of my experiences. I’m trying to interpret my experiences that I have on an individual level into a kind of storytelling, a narrative of sorts, and present it through song. To the best of my ability to answer your question I’d say, everything inspires our music. Everything from what I’m reading or what I’m watching or what I’m experiencing in my day-to-day life. So, lyrically I would say. I can’t speak for what inspires the guitar riffs and the rhythms and things like that, but from a lyrical, melodic perspective, my experience of being alive is what inspires the things that I put out.

SFL Music Magazine: You and Mike co-founded the band. Do you think coming from L.A. influenced you to become a musician?

Boyd: I’m sure that our environments had an indelible effect on who we’ve become. How much of an effect, I don’t really know if that’s for me to say. Los Angels was and is a hot bed of creativity. I grew up very sort of fortunate in my environment to be able to go to lots of concerts and lots of performances of different kinds, and so I’m sure that had some kind of an effect. I’d say more than anything, growing up in a household where creativity and creative expression was encouraged. It was sort of the norm. My mom was a painter, and my mom was a singer and a dancer. My dad was an actor long, long time ago. He was an engineer by training, but his dream was to be an actor. So, when my brothers and I started to show signs of creative expression, I’m sure that my parents were like, amazing! They made certain tools available to us. Like in the case of my mom, she let me use all of her art supplies. Her paints, her brushes, her sketch books, her drawing books. Everything was sort of available to me and my brothers. Then when we started to make noise with instruments, which still to this day I marvel at, but they let us commandeer the garage to start our bands. Our neighbors didn’t seem to complain too much which is a thing. Like sometimes the barriers to entry with young bands is, are your parents willing to tolerate the kind of hackary and garbage that comes out of the room next door or out of the garage because as kids, you’re just like smashing things, making noise, and sometimes it sort of finds its way into focus and it’s like, oh, we wrote a song! God forbid we wrote a whole album. So, long way around to answer your question, I’m certain that my parents, and our parents collectively encouraging us and allowing us to make terrible, terrible noise for some years, had a big effect on why we were able to start our band.

SFL Music Magazine: incubus has Multi-Platinum albums and have sold over twenty-three million records world-wide. What would you say attributes to the longevity and success?

Boyd: That’s an impossible question as well (he laughed). These are questions for statisticians and phycologists. I’m sure I don’t know. I mean, what I could say is, I hope that some of our success over the years is a result of people resonating with some of the ideas, and resonating with sort of the emotionality of the songs, and they were able to allow them into their lives and make these songs part of their lives. I know from just being a fan of music and of art, when the right song or the right band or even the right artist finds their way into your experience, it can help guide your experience in certain ways. It can help somebody make sense of what can be a confusing time in their life or a bad time in their life, or an exciting time in their life, or sort of like a sound track to it under the best of circumstances. So, if in some small way Incubus has been able to be part of people’s experiences, I suppose that’s part why we’ve had some kind of staying power because these things, they’re easy to take for granted, music and bands, but I find interest in my experience with my favorite bands and my favorite artists. They are of the upmost importance to me, and I wouldn’t be the person that I am if it weren’t for my favorite bands and my favorite songwriters. I still to this day listen to the albums and go back to some of the artists that I fell in love with when I was fourteen, fifteen years old.

SFL Music Magazine: Is there anything else new coming out? Anything else for fans to look forward to?

Boyd: We are writing a new record. So, we’re probably going to have a new record out at the most by mid next year. We’re already recording it. So yeah, we’re going to have a new record out sometime in ’25.

SFL Music Magazine: That’s definitely something for people to look forward to. Was there anything else you want to add for people to know about the show in Tampa?

Boyd: We look forward to seeing everybody. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.