Incubus vocalist Brandon Boyd and guitarist Mike Einziger have reflected back on their multi-platinum discography as a result of having been asked by Metal Hammer to name the five songs that defined their career. From their funky nü-metal beginnings to their late 90s and 2000s onward turn as alternative rock stars, the pair laid out their choices.
Unsurprisingly, there’s no selections chosen from their major label debut album “S.C.I.E.N.C.E.“. While that 1997 fusion of funk, hip hop and nü-metal certainly helped establish the band, it has also not stood the test of time to them personally.
Boyd was the first to chose a track in this new feature, picking “The Warmth” from 1999’s 2x multi-platinum “Make Yourself“. Einziger then offed up his choice in the lead single from “Make Yourself“, “Pardon Me“. He elaborated on that [transcribed by theprp.com]:
“It’s kind of a lot of people’s first — on the larger scale — introduction to Incubus as a band. And it was really us trying to kind of make sense of all our different influences that were influencing us particularly at that time.
We were really discovering all of this really cool new drum and bass music that was coming from the U.K. to the U.S.. And we’re also… well, we also like rocking out really hard. So it was kind of like a collision of drum and bass and rock music in a way that on paper, probably sounds like it wouldn’t work. And maybe to certain people, it still doesn’t work.
But it worked for us at the time, so the song, “Pardon Me” is definitely kind of the result of that and I think that definitely helped define us, and certainly charted our pathway forward from that point on.”
Boyd offered up the third choice, settling on “Wish You Were Here“, the lead single from their 2001 2x multi-platinum album “Morning View“. Reminiscing on both the impact that song has had on their career (it currently stands as their second most streamed track on Spotify) and the tragedy that took place around it’s release, Boyd relayed:
“It was a single, and it ended up being a really kind of big single for us. It came out at a really, really weird period of time — not just sort of like American history — but world history. We had written this album. We recorded it. We were about to put out this single, ‘Wish You Were Here‘, and the World Trade Centers in New York were attacked.
So we were in New York on 9/11 and we were actively starting to promote ‘Morning View‘. And then it felt like the whole world was falling down. And we had two sold-out concerts in New York City on, I think it was the 14th and the 15th of September, and they were, it was likely that they were going to go away, those shows, just because of the circumstances, but we ended up playing.
And that song is sort of forever locked away in my memory bank as being sort of a moment of lightness in an otherwise really kind of like dark period of time. And it seemed like it had that effect on audience as well. Like we took the song and we released it, and people seemed to be enjoying it, and then we kind of kept playing it at this point ad nauseum.
We haven’t not played it at a concert since then. So once again, it’s like one of those things where if we don’t play that song at a show, something feels like it’s missing.”
The band’s biggest hit to date, “Drive“. Released as the third and final single from “Make Yourself” as the fourth selection. Einziger stated of it:
“I’m gonna skip backwards a little bit and just go back to the song ‘Drive‘. It’s continued to be a career-defining song for us. We put that song out in 1999 on our album ‘Make Yourself‘ and it kind of like… We had made a lot of progress prior to ‘Drive‘ being released as a single, but we had all this sort of momentum, and really connecting with our audience, and then ‘Drive‘ came out and kind of like really made a huge impact at the time.”
He went on to add:
“Because it’s also a really different kind of song for us. There’s no heavy guitar, it’s not aggressive. That’s a much more sort of introspective, kind of mellow song. And I think also, we had to prove to ourselves that we could write music like that. I think heavy music, aggressive music, I think, it has a tendency to, in a way, can kind of box you in. To a certain, like, oh, ‘you can’t do this kind of music’, or ‘you can’t do that kind of music.’
And we weren’t really, I think, consciously, even thinking about that. But after the fact, it was kind of like, ‘oh yeah’, it was something that we we definitely took a chance doing that — at least it felt like it in a way — and people really connected with it.
I mean, we really connected with it at the beginning. So that’s all the sort of validation that we needed. But then seeing the way people reacted to, it was kind of a big deal for us. So I think it would be impossible to talk about our band without talking about the song ‘Drive‘.
And then, you know, here we are, 20 something years later. And you know, there was a TV show called ‘Beef‘, [a] series on Netflix a couple years ago that was hugely successful, and that song made an appearance in the show in a very sort of visible way.
And it kind of all came roaring back, like as a reminder this thing that we wrote decades ago is still relevant in a totally new way that we never could have anticipated. And, yeah, music is really big like that. Like, it’s a big place, and it has potential to reach people all over the world, not only across like geographies, but also across time, you know, over years and decades.”
For the final choice Boyd opted for the as-yet unreleased title track to their forthcoming ninth studio album “Something In The Water“. That record is currently on course for an October 10th release date and Boyd stated of it:
“Our number five pick for our career-defining song is the first single from our new record. It’s called ‘Something In The Water‘. I’m going to project into the future a little bit. It’s a song that has reminded people, ‘Oh, yeah, I really like this meal. i’m going to go back to that restaurant and have that meal again.’ So the chef has tweaked it a little bit, like, [put] a little different salt on it. It tastes really good. It reminds me of what I ate before, but somehow, newer and fresher and better… Yeah, anyway, that’s my answer.”
