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Rekindling The Flame With BRANDON BOYD From Incubus · HEAVY Music Interviews

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  Here everyone. My name is Brandon Boyd. I'm from the band Incubus and
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  we are coming to Australia in like a week or something like that. About
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  six sleeps made about six leaps. That's it. Thanks for joining us today,
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  Thank you for having me. Oh very so, Incurbus are making a
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  welcome return to this side of the world for run of shows to celebrate the
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  twenty fat veryou three of your album Morning View with shows in christ Church on
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  April second, you got Awk on in April four, then you head to
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  Australia, traveling through Brabi Island, Gold Coast, Woollongong, Sydney, Morning
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  in Melbourne, Adelaide and finishing in Hillary's in Wa on April twenty. Like.
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  That's a lot of shows, mate, not exhausted, just saying it.
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  How are you hit a playball? I think this is probably the most
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  extensive tour of Australia we will have done. Actually, if I'm not mistaken,
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  I could be wrong about that, but I don't remember having played I
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  think it's like eight or nine shows by itself, just in Australia, and
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  it's going to be your first trip down since twenty eighteen. Marte So I
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  suppose the biggest question is why have you neglected us for so long? No,
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  something happened in the world sometime after twenty nineteen that like made it so
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  traveling was really tough, and I don't remember exactly what it was, but
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  something happened that kept us, kept us off of airplanes and stuff. So
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  we're we're we're sorry it's taken us so long, but we're really excited to
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  be able to finally make our way back, and we're thrilled to be able
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  to do these shows. But the band live as well. Oh yeah,
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  So what would you say is actually changed with incab it since you're out here
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  last in Oh Boy? A lot of things have changed, not the least
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  of which is let's see twenty eighteen. Hey, how I do you use
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  my fingers to you? There's I don't have any kids yet, but there's
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  quite a few more kids that were made in the band. I think Mikey
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  has seven or eight now something like that. Not that many, but quite
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  a few. We have a new member in our band, Nicole Rowe,
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  is playing bass with us. She's been with us for just about a year,
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  I think, and she started out filling in for Ben Kenny, our
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  bass player of over twenty years, and upon his recommendation. Actually, that's
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  how we found out about Nicole was Ben Kenny recommended that we call her to
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  fill in for him while he was stepping out for a time. And then
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  when he decided to not come back to the band, we you know,
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  it was a tough, tough call, but it was his to make and
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  we were, you know, we were saddened by it. But then we
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  asked Nicole if she was interested in being a part of our band more permanently,
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  and she enthusiastically accepted and it's been a real joy playing with her and
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  being around her, and so yeah, that's probably the biggest thing that's changed,
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  I think is just we have a new member. Yeah, you sort
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  of touched on this briefly before, mate, but you were bringing with you
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  another legendary band in the form of Live. So it's a perfect touring team
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  as far as I'm concerned. But what made you decide that bringing them out
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  here would be a good fit. This was something that it honestly wouldn't have
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  occurred to me to put our bands together to do this. It was it
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  came through other channels too, Potentially pair us up to tour. But when
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  we heard about it as a possibility through these other channels, all of us
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  were very enthusiastic about the idea because, you know, Live was one of
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  those bands when I was growing up that they just had some bangers, you
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  know what I mean. They got some tracks that are just killer, and
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  I've actually never seen them play live. So pretty awesome to go on tour
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  with the band that you enjoy but you've never had the pleasure of seeing live,
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  and so this will be my introduction to them formally. Yeah, that's
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  amazing. There wouldn't be many bands out there that you haven't played before that
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  you actually like, wouldn't they. Yeah, you know, we've been We've
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  been really lucky over the years. There's been so many of bands that grew
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  up that we grew up listening to, and some of these bands like made
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  us want to be a band ourselves, and we've ended up touring with them,
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  which is kind of amazing. Like to think about it like that,
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  because I think ultimately, first and foremost were music fans, Like we're just
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  kind of obsessed with music and music was one of my first obsessions. Music
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  and art and surfing. Those three things were like they were They still are
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  pretty much everything to me other exceptions. So yeah, there were bands that
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  we go and see live when they came through Los Angeles here, and you
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  know, they inspired us to pick up instruments and pick up microphones and start
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  practicing and playing and trying to write our own songs. And then some years
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  later we ended up touring with some of these bands. It's pretty awesome.
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  Full circle would be. Out of the nine shows that you play, mate,
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  five of them are part of the actual tour, but you're also part
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  of the inaugural Lookout Festival, which pieces Aussie bands Birds of Tokyo, Eskimo
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  Joe, and the Superjesus. Like sounds like a lot of funny got the
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  contrasting between the outdoor shows and the inside shows, it's a nice balance.
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  Yeah. I always look forward to doing festivals outside with a bunch of bands
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  that we haven't sometimes haven't heard of and some very often haven't seen performed.
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  So it's festivals are an incredible way to see a bunch of new music.
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  Those are some incredible band names that you mentioned. I don't know those bands,
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  but the names of the bands are amazing. That's a good way to
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  look at them. That's different. I'm probably going to put you on this
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  spot a little bit here, my admit, But what is sort of look
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  forward to you the most, Like the outdoor festivals with the local bands,
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  I guess, or the inside more sort of intimate personal shows with your fans
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  with bandlight Live. If I could craft the perfect tour just for my own
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  selfish motives and reasons, it would be a mixture of festivals and headlining dates.
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  And so I'm really looking forward to this trip because we get to have
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  our cake and eat it too. Doing exclusively festival tours is fun, but
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  then you know, it can be a little bit monotonous. Doing exclusively headlining
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  shows is super fun, but can also get kind of monotonist. So it
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  kind of craftily structured changing of this atmosphere is sort of the best way,
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  in my opinion, of going on tour, because you get to you don't
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  have a chance to become complacent. I suppose the one thing that everyone does
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  know about this you're already though, is they're pretty much going to know most
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  of the set list because you're celebrating the twenty fifth birthday of your fourth album
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  Morning View which came out back in two thousand and one. So you play
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  that album in fall? Is that right? Uh? No? Not on
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  this trip, we'll be doing quite a lot of morning view. But well
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  it's going to be how do you say this? Like, it's our sets
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  that we're bringing down there are a kind of ramp through the Incubus catalog.
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  But the catalog is massive. Way like you've got the eight albums all up,
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  I think like yours, Like you guys are a band, I guess,
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  so many different people connected with for so many different reasons, which makes
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  a wide selection of fan favorite songs. Like when you're doing your set list
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  up, like, it's got to be hard because, like I said,
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  you're not just playing a one sort of fan, you know, So you
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  can't just pick that one collection of songs. You've got to try and cover
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  a spectrum. It's more difficul, wouldn't it. Yeah, And then you
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  try and factor in making the set fun and interesting for us in the band.
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  You have the factor in so many different things, so you are corrected.
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  Writing sets gets progressively more challenging. We take all of those things into
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  consideration and that's how we come up with the sets that we write. If
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  we were writing a set that was just for us, it would look very
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  very different. If we were writing it just for the fans, it would
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  look very different. So this is really a kind of combination of all of
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  those factors that you laid out, and it ends up being I think,
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  a better set because there's there's a little bit of everything happening, and we
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  always leave room for lots of improvisation, and we love covering other people's music
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  randomly and fitting in other people's music into some of the bridges of our songs
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  and it's a delightful mess. Put it that way. And another thing too
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  that like along those setless lines, like your music, it relies a lot
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  on atmospherics and moods I've found what you doing it, So does that make
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  it more difficult too? Like getting songs that flow in with each other along
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  those lines. That's one of the things that we factor in while we're writing
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  these sets is we see how and if songs will actually segue into each other
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  properly. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they most definitely don't. Sometimes there
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  are segus that are really awkward, and we don't know that until we play
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  them in sequence and so we're essentially coming up with these set lists. We
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  can have an idea about what, like a what good set would be,
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  but then we'll perform it together in the privacy of our rehearsal studio and we
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  figure out pretty quick what does and doesn't work. Now, I'm not going
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  to ask too much on this way, but can I ask if Gig made
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  the final cut? Oh the song dig? Yeah, Well, I don't
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  want to tell you the ingredient meal before we serve it to you, whispered,
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  I won't tell anyone. So sort of focusing a bit on the album
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  Morning View, because you've just finished the tour over there, celebrating that and
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  now celebrating it here mate, Like the main songs in that you first started
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  playing them around the two thousands, because that's when the album came out,
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  but there stood the test of time because you've just like I said, you've
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  just finished playing them again. Now, Like, did they get the same
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  sort of response twenty years later or do people relate to them differently? Well,
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  we we're going to do the Morning View tour here in the States that
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  starts in August. We haven't actually done it yet. We did one show
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  at the Hollywood Bowl in October where we did We performed Morning View from front
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  to back, and it was a It was a pretty wild experience because you
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  know, it's hard to really truly gauge how people feel about a song,
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  let alone like an entire album. But for some reason, that album seems
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  to have resonated with people more deeply, and I feel so much gratitude that
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  it has. You know, you can you never rely on that kind of
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  thing. You put your heart and your soul into making music, but there's
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  no guarantee of the response or the outcome. You know, you can just
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  do your best and kind of hope that people hear it and then enjoy it
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  if they hear it. That's the thing that's been getting more and more challenging
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  as we get further into the Internet age. It's like getting people to even
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  know that you have an album out. It's becoming major lyft. Yeah,
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  you're competing with the Internet, you know. It's My analogy is sort of
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  like crying during a hurricane. It's like, that's going to know, I'm
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  gonna hear you. You know, that's a good way to put it.
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  No, we've been running out a song might but before we go, or
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  did you want to bring out the fact that you have re recorded Morning View,
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  which you're going to be released on my the tent as morning View twenty
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  three, So tell us quickly about that release. Yes, comes out May
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  tenth. We've been We've put out two of the tracks already. We put
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  out the song Echo, and we put out Circles. The next song that
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  comes out, I think it comes out in like a week is under My
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  Umbrella. We've been purposefully putting out songs that weren't singles back in the early
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  two thousands, though I'm sure the songs that were singles back then will become
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  singles in the near future again. But yeah, we're super excited about it.
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  The re record turned out beautifully. We worked really hard on it,
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  and us in the band and everyone that we've played it for it seemed pretty
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  excited about it. So we hope that our listeners will give it a fair
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  shot. You know, And how about from a personal point of view,
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  might live Did you find it difficult in anyway? I guess reconnecting with those
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  songs nearly twenty five years after you write it, I don't think it was
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  difficult to reconnect with them. What was challenging was to put my self back
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  in a position from like a physiological place, like I'm forty eight and when
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  we wrote and recorded that, I was twenty five. So my voice has
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  changed a little bit, and it's been through any number of adventures in that
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  period of time. But I found it and I continue to find it.
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  The place, the resonance, so to speak, of where I was when
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  I was singing those songs. And yeah, I'm actually really stalked with the
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  way it turned out. So I'm excited for people to hear it. Well,
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  very good mate, all right, Well that's the outside Up brand.
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  It's been a pleasure to speak with you mate, Thank you very much.
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  The tour kicks off in under a week in New Zealand on the second of
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  April. One more show there, then moves to Australia. So check out
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  your social stud your thing and get along with a show. Thank you so much.