Incubus’ Brandon Boyd on Morning View and How Music Helps Him Through Chaos
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The post Incubus’ Brandon Boyd on Morning View and How Music Helps Him Through Chaos appeared first on Consequence.
[Listen to the full episode on our Consequence UNCUT podcast, which presents the complete interview unedited for your listening pleasure below or wherever you get your podcasts.]
“The world is gonna world. Is that a saying?” Brandon Boyd asks. The Incubus frontman is referring to the general idea of “shit happens,” but also two very specific moments for the band — September of 2001, when Incubus were days away from kicking off their US tour in support of fourth album Morning View, and 2020, when they released their Trust Fall (Side B) EP and planned on taking Morning View out on the road for a 20th anniversary tour.
Both periods were marred by turbulence out of the California group’s control: The September 11th terrorist attacks casting a shadow over this new album they couldn’t wait to share, and 20 years later, the COVID-19 pandemic preventing the group from revisiting the album that propelled them to their peak. “The phrase ‘best laid plans’ comes to mind,” Boyd clarifies. “But music, for us, it’s been a constant. It’s sort of a continuum, and one that we joyously approach and keep getting joyously pulled back into.”
For a rock band with a 30+ year history, Incubus are no stranger to stormy weather — and now, as they gear up to release their re-recorded version of Morning View (titled Morning View XXIII), they’re looking back on one of the biggest moments in their career with a renewed sense of gratitude. While Morning View XXIII is a faithful re-hash of the album front to back (plus a few newly-added sonic detours), it’s a great excuse to rediscover the glory of these songs. Morning View 20 would have probably been a stickier title, but alas — 23 will do.
As Incubus found themselves recording Morning View in 2001 at the Stern House in Malibu, a short drive from their hometown of Calabasas, CA, their song “Drive” became a top 10 hit. Meanwhile, a 25 year-old Brandon Boyd was dealing with heartbreak, and the quintet had a unique opportunity to capture everyone’s attention.
“It was such a weird, wonderful, heartbreaking, but also revelatory period of my life,” Boyd recalls. “I was learning a lot about myself in that kind of quiet grieving… it was such a strange, dichotomous moment where I was sad, a bit morose probably, but then we were winning at the same time, in a way.”
While those knotty feelings definitely made their way into Boyd’s lyrics and the album overall, Morning View does not capture the sound of a tortured band. The softness is even more remarkable considering the era — the rock scene teemed with rage in the early aughts, with the post-grunge and nu-metal movements reaching their peak. Sure, Mike Einziger’s guitars on Morning View can be blistering and heavy, but they’re in service of a greater release, a portrait of sun-soaked peace. Beloved songs like “Wish You Were Here,” “Are You In,” and “Aqueous Transmission” capture this feeling of rushing clarity, truly epitomizing the album’s scenic cover with moments of awe-striking beauty.
“We were in this beautiful house, this giant empty mansion with recording gear in it and mattresses. We looked like we were squatting in this house. I was there with my best friends in the world and we were making music and doing what we had always hoped we would be able to do. It was just this incredible, ‘happy, sad, happy, happy’ period. So I think back on it quite fondly because I learned so much during that period of time.”
It was after this “revelatory” recording period that Incubus found themselves in New York City the week of September 11th, 2001. They were in town for the MTV Video Music Awards (they ended up losing to *NSYNC) and Brandon Boyd was blocks away from ground zero on September 11th.
He recalls an apocalyptic scene: “My hotel literally shook and windows were breaking around me and car alarms are going off… It was absolutely insane.” With their tour kickoff days away, Boyd and the band felt their futures altering. “Our knee jerk reaction was to cancel the tour,” he remembers, “We sat with that for a few minutes and every bone in our collective being knew that that wasn’t the right thing to do. We just felt like it would be better to make music and have three people come, and have those people be with us in a moment where we’re able to transcend… or potentially transcend these moments of chaos.”
They opted to move forward with the tour, still expecting a drastically lower turnout than they had originally hoped for. What they found was the opposite. “We offered everyone their money back if they didn’t want to come and almost nobody didn’t show up, which was amazing… we were correct in our assumption that everyone else needed the music as much as we did, and we could have very easily been wrong.”
Boyd says moments like this — as well as the COVID pandemic — are ones that have brought him closer to art. “There’s always going to be some political uprising or a financial collapse or a pandemic or a terrorist attack,” Boyd says, before clarifying, “That’s not to be crass about these things or to underscore their importance… but art, to me, is what helps us make sense of all of the constant chaos.”
Indeed, “the world is going to world,” as Boyd puts it. They weathered the storm in 2001, and weathered it once again 20 years later as they curbed their plans to revisit Morning View. They had previously toured Make Yourself in 2019 for its 20th anniversary, and felt like celebrating Morning View was the inevitable next step. Since hitting the road wasn’t an appropriate option during the pandemic of 2021, Incubus opted for a 20th anniversary livestream concert taking place at the Stern House in Malibu.
It was emotional for Boyd revisiting the space where Morning View came together, but what struck him the most was that drummer José Pasillas’ snare sounded exactly the same. “The living room where we wrote and recorded had these cathedral windows and these big ceilings,” he remembers. “Every time José would hit his snare, it would kind of bounce off of this really tall ceiling. This room was designed for acoustic and orchestral performances, we were told — not for a rock band. We tried some things to absorb some of the sound, but one thing that we could never change was the way that the snare would bounce off the room.”
The livestream was a success for the group, and they considered putting out the recording as a live album and bringing it on the road when things opened back up. But Boyd wanted to go deeper than just touring the album. “I actually kind of campaigned… or lobbied the band to do a proper re-record,” Boyd says. “It just needed to be something a little more special than us just playing the songs from front to back.” They began revisiting these songs with their new bass player, Nicole Row, and, according to Boyd, gave them “a really, really careful look.”
As a result of the “careful look,” and, as Boyd puts it, “lovingly performing these songs night after night for the last 23 years,” some little things might be slightly different than the original recording. Boyd feels that the re-recording project was about maintaining the “burgeoning legacy” of this album while keeping the possibility of discovery. “A lot of people love this album the way it is — it’s not like it’s broken,” Boyd says, “But over the years, in subtle ways, [the songs have] sort of morphed and changed, in certain ways they’ve evolved. Sometimes they’ve evolved out into totally different arrangements and then made their way back to the original arrangement — We’ve been playing them that long at this point. On the re-recording, you can tell it’s the same song, but there are different embellishments.”
With their newly-revisited Morning View XXIII, Incubus and Brandon Boyd feel that the time is finally right to celebrate the album on the road (get tickets here). They did get their chance to perform Morning View at the Hollywood Bowl last year, even bringing Lizzo onstage to play flute in “Aqueous Transmissions” (Lizzo claims she wants to go to a farmer’s market with Boyd; Boyd says they’re friends and would also like to).
Now, Boyd has his sights set on the future, even with this blast from the past. “We’re in a very, very different place as a band, which is kind of great,” Boyd says at the end of our conversation. “We have the same passion for music, but don’t have the desire to do stupid shit.” Nothing has been officially confirmed yet, but new music from Incubus is in the works. The world is gonna world, that’s for sure — and odds are, Incubus is gonna Incubus.
Incubus’ Brandon Boyd on Morning View and How Music Helps Him Through Chaos
Paolo Ragusa
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