A Conversation with Brandon Boyd of Incubus

This is the original transcript of the interview, only minor editing has been applied for readability. This has been the basis for articles but has never been published in the original form.

Wortraub: The last two years have been a time off for you – how does it feel to be back on team Incubus? Has anything changed for you?
Brandon: It feels refreshed. We feel really like renewed. Like we are getting to start over. Taking the first year off in our career was very essential to us, to step away from Incubus and from the road and from the pace that we have been going down the road for almost ten years. It is an amazing experience, a lot of fun, but it is also really tiring. It wore us down. So we took that year and did not do anything Incubus related for a long time. When we started writing the new record we had no schedule, we were writing very slowly. We got together every couple of days and made music. I am glad we had the opportunity because it gave us the chance to feel new about this band. I mean, we are fifteen years old at this point. What has changed is a more relaxed feeling and a renewed vigor. We just feel a sense of newness.

Wortraub: You stated that after „A Crow“ you felt like you all needed time off, to get some things back that had been lost. Did you feel Incubus got bigger than all of you? Was there a problem with the band?
Brandon: No, there was no problem. There is this physical effect. There is a toll that is taken from travelling and moving so much. We would write a record, put it out and go on tour for two years, write a record, put it out and go on tour for two years – that did not really leave time to look at what we had made together. I started to almost get to a point when we were almost on auto-pilot, which I don’t wanna be. I wanna always feel like I am an active participant in everything that we do and making decisions from a lucid place as opposed to an automatic sort of robotic sense. That being said, all the opportunities that came to us were incredibly lucky, to have been doing what we were doing. But I think we deserved a break, I think it was good for the legacy of our band to go away for a while too. And as a result, we came back with what in my opinion is our strongest album to date.

Wortraub: You took a break from Incubus, but you kept on working at different projects. Was that time a chance to explore other fields of creativity?
Brandon: Absolutely. It gave us the opportunity to first and foremost rest, but then again it gave Michael, who has a lot of music lurking around in him, the chance to work on his film scores. He also produced his younger brothers band Agent Sparks, and he produced some other records. Michael and I worked on this surf documentary together called „Flow“, he did the music, I narrated the documentary. I had the opportunity to paint a series of paintings that are going to be published in a book that comes out in January. It gave everybody a chance to sort of indulge their own personal creative endeavors and it really ends up enriching the Incubus project, because everybody comes back to Incubus and feels fulfilled. Nobody feels like they have been robbed of some kind of opportunity of any kind. We like to look at everything that presents itself with open eyes.

Wortraub: You cite the British author Colin Wilson talking about art making you pull back „like a camera taking a long shot with a wide angle lense“. And you said that this album „Light Grenades“ is your long shot. Why the photographic imagery? What is this capturing of light at a certain point in time to you?
Brandon: It is interesting that you point that out, that there is a lot of photographic analogy. It is not something that is totally conscious on my part. A lot of the work that you see, pertaining to our band, the bio that I wrote, a lot of that stuff comes from me. I think, that a good photograph has the ability to stop time. It basically, if you look at it the right way, it can be a very powerful thing and change your life. Same thing can happen if you look at a painting the right way. It can change your life and literally force time to stop and allow you to look at things in a completely different and unexpected way. That being said, songs and music have the ability to do that as well. So music, being our most concentrated art form that we do, I think has given us the chance get perspective on our lifes and to look back at what we have done and look at ourselves. And as I have said in the bio, in a lot of ways it has rescued us, from a normal life.

Wortraub: So this album is a capturing of the moment, looking back at everything that you have done so far?
Brandon: Yeah, very much so. It is probably the most accurate portrayal of us at any given time. And every record being a snapshot, this one is the most self-assured and self-confident snap shot that we have ever taken. This is us as we are.

Wortraub: From this citation I would say, that art for you has a certain aspect of enlightenment or should I say „epiphany“ – it makes the world more visible, right?
Brandon: It think that it makes things more vivid. Another expression that Wilson uses in that book, The Occult, is „peak experience“. Art in it’s most general sense allowed me at a very young age a glimpse into that. I painted since I was very young. Music, as I matured, has offered me multiple opportunities to get that peak experience and the know how to get there. It is not a random thing that occurs in me. It actually happens all the time, the colors are more vivid, sounds are more vibrant and everything is just a little bit turned up, the volume is turned up so to speak. That is what music has kind of done for me. Being able to live a creative life as a musician and and artist has allowed me to live a peak experience all the time.

Wortraub: What about the listener then, can you transport that experience?
Brandon: I think that there is the possibility of that translating. That is not the expectation as far as what we are doing though. Our role is to make the music that we want to hear, that we have yet to hear. If the listener is coerced into peak experience while listening to our music then that is unbelievable and the best thing that could ever happen. It is unexpected. That is the ultimate goal, I couldn’t be happier.

Wortraub: What is it that „Light Grenades“ is supposed to illuminate?
Brandon: For me, it sheds light on an otherwise darkened picture. So much of the world is in so much turmoil right now and we are struggeling with some very basic aspects that we have been struggeling with for as long as there have been human beings. Music has given us the opportunity to communicate with each other on a much more advanced level. I think, music is a form of communication that is really important and underrated. It basically gives me hope, that we still have a form of communication that is largely free. Anybody can do it and write a song and express themselves in a way they otherwise might not be able to. That is hopeful to me. Does that make sense?

Wortraub: Yeah, it does. – You don’t like to interpret your own songs, but why is it so important that your songs are open to interpretation?
Brandon: I will give like basic guidelines, what a song is about. If people are interested, it is important for people to interpret it on their own. What it does is it allows for that communication that I was talking about. It is the life of the song. It also speaks to the intelligence of the listener, the individual intelligence. To tell somebody what a song is about, with „period!“, is boxing it up to me, it is finishing it. And I don’t think songs should ever be finished. I think that songs should grow and have a life separate from whoever created it, long after they have created it. The only way that can really happen, is if different generations and different kinds of people around the world are interpreting it on their own. Figuring it out for themselves what they think it is about. That is how I have always experienced music.

Wortraub: You stated that for this album you took your time to create it. Are you becoming more aware of your role as an artist or why is that?
Brandon: Yes, there is that. But there is also the fact that we did not write any Incubus music together for a couple of years. The creative muscle is susceptible to atrophy if you don’t work it for a long time. So when we started writing music again, that muscle had weakened. We wanted to have time to be strong again, before we presented anything. The first songs we wrote were kind of shit actually and then we were ok with that because we knew it was part of the process. The songs kept getting stronger and we finally had the opportunity to see how far we could take it. How strong we could become in exercising that muscle.

Wortraub: Musically, this album seems to organically combine the rough edges of „A Crow“ with the more emotional and smoother elements of „Morning View“. Why is that?
Brandon: It wasn’t a conscious effort to combine those elements. But in retrospect in can hear what you are talking about. I hear certain elements from certain other records. It is just because we were open to everything on this record. Every idea that came through we were willing to chase it down.

Wortraub: From an emotional standpoint, where would you situate that album?
Brandon: This is probably the most confident album that we have put together. It is the most self-assured in what we are as a band and in what we have to offer as artists. It is the least apologetic, coming from a psychological point of view. I feel like it is the strongest and I am proud of it. It is gonna feel good to let go of it in a few weeks. To let it out into the world and allow people to digest it, interpret it.

Wortraub: You always seemed self-assured, very positiv about what you do. Are you never let down?
Brandon: Oh no, I do get that. I get let down, just as anybody else. But I want to transcend sadness and learn from the bad things that happen in my life. I don’t want to mope around bad incidents. I would like to think that I am a positive thinker. The older I get, the more sceptical I become. It is infused with a healthy dose of optimism though. It keeps things in perspective.

Wortraub: Coming to more details: Anna Molly ñ is a pun an anomaly. Why the word play?
Brandon: In the same way that sound on a melodic level can be bent and manipulated and shaped, I think that words are just as shiftable and maliable as sound is. That just hasn’t been approached as much in popular music. I think, you can hear some of that in underground music. There is a lot of room to work in popular music on a literary level. Words are a lot of fun. Language is fascinating, to play with it, to interpret it. It is a valuable thing.

Wortraub: Do you like to have a lighter, playful element in your songs, like „Pardon Me“ or „Are You In?“ Is that an ironic twinkle, the lightness of being in you?
Brandon: I think so, yes. It is not a 100% conscious though. It is this part of me. This mischievous side, that trickster in me. It is for good reasons. I like the idea of playing. Like being an adult and playing for a living. I want to stay in touch with my playful side for as long as I live. That is why I surf, why I make music, make pictures. Why I laugh with my friends. The most important part of life for me is having fun. We can speak important truths through music, but we can also have a good time doing it. That is really important.

Wortraub: Thank you for the interview.