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[Derek Oswald] (0:05 – 0:13)
Thank you so much for joining me today for the AltWire podcast. As you might be seeing, I’m joined by a second person here today. Say hello to everybody, Evan.
[Evan Etheridge] (0:14 – 0:16)
Hello, everybody. My name is Evan. It’s nice to be here.
[Derek Oswald] (0:16 – 0:29)
Really excited for who is joining us. Many of you may know him as the lead singer of Incubus, Brandon Boyd. Evan, I know you’re a big fan of Brandon.
You were really excited when I told you we were getting this interview.
[Evan Etheridge] (0:29 – 0:31)
Oh, definitely. He’s one of my biggest influences.
[Derek Oswald] (0:31 – 1:08)
For all you watching, please like, follow, and subscribe. Please share us on your social media. Your support and your love is what gets us these interviews.
Thank you so much for listening and stay tuned for the next episode of the AltWire Podcast. It’s really nice to have you with us. For Morningview 23, you all went back and re-recorded the entire album.
I’ve been really thrilled to hear it’s Sonic Evolution after those 23 incredible years. Was it strange to go back and revisit the album at pretty much the literal place of its creation over 20 years ago, or did it kind of feel nostalgic and spiritually meaningful?
[Brandon Boyd] (1:09 – 3:13)
It was both of those things. It was nostalgic in many, many wonderful ways. It was thrilling in certain ways because there were elements of, in particular, that room.
It’s a big living room with really high cathedral windows. It was designed to host acoustic orchestral performances. That’s what we were told back in late 2000 when we were looking at that place.
It was empty. There was almost no furniture in it. We brought in mattresses and recording gear.
It looked like we were squatting. So going back into that room was really cool. It looks exactly the same.
The house hasn’t been updated or anything. A lot of ways of falling into disrepair. It was also weird and stressful at the same time.
I’m assuming you guys are referring to the live broadcast we did from there, the live stream. I think it was 2021 or maybe it was 22. Anyway, because it occurred to me right then and there, and it hadn’t occurred to me before that, that we were going to be judged based on how well we performed the songs as compared to something that we wrote and recorded when we were 25 years old.
That’s a tall order. So I had to really just surrender to it. It’s like, we’re 48 now.
I was 25 then. We were going to make this what it is today. We’re not going to try and recreate what we had done 23 years ago.
That being said, once we started to really dig into the recording of Morningview 23, we took the live drums from that live stream because Jose performed them beautifully and the rest of us re-recorded everything.
[Evan Etheridge] (3:14 – 3:15)
That’s badass.
[Brandon Boyd] (3:16 – 4:12)
Yeah. So we took the live drums from that thing and then we recorded everything between the recording studio and my house. It ended up being this really wonderfully fun, complex, nostalgic, but also excitingly new thing.
And for so many reasons, not the least of which is because Nicole Rowe was performing with us on this re-record when we got to… We were getting to know Nicole not only as a new friend, but as someone who was just freshly joining our band while we were doing this re-record. And so she would be sitting in the studio with her and she was just up for anything.
It was so much fun. She was such a delightful presence in our band. And so, yeah, it was everything.
It was good, bad, scary, exciting, all of it.
[Evan Etheridge] (4:12 – 4:15)
That’s amazing. It sounds like it was a really special time.
[Brandon Boyd] (4:15 – 4:40)
It certainly was. I can only hope that people take Morningview 23 for what it is. It is a re-record.
The original record still exists. It’s not broken. We weren’t trying to fix it.
We were just doing a little bit of a creative exercise of sorts. And we also got our re-record rights back from the original record contracts. It was like, why not?
[Derek Oswald] (4:40 – 4:41)
You Taylor Swifted them.
[Brandon Boyd] (4:42 – 4:49)
Yeah. That’s the working description.
We gave them the old Taylor Swift move.
[Derek Oswald] (4:49 – 4:59)
Now, obviously, you guys all got back together to re-record that. Did you bring in any of the other original personnel on for this album, like the producer or the engineer?
[Brandon Boyd] (5:00 – 6:52)
No. No. The engineer, his name was Rick Will.
He passed away, I want to say, six years ago or so. One of the most badass engineers we’ve ever worked with. He was such a talented engineer, such a great dude.
He is partially responsible for how awesome and organic the original Morningview sounds. He was really able to capture the sound of that room, along with Scott Lipp, who produced the record. Scott was more involved in the mixing of the album, but Rick Will was every day there while we were recording it.
He had this travel case, one of those metal touring cases that opened up and it was overflowing with what he called vibe. And it was just lights and lava lamps and blankets and things. And so he turned the actual recording room, which was a loft above the living room, into just the coolest.
There may have even been blacklight posters up. Anyway, go back to your question. It was engineered by Tom Surowski, who we’ve been working with as an engineer for probably 15 or 16 years, maybe even longer than that.
And Adam Hawkins, is that his name? Mixed it. I just met Adam for the first time.
Let me just confirm this for you so I don’t… Yeah, Adam Hawkins mixed it. Mikey and I went to Nashville.
We mixed it at his house. So he did a good job.
[Evan Etheridge] (6:53 – 7:13)
Nashville’s a great city too. A lot of history there. What I really appreciate about the approach to the album is that it feels like you will take a lot of the experience you’ve garnered along the way with all the subsequent releases.
And it’s like you feed that back into the recreation of these classic songs. What were some of your favorite experiences going back into the studio and recording?
[Brandon Boyd] (7:15 – 9:26)
I appreciate that observation. I think that whether we were trying to or not, that is most certainly what happened. Some of my favorite experiences with recording this were the final track on the record, Aqueous Transmission.
We had done this pretty involved orchestral performance on the original recording. We brought string musicians into this living room and recorded them and live flute and it was very involved. And we’ve lost touch with almost everybody in that regard, except for the woman who helped us with the orchestrations and put the musicians together.
Her name is Susie Katiyama. She’s an amazing musician. We’ve known her for a long time.
And alluding to your question, part of the thing that has changed over all these years is we’ve built out a pretty extensive network of friends and colleagues who are musicians and artists from all different walks. We had new players, one of which on Gush. She performed on Aqueous Transmission.
She performed on 11am. Any other song on the new recording that has any violin, viola, or cello is Anne-Marie Simpson-Einziger, who’s Mike’s wife. She’s a phenomenal musician.
She’s a classically trained violinist and she was a touring violinist with Steve Vai and Hans Zimmer and all these people. And so we were like, we needed strings. And we were like, hey, Anne-Marie, come in here and play this part.
She’s like, great. She stacked them and everything. And then some friends came in and did different parts and we recreated the entire album.
Everything was brand new.
[Evan Etheridge] (9:27 – 9:28)
That’s amazing.
[Derek Oswald] (9:28 – 9:45)
It’s kind of funny that you mentioned Aqueous Transmission because that song in particular is a notable favorite because it’s often a closing song for your tour. Did you feel any pressure to ensure the vibe was right going into this re-recording with certain songs such as that one?
[Brandon Boyd] (9:46 – 11:23)
No, not pressure, but importance, I would say. We’ve done a pretty good job over the course of our career of recognizing when there were certain things that were of a level of importance and attuning to that, moving forward accordingly, but not allowing for that sort of, you know, that weird demon to rear its head like pressure. That’s one of the things I think about being a performing artist that if you get a handle on the sort of psychology of performance and the psychology of recognizing when something has become a level of importance even to you individually, let alone to an audience that could span over a long period of time or across the whole world, pressure can be a thing that sabotages the whole thing.
It can take it all down. And so there’s a difference between recognizing when something’s important and then allowing for that to infect the process. I feel like if we hadn’t figured that out from a relatively young age, we probably would have been putting out very different records.
Our records would have been way more, um, hindering for lack of a better word. I think that it’s a testament to our ability to take on some of that awareness and sort of transcend it, perhaps for lack of a better term, that has allowed us to, you know, make records that people didn’t know they wanted to hear.
[Evan Etheridge] (11:24 – 11:27)
Definitely. I feel like those are words to live by.
[Brandon Boyd] (11:28 – 12:17)
Yeah. So that’s a true question. We knew that it would be important to capture a particular vibe.
But what’s cool about a song like Aqueous is that the minute… And we’ve been rehearsing that track because we’re about to go on tour down in the Southern Hemisphere. And we’ve been rehearsing it.
The minute Mikey picks up the pipa and sits down and puts it onto his lap and starts messing with it, it’s like built in. That instrument is… It’s like the thinnest wood and it’s resonating through this strange little sort of avocado body.
And the way that he plays it, I don’t even think Mikey is aware if he’s playing it correctly, but it is doing something. Something is occurring that is really, really cool. And it doesn’t matter where we are, what room, the minute he starts playing, it’s like, there’s that vibe.
[Evan Etheridge] (12:18 – 12:19)
Definitely.
[Derek Oswald] (12:20 – 12:34)
That’s amazing. You know, you seem so proud when talking about this re-record. Obviously, Aqueous Transmission, from what you said, is an exciting one to look out for.
What song are you most excited for fans to hear from this upcoming re-record?
[Brandon Boyd] (12:35 – 14:11)
That’s definitely one of them. I was really excited when we put out Echo because I… It’s a version of the song that is…
It’s true to form in its arrangement for the most part, with some marked differences. It ends differently. The way it ends on this recording is the way we’ve been playing it live now for about four years, I think, five years maybe, which has this kind of big crescendo ending, which is very different than the original recording of it.
And there’s also the fact that Jose stopped playing the song on brush sticks, like two years after we recorded it, he started playing them with his regular sticks. And it gives the song a little bit more of an urgency, so it’s less mellow. But I liked that about it.
I liked that it was a little bit more urgent in its presentation. So there’s that. Another one that I’m really excited about is Under My Umbrella, which actually I think comes out next week, if I’m not mistaken.
And that’s a song that was probably the deepest album cut from the original. But the re-recording of it sounds like really, like it makes you want to like smell your mustache for your life. You know, and I hope that even non-mustache-having humans can have that experience with it.
And then lastly, another sort of like deep album cut, which I’m excited about, is a track called Blood on the Ground. The re-recording of it, actually, I enjoy more than the original recording, so I’ll be curious to see if anybody else feels that way about it.
[Evan Etheridge] (14:11 – 14:27)
Probably looking forward to that. So after two decades, I mean, you guys have performed these songs for all of these years. What have been some of the most challenging things you’ve endured vocally?
How do you maintain your voice on a regular basis after putting it through the ringer year after year?
[Brandon Boyd] (14:29 – 16:19)
I was just having this conversation this morning. Um, my voice has definitely changed in the 23 plus years since the original recording. Part of it is just aging naturally.
Our voices just sort of change. They deepen, you know. And then there was the fact that I had learned to sing on one nostril.
I had a badly deviated septum from two nose breaks before I was even 20 years old. I broke my nose twice when it lent itself a little bit to the way my voice sounded for the first almost 30 years of our career. But then it became, you know, as we age, our noses and our ears never stop growing.
That’s like a thing, right? So if you have a badly deviated septum, it’ll just keep deviating. And so it became right around my late, mid to late thirties, I started to notice it was like getting harder to sing.
And it was kind of annoying. And I was like, what the fuck is happening? Like, am I just getting old?
And so I started to almost like surrender to it. I was like, yeah, I just, I just can’t sing like that anymore or whatever. And then it started getting kind of painful to sing, like actually painful in my face.
And so I went and saw an ear, nose and throat friend of mine here in Los Angeles. And he’s like, can I please do an x-ray of your face? Like from what he could see, he’s like, from what I can see, your septum is really badly deviated.
And it would explain why it might be painful for you to sing like up the way that you like to sing. And so he did like all of the fancy scans and everything. And he put them on the thing.
He’s looking at me, he looks at me and he goes, your face is fucked up.
[Evan Etheridge] (16:19 – 16:20)
That’s what he said.
[Derek Oswald] (16:20 – 16:22)
That’s quite a nice thing to say to someone!
[Brandon Boyd] (16:22 – 17:01)
I was like, um, okay. He’s like, let me get in there. Let me, let me, let me fix your septum.
So I had, they, they, they knocked me out. They Mr. T’d me and they rebroke my nose from the inside and they fixed my septum in 2019. And so I got the opportunity to learn how to sing over again.
So to answer your question, how do you maintain your voice? You do it by breaking your nose from the inside and starting from scratch at like 47, 46 years old. That’s, that’s how you do it, kids.
[Evan Etheridge] (17:01 – 17:03)
You know, I need to find a two by four then for my nose.
[Derek Oswald] (17:05 – 17:37)
I wanted to shift a little bit because you mentioned that you’re very soon about to travel to Australia. I can imagine probably one of the hardest things about touring is leaving your family. Um, your love of your adorable pugs that, that we heard is also known having found their way even into your music video for Nimble Bastard.
How do you survive being on tour for possibly months without seeing them? Does a pet sitter watch over them? Do you video chat or do you fly back a few times mid-tour Taylor Swift style to see them?
[Brandon Boyd] (17:37 – 19:48)
Oh, to have that Taylor Swift style fund to be able to do so, it’d be really cool. We’re not, we’re not quite there and God bless like she, to have that capacity. I don’t know if she’s doing that, but I would if I had the capacity to.
No, we, um, first thing is we’ve definitely, we still tour a lot, but we don’t tour nearly as much as we used to. You know, most of us in the band are married and have homes that we love and dogs and some of the band even have little humans and not so little humans that are, you know, that rely on them. So that part is really, really hard and it gets harder as you get older because you understand the sort of, uh, how powerful and essential presence is like physical presence.
And so my wife and I have a policy in our relationship where we’ve learned that we won’t ever be apart, physically apart for more than two to three weeks, as much as that is possible. There’s a chemical sort of separation that starts to happen after two weeks, both psychologically and physiologically that can be detrimental to relationships. And it has been on almost every relationship I’ve ever been in.
Being a touring musician is very, very challenging in that regard. So we’re about to go to, we start in New Zealand, then we go to Australia, then we go through Asia, and it’s going to have us gone for four weeks. And there’s just not a way for me to come home in that four weeks.
So we’re having to bend that rule temporarily, but then we’ll be for a number of months. So in the events that we can’t, you know, abide by that sort of self-imposed rule, these technologies are the next best thing, you know, since we have FaceTime and these sort of video chat tech, it’s made things a little bit better. I even do my best to try and FaceTime with my dogs.
I don’t know if they can see me, but certainly get up into the camera and start wagging their tails. So it makes me feel a little bit better.
[Evan Etheridge] (19:48 – 19:51)
I think they can definitely see you, definitely hear you for sure too.
[Brandon Boyd] (19:51 – 19:53)
Yeah. They can’t smell us though. That’s the thing.
[Derek Oswald] (19:53 – 19:54)
Right, right.
[Brandon Boyd] (19:54 – 19:55)
That’s why I smell Swift.
[Derek Oswald] (19:56 – 20:07)
When you’re on the road for so long and things get tense, because with any band that’s going to happen, how do you guys break the tension? Do you all prank each other on tour? Is there certain things you do to kind of chill out a little bit?
[Brandon Boyd] (20:08 – 20:13)
Pranking each other. That’s a fantastic idea, or it’s the worst idea that is ever.
[Evan Etheridge] (20:15 – 20:16)
Maybe both.
[Brandon Boyd] (20:16 – 21:49)
Yeah, right. We definitely, first and foremost, there’s a great deal of love for each other and in our general kind of like band universe. Everyone that comes on tour with us, that works with us, has been working with us for, I think that the youngest member has been with us almost a decade now.
Some of the oldest members have been with us for over two decades. So it’s a sort of family band, so to speak. Things do get tense.
People get tired. People get sick. People get homesick.
The food usually sucks. These sort of creature comforts. Ooh, black cat.
What we try and do is lean into each other. Like if someone starts getting a little, feeling a little bit of the blues of being on the road, we do things to make each other smile. We’ll offer more love, bring each other food, offer love and affection, watch movies together, go on a day off if there is one, go see something unique or unusual about the place that we’re in.
These things, it’s really just sort of basic human stuff that you do to remind people that they’re not alone, that we’re all here together. We do our best to do those things. And even then, being on tour for a moment in time is challenging.
I don’t know how the Grateful Dead did it.
[Derek Oswald] (21:50 – 21:55)
Speaking of Grateful Dead, you actually had a question pertaining to the Grateful Dead, Evan, that you wanted to ask.
[Evan Etheridge] (21:55 – 22:01)
Yeah, I did. What are some of your most favorite Grateful Dead albums? What are the ones you revisit like the most often?
[Brandon Boyd] (22:02 – 23:01)
I haven’t revisited a Grateful Dead record in probably 20 years if I’m being honest. I go through seasons with music for sure. And I have a long love of the dead.
I saw them six or seven times growing up and did 10 or 12 parking lots where I couldn’t actually get a ticket. I don’t know if I actually ever paid for a ticket to go see the dead to tell you the truth. I like traded drawings for tickets.
So there was this thing that you would do if you were in the parking lot and you didn’t have any money, which was me as a young teenager, you just do this. You would just walk around like this while you were socializing with your finger up. And it was asking for a miracle.
But when someone would come over and just hand you a ticket, it meant you got miracled in the dead sort of parlance. That’s really awesome.
[Evan Etheridge] (23:01 – 23:04)
That’s kind of cool. We should do that at Intubus concerts.
[Brandon Boyd] (23:05 – 23:27)
We should start encouraging, but it should be this one. Here’s three tickets to Taylor Swift’s Private Jet. Yeah.
I don’t even know where to begin. There was a dead cover album that came out 10 years ago, where as much of contemporary art is covering dead songs.
[Evan Etheridge] (23:27 – 23:46)
I’ll have to look that up. So I’ve got a question about your lyricism, actually, if I can. Your lyricism has always taken on a philosophical cadence, kind of like the words of an old soul that are as thought provoking as they are emotionally moving.
So what are some of your biggest vocal influences and lyrically and everything between?
[Brandon Boyd] (23:46 – 27:18)
Nice thing to say. Thank you. I could only hope that people would even read the lyrics, let alone resonate with them in any way.
If any of the lyrics that I’ve written have resonated with people, it is such a delightful surprise. I have always been in pursuit of making sense of my own experience. Writing, just generally speaking, is to me the most assured way of making sense of one’s experience because you’re externalizing, you’re an internal process.
Through lyric writing for songs, you get to do that, but then you can add this extra sort of dimension of melody to it, which has this amazing capacity to express even more emotion and sentiment than mere words. So it’s this phenomenal, phenomenal aesthetic technology that I’ve always been deeply fascinated by. So some people that have influenced me, I honestly have been, I’ve definitely been influenced by songwriters, just probably too many to mention, but some of them that have been very influential to me, especially lyrically, have been like PJ Harvey, Jeff Buckley, Chris Cornell, Leonard Cohen.
I marvel at his lyrics. His Leonard Cohen stuff still makes me cry, even as a middle-aged man, just to name a few. But something else I’ve really, really noticed is that I am very, very, very influenced by who I’m reading.
And I’ve been collecting books, and I’m fascinated by writers’ minds, both living and deceased, some of them long-deceased, since I was a teenager. When I was like 15, we first started the band, I was fascinated with this writer named Robert Anton Wilson, who some of your viewers or listeners may be familiar with. He’s a very weird, polarizing character, but he was into this idea of upsetting the status quo, like discord.
It was like artful discord. He would write about conspiracy theories, but he’d do it with his tongue firmly placed in his cheek, making fun of conspiracy theorists, but indulging them nonetheless. And so there were all these amazing books that he wrote that I just gobbled them up as a teenager.
And some of the early Incubus lyrics were definitely influenced by that stuff. And then I started to delve more into classic beat authors as a late teenager, and then that was influencing the music. And then I started delving even further into what you could consider classics in my early 20s.
And that, coupled with some of those songwriters and poets that I mentioned, I think most certainly have had an effect on me. Yeah, it’s just interesting. I find writers, whether they’re songwriters or novelists, it’s such an amazing technology that we can look into someone’s process.
You know what I mean?
[Evan Etheridge] (27:18 – 27:19)
Yeah, definitely.
[Brandon Boyd] (27:19 – 27:26)
Where they are intellectually speaking, spiritually speaking, emotionally speaking, and that is definitely fuel for songwriting.
[Evan Etheridge] (27:27 – 27:29)
It’s like a window to their thoughts.
[Brandon Boyd] (27:29 – 27:29)
Yeah, yeah.
[Derek Oswald] (27:30 – 27:43)
Well, hey, I just really want to thank you so much for joining us today. I greatly appreciate your insight as always. You know, I speak for Evan and I when I say that you are definitely one of the best artists of our generation, and it’s always an honor to speak with you.
[Brandon Boyd] (27:44 – 27:44)
Thank you so much.
[Evan Etheridge] (27:45 – 27:45)
No doubt.
[Derek Oswald] (27:45 – 28:00)
Just want to close out by thanking you for joining us, and also to anyone who’s listening in, please make sure to check out Morningview 23. But I’m going to let you go, Brandon, because I know you’ve got places to go and people to say. Yes, thank you for your time.
[Brandon Boyd] (28:00 – 28:03)
I appreciate your time as well. Yeah, thank you guys. Have a great day.
[Derek Oswald] (28:04 – 28:12)
So that concludes that episode of The Altwire Podcast with Brandon Boyd. That was a great interview. What did you think, Evan?
That was amazing.
[Evan Etheridge] (28:12 – 28:14)
A lot of great tidbits of wisdom in there.
[Derek Oswald] (28:15 – 28:23)
He legitimately is one of my all-time favorite artists, not just from an incubus standpoint, but from a solo standpoint as well. Definitely.
[Evan Etheridge] (28:24 – 28:31)
His whole energy is just very, very down to earth, and that’s one of the best qualities about him.
[Derek Oswald] (28:31 – 28:38)
I think we need to add a third host to the podcast. I think your black cat has to visit us a little bit more.
[Evan Etheridge] (28:38 – 28:53)
Yeah, I’ll have to bust out Luna for her big debut. We call her Roo for short, because whenever she meows, she roos. You’re going to call her rude if she keeps interrupting you like that.
Yeah, that’s one of her nicknames. She’s so sassy.
[Derek Oswald] (28:55 – 29:08)
Well, hey, I do want to thank all of you guys for joining us. As I mentioned in the beginning of the video, please like, follow, and subscribe. Your support makes a world of difference, and we can’t wait to see what you guys think.
Thank you so much for tuning in to The Altwire Podcast.
Thank you so much for joining me today for the AltWire podcast. As you might be seeing, I’m joined by a second person here today. Say hello to everybody, Evan.
[Evan Etheridge] (0:14 – 0:16)
Hello, everybody. My name is Evan. It’s nice to be here.
[Derek Oswald] (0:16 – 0:29)
Really excited for who is joining us. Many of you may know him as the lead singer of Incubus, Brandon Boyd. Evan, I know you’re a big fan of Brandon.
You were really excited when I told you we were getting this interview.
[Evan Etheridge] (0:29 – 0:31)
Oh, definitely. He’s one of my biggest influences.
[Derek Oswald] (0:31 – 1:08)
For all you watching, please like, follow, and subscribe. Please share us on your social media. Your support and your love is what gets us these interviews.
Thank you so much for listening and stay tuned for the next episode of the AltWire Podcast. It’s really nice to have you with us. For Morningview 23, you all went back and re-recorded the entire album.
I’ve been really thrilled to hear it’s Sonic Evolution after those 23 incredible years. Was it strange to go back and revisit the album at pretty much the literal place of its creation over 20 years ago, or did it kind of feel nostalgic and spiritually meaningful?
[Brandon Boyd] (1:09 – 3:13)
It was both of those things. It was nostalgic in many, many wonderful ways. It was thrilling in certain ways because there were elements of, in particular, that room.
It’s a big living room with really high cathedral windows. It was designed to host acoustic orchestral performances. That’s what we were told back in late 2000 when we were looking at that place.
It was empty. There was almost no furniture in it. We brought in mattresses and recording gear.
It looked like we were squatting. So going back into that room was really cool. It looks exactly the same.
The house hasn’t been updated or anything. A lot of ways of falling into disrepair. It was also weird and stressful at the same time.
I’m assuming you guys are referring to the live broadcast we did from there, the live stream. I think it was 2021 or maybe it was 22. Anyway, because it occurred to me right then and there, and it hadn’t occurred to me before that, that we were going to be judged based on how well we performed the songs as compared to something that we wrote and recorded when we were 25 years old.
That’s a tall order. So I had to really just surrender to it. It’s like, we’re 48 now.
I was 25 then. We were going to make this what it is today. We’re not going to try and recreate what we had done 23 years ago.
That being said, once we started to really dig into the recording of Morningview 23, we took the live drums from that live stream because Jose performed them beautifully and the rest of us re-recorded everything.
[Evan Etheridge] (3:14 – 3:15)
That’s badass.
[Brandon Boyd] (3:16 – 4:12)
Yeah. So we took the live drums from that thing and then we recorded everything between the recording studio and my house. It ended up being this really wonderfully fun, complex, nostalgic, but also excitingly new thing.
And for so many reasons, not the least of which is because Nicole Rowe was performing with us on this re-record when we got to… We were getting to know Nicole not only as a new friend, but as someone who was just freshly joining our band while we were doing this re-record. And so she would be sitting in the studio with her and she was just up for anything.
It was so much fun. She was such a delightful presence in our band. And so, yeah, it was everything.
It was good, bad, scary, exciting, all of it.
[Evan Etheridge] (4:12 – 4:15)
That’s amazing. It sounds like it was a really special time.
[Brandon Boyd] (4:15 – 4:40)
It certainly was. I can only hope that people take Morningview 23 for what it is. It is a re-record.
The original record still exists. It’s not broken. We weren’t trying to fix it.
We were just doing a little bit of a creative exercise of sorts. And we also got our re-record rights back from the original record contracts. It was like, why not?
[Derek Oswald] (4:40 – 4:41)
You Taylor Swifted them.
[Brandon Boyd] (4:42 – 4:49)
Yeah. That’s the working description.
We gave them the old Taylor Swift move.
[Derek Oswald] (4:49 – 4:59)
Now, obviously, you guys all got back together to re-record that. Did you bring in any of the other original personnel on for this album, like the producer or the engineer?
[Brandon Boyd] (5:00 – 6:52)
No. No. The engineer, his name was Rick Will.
He passed away, I want to say, six years ago or so. One of the most badass engineers we’ve ever worked with. He was such a talented engineer, such a great dude.
He is partially responsible for how awesome and organic the original Morningview sounds. He was really able to capture the sound of that room, along with Scott Lipp, who produced the record. Scott was more involved in the mixing of the album, but Rick Will was every day there while we were recording it.
He had this travel case, one of those metal touring cases that opened up and it was overflowing with what he called vibe. And it was just lights and lava lamps and blankets and things. And so he turned the actual recording room, which was a loft above the living room, into just the coolest.
There may have even been blacklight posters up. Anyway, go back to your question. It was engineered by Tom Surowski, who we’ve been working with as an engineer for probably 15 or 16 years, maybe even longer than that.
And Adam Hawkins, is that his name? Mixed it. I just met Adam for the first time.
Let me just confirm this for you so I don’t… Yeah, Adam Hawkins mixed it. Mikey and I went to Nashville.
We mixed it at his house. So he did a good job.
[Evan Etheridge] (6:53 – 7:13)
Nashville’s a great city too. A lot of history there. What I really appreciate about the approach to the album is that it feels like you will take a lot of the experience you’ve garnered along the way with all the subsequent releases.
And it’s like you feed that back into the recreation of these classic songs. What were some of your favorite experiences going back into the studio and recording?
[Brandon Boyd] (7:15 – 9:26)
I appreciate that observation. I think that whether we were trying to or not, that is most certainly what happened. Some of my favorite experiences with recording this were the final track on the record, Aqueous Transmission.
We had done this pretty involved orchestral performance on the original recording. We brought string musicians into this living room and recorded them and live flute and it was very involved. And we’ve lost touch with almost everybody in that regard, except for the woman who helped us with the orchestrations and put the musicians together.
Her name is Susie Katiyama. She’s an amazing musician. We’ve known her for a long time.
And alluding to your question, part of the thing that has changed over all these years is we’ve built out a pretty extensive network of friends and colleagues who are musicians and artists from all different walks. We had new players, one of which on Gush. She performed on Aqueous Transmission.
She performed on 11am. Any other song on the new recording that has any violin, viola, or cello is Anne-Marie Simpson-Einziger, who’s Mike’s wife. She’s a phenomenal musician.
She’s a classically trained violinist and she was a touring violinist with Steve Vai and Hans Zimmer and all these people. And so we were like, we needed strings. And we were like, hey, Anne-Marie, come in here and play this part.
She’s like, great. She stacked them and everything. And then some friends came in and did different parts and we recreated the entire album.
Everything was brand new.
[Evan Etheridge] (9:27 – 9:28)
That’s amazing.
[Derek Oswald] (9:28 – 9:45)
It’s kind of funny that you mentioned Aqueous Transmission because that song in particular is a notable favorite because it’s often a closing song for your tour. Did you feel any pressure to ensure the vibe was right going into this re-recording with certain songs such as that one?
[Brandon Boyd] (9:46 – 11:23)
No, not pressure, but importance, I would say. We’ve done a pretty good job over the course of our career of recognizing when there were certain things that were of a level of importance and attuning to that, moving forward accordingly, but not allowing for that sort of, you know, that weird demon to rear its head like pressure. That’s one of the things I think about being a performing artist that if you get a handle on the sort of psychology of performance and the psychology of recognizing when something has become a level of importance even to you individually, let alone to an audience that could span over a long period of time or across the whole world, pressure can be a thing that sabotages the whole thing.
It can take it all down. And so there’s a difference between recognizing when something’s important and then allowing for that to infect the process. I feel like if we hadn’t figured that out from a relatively young age, we probably would have been putting out very different records.
Our records would have been way more, um, hindering for lack of a better word. I think that it’s a testament to our ability to take on some of that awareness and sort of transcend it, perhaps for lack of a better term, that has allowed us to, you know, make records that people didn’t know they wanted to hear.
[Evan Etheridge] (11:24 – 11:27)
Definitely. I feel like those are words to live by.
[Brandon Boyd] (11:28 – 12:17)
Yeah. So that’s a true question. We knew that it would be important to capture a particular vibe.
But what’s cool about a song like Aqueous is that the minute… And we’ve been rehearsing that track because we’re about to go on tour down in the Southern Hemisphere. And we’ve been rehearsing it.
The minute Mikey picks up the pipa and sits down and puts it onto his lap and starts messing with it, it’s like built in. That instrument is… It’s like the thinnest wood and it’s resonating through this strange little sort of avocado body.
And the way that he plays it, I don’t even think Mikey is aware if he’s playing it correctly, but it is doing something. Something is occurring that is really, really cool. And it doesn’t matter where we are, what room, the minute he starts playing, it’s like, there’s that vibe.
[Evan Etheridge] (12:18 – 12:19)
Definitely.
[Derek Oswald] (12:20 – 12:34)
That’s amazing. You know, you seem so proud when talking about this re-record. Obviously, Aqueous Transmission, from what you said, is an exciting one to look out for.
What song are you most excited for fans to hear from this upcoming re-record?
[Brandon Boyd] (12:35 – 14:11)
That’s definitely one of them. I was really excited when we put out Echo because I… It’s a version of the song that is…
It’s true to form in its arrangement for the most part, with some marked differences. It ends differently. The way it ends on this recording is the way we’ve been playing it live now for about four years, I think, five years maybe, which has this kind of big crescendo ending, which is very different than the original recording of it.
And there’s also the fact that Jose stopped playing the song on brush sticks, like two years after we recorded it, he started playing them with his regular sticks. And it gives the song a little bit more of an urgency, so it’s less mellow. But I liked that about it.
I liked that it was a little bit more urgent in its presentation. So there’s that. Another one that I’m really excited about is Under My Umbrella, which actually I think comes out next week, if I’m not mistaken.
And that’s a song that was probably the deepest album cut from the original. But the re-recording of it sounds like really, like it makes you want to like smell your mustache for your life. You know, and I hope that even non-mustache-having humans can have that experience with it.
And then lastly, another sort of like deep album cut, which I’m excited about, is a track called Blood on the Ground. The re-recording of it, actually, I enjoy more than the original recording, so I’ll be curious to see if anybody else feels that way about it.
[Evan Etheridge] (14:11 – 14:27)
Probably looking forward to that. So after two decades, I mean, you guys have performed these songs for all of these years. What have been some of the most challenging things you’ve endured vocally?
How do you maintain your voice on a regular basis after putting it through the ringer year after year?
[Brandon Boyd] (14:29 – 16:19)
I was just having this conversation this morning. Um, my voice has definitely changed in the 23 plus years since the original recording. Part of it is just aging naturally.
Our voices just sort of change. They deepen, you know. And then there was the fact that I had learned to sing on one nostril.
I had a badly deviated septum from two nose breaks before I was even 20 years old. I broke my nose twice when it lent itself a little bit to the way my voice sounded for the first almost 30 years of our career. But then it became, you know, as we age, our noses and our ears never stop growing.
That’s like a thing, right? So if you have a badly deviated septum, it’ll just keep deviating. And so it became right around my late, mid to late thirties, I started to notice it was like getting harder to sing.
And it was kind of annoying. And I was like, what the fuck is happening? Like, am I just getting old?
And so I started to almost like surrender to it. I was like, yeah, I just, I just can’t sing like that anymore or whatever. And then it started getting kind of painful to sing, like actually painful in my face.
And so I went and saw an ear, nose and throat friend of mine here in Los Angeles. And he’s like, can I please do an x-ray of your face? Like from what he could see, he’s like, from what I can see, your septum is really badly deviated.
And it would explain why it might be painful for you to sing like up the way that you like to sing. And so he did like all of the fancy scans and everything. And he put them on the thing.
He’s looking at me, he looks at me and he goes, your face is fucked up.
[Evan Etheridge] (16:19 – 16:20)
That’s what he said.
[Derek Oswald] (16:20 – 16:22)
That’s quite a nice thing to say to someone!
[Brandon Boyd] (16:22 – 17:01)
I was like, um, okay. He’s like, let me get in there. Let me, let me, let me fix your septum.
So I had, they, they, they knocked me out. They Mr. T’d me and they rebroke my nose from the inside and they fixed my septum in 2019. And so I got the opportunity to learn how to sing over again.
So to answer your question, how do you maintain your voice? You do it by breaking your nose from the inside and starting from scratch at like 47, 46 years old. That’s, that’s how you do it, kids.
[Evan Etheridge] (17:01 – 17:03)
You know, I need to find a two by four then for my nose.
[Derek Oswald] (17:05 – 17:37)
I wanted to shift a little bit because you mentioned that you’re very soon about to travel to Australia. I can imagine probably one of the hardest things about touring is leaving your family. Um, your love of your adorable pugs that, that we heard is also known having found their way even into your music video for Nimble Bastard.
How do you survive being on tour for possibly months without seeing them? Does a pet sitter watch over them? Do you video chat or do you fly back a few times mid-tour Taylor Swift style to see them?
[Brandon Boyd] (17:37 – 19:48)
Oh, to have that Taylor Swift style fund to be able to do so, it’d be really cool. We’re not, we’re not quite there and God bless like she, to have that capacity. I don’t know if she’s doing that, but I would if I had the capacity to.
No, we, um, first thing is we’ve definitely, we still tour a lot, but we don’t tour nearly as much as we used to. You know, most of us in the band are married and have homes that we love and dogs and some of the band even have little humans and not so little humans that are, you know, that rely on them. So that part is really, really hard and it gets harder as you get older because you understand the sort of, uh, how powerful and essential presence is like physical presence.
And so my wife and I have a policy in our relationship where we’ve learned that we won’t ever be apart, physically apart for more than two to three weeks, as much as that is possible. There’s a chemical sort of separation that starts to happen after two weeks, both psychologically and physiologically that can be detrimental to relationships. And it has been on almost every relationship I’ve ever been in.
Being a touring musician is very, very challenging in that regard. So we’re about to go to, we start in New Zealand, then we go to Australia, then we go through Asia, and it’s going to have us gone for four weeks. And there’s just not a way for me to come home in that four weeks.
So we’re having to bend that rule temporarily, but then we’ll be for a number of months. So in the events that we can’t, you know, abide by that sort of self-imposed rule, these technologies are the next best thing, you know, since we have FaceTime and these sort of video chat tech, it’s made things a little bit better. I even do my best to try and FaceTime with my dogs.
I don’t know if they can see me, but certainly get up into the camera and start wagging their tails. So it makes me feel a little bit better.
[Evan Etheridge] (19:48 – 19:51)
I think they can definitely see you, definitely hear you for sure too.
[Brandon Boyd] (19:51 – 19:53)
Yeah. They can’t smell us though. That’s the thing.
[Derek Oswald] (19:53 – 19:54)
Right, right.
[Brandon Boyd] (19:54 – 19:55)
That’s why I smell Swift.
[Derek Oswald] (19:56 – 20:07)
When you’re on the road for so long and things get tense, because with any band that’s going to happen, how do you guys break the tension? Do you all prank each other on tour? Is there certain things you do to kind of chill out a little bit?
[Brandon Boyd] (20:08 – 20:13)
Pranking each other. That’s a fantastic idea, or it’s the worst idea that is ever.
[Evan Etheridge] (20:15 – 20:16)
Maybe both.
[Brandon Boyd] (20:16 – 21:49)
Yeah, right. We definitely, first and foremost, there’s a great deal of love for each other and in our general kind of like band universe. Everyone that comes on tour with us, that works with us, has been working with us for, I think that the youngest member has been with us almost a decade now.
Some of the oldest members have been with us for over two decades. So it’s a sort of family band, so to speak. Things do get tense.
People get tired. People get sick. People get homesick.
The food usually sucks. These sort of creature comforts. Ooh, black cat.
What we try and do is lean into each other. Like if someone starts getting a little, feeling a little bit of the blues of being on the road, we do things to make each other smile. We’ll offer more love, bring each other food, offer love and affection, watch movies together, go on a day off if there is one, go see something unique or unusual about the place that we’re in.
These things, it’s really just sort of basic human stuff that you do to remind people that they’re not alone, that we’re all here together. We do our best to do those things. And even then, being on tour for a moment in time is challenging.
I don’t know how the Grateful Dead did it.
[Derek Oswald] (21:50 – 21:55)
Speaking of Grateful Dead, you actually had a question pertaining to the Grateful Dead, Evan, that you wanted to ask.
[Evan Etheridge] (21:55 – 22:01)
Yeah, I did. What are some of your most favorite Grateful Dead albums? What are the ones you revisit like the most often?
[Brandon Boyd] (22:02 – 23:01)
I haven’t revisited a Grateful Dead record in probably 20 years if I’m being honest. I go through seasons with music for sure. And I have a long love of the dead.
I saw them six or seven times growing up and did 10 or 12 parking lots where I couldn’t actually get a ticket. I don’t know if I actually ever paid for a ticket to go see the dead to tell you the truth. I like traded drawings for tickets.
So there was this thing that you would do if you were in the parking lot and you didn’t have any money, which was me as a young teenager, you just do this. You would just walk around like this while you were socializing with your finger up. And it was asking for a miracle.
But when someone would come over and just hand you a ticket, it meant you got miracled in the dead sort of parlance. That’s really awesome.
[Evan Etheridge] (23:01 – 23:04)
That’s kind of cool. We should do that at Intubus concerts.
[Brandon Boyd] (23:05 – 23:27)
We should start encouraging, but it should be this one. Here’s three tickets to Taylor Swift’s Private Jet. Yeah.
I don’t even know where to begin. There was a dead cover album that came out 10 years ago, where as much of contemporary art is covering dead songs.
[Evan Etheridge] (23:27 – 23:46)
I’ll have to look that up. So I’ve got a question about your lyricism, actually, if I can. Your lyricism has always taken on a philosophical cadence, kind of like the words of an old soul that are as thought provoking as they are emotionally moving.
So what are some of your biggest vocal influences and lyrically and everything between?
[Brandon Boyd] (23:46 – 27:18)
Nice thing to say. Thank you. I could only hope that people would even read the lyrics, let alone resonate with them in any way.
If any of the lyrics that I’ve written have resonated with people, it is such a delightful surprise. I have always been in pursuit of making sense of my own experience. Writing, just generally speaking, is to me the most assured way of making sense of one’s experience because you’re externalizing, you’re an internal process.
Through lyric writing for songs, you get to do that, but then you can add this extra sort of dimension of melody to it, which has this amazing capacity to express even more emotion and sentiment than mere words. So it’s this phenomenal, phenomenal aesthetic technology that I’ve always been deeply fascinated by. So some people that have influenced me, I honestly have been, I’ve definitely been influenced by songwriters, just probably too many to mention, but some of them that have been very influential to me, especially lyrically, have been like PJ Harvey, Jeff Buckley, Chris Cornell, Leonard Cohen.
I marvel at his lyrics. His Leonard Cohen stuff still makes me cry, even as a middle-aged man, just to name a few. But something else I’ve really, really noticed is that I am very, very, very influenced by who I’m reading.
And I’ve been collecting books, and I’m fascinated by writers’ minds, both living and deceased, some of them long-deceased, since I was a teenager. When I was like 15, we first started the band, I was fascinated with this writer named Robert Anton Wilson, who some of your viewers or listeners may be familiar with. He’s a very weird, polarizing character, but he was into this idea of upsetting the status quo, like discord.
It was like artful discord. He would write about conspiracy theories, but he’d do it with his tongue firmly placed in his cheek, making fun of conspiracy theorists, but indulging them nonetheless. And so there were all these amazing books that he wrote that I just gobbled them up as a teenager.
And some of the early Incubus lyrics were definitely influenced by that stuff. And then I started to delve more into classic beat authors as a late teenager, and then that was influencing the music. And then I started delving even further into what you could consider classics in my early 20s.
And that, coupled with some of those songwriters and poets that I mentioned, I think most certainly have had an effect on me. Yeah, it’s just interesting. I find writers, whether they’re songwriters or novelists, it’s such an amazing technology that we can look into someone’s process.
You know what I mean?
[Evan Etheridge] (27:18 – 27:19)
Yeah, definitely.
[Brandon Boyd] (27:19 – 27:26)
Where they are intellectually speaking, spiritually speaking, emotionally speaking, and that is definitely fuel for songwriting.
[Evan Etheridge] (27:27 – 27:29)
It’s like a window to their thoughts.
[Brandon Boyd] (27:29 – 27:29)
Yeah, yeah.
[Derek Oswald] (27:30 – 27:43)
Well, hey, I just really want to thank you so much for joining us today. I greatly appreciate your insight as always. You know, I speak for Evan and I when I say that you are definitely one of the best artists of our generation, and it’s always an honor to speak with you.
[Brandon Boyd] (27:44 – 27:44)
Thank you so much.
[Evan Etheridge] (27:45 – 27:45)
No doubt.
[Derek Oswald] (27:45 – 28:00)
Just want to close out by thanking you for joining us, and also to anyone who’s listening in, please make sure to check out Morningview 23. But I’m going to let you go, Brandon, because I know you’ve got places to go and people to say. Yes, thank you for your time.
[Brandon Boyd] (28:00 – 28:03)
I appreciate your time as well. Yeah, thank you guys. Have a great day.
[Derek Oswald] (28:04 – 28:12)
So that concludes that episode of The Altwire Podcast with Brandon Boyd. That was a great interview. What did you think, Evan?
That was amazing.
[Evan Etheridge] (28:12 – 28:14)
A lot of great tidbits of wisdom in there.
[Derek Oswald] (28:15 – 28:23)
He legitimately is one of my all-time favorite artists, not just from an incubus standpoint, but from a solo standpoint as well. Definitely.
[Evan Etheridge] (28:24 – 28:31)
His whole energy is just very, very down to earth, and that’s one of the best qualities about him.
[Derek Oswald] (28:31 – 28:38)
I think we need to add a third host to the podcast. I think your black cat has to visit us a little bit more.
[Evan Etheridge] (28:38 – 28:53)
Yeah, I’ll have to bust out Luna for her big debut. We call her Roo for short, because whenever she meows, she roos. You’re going to call her rude if she keeps interrupting you like that.
Yeah, that’s one of her nicknames. She’s so sassy.
[Derek Oswald] (28:55 – 29:08)
Well, hey, I do want to thank all of you guys for joining us. As I mentioned in the beginning of the video, please like, follow, and subscribe. Your support makes a world of difference, and we can’t wait to see what you guys think.
Thank you so much for tuning in to The Altwire Podcast.
This episode is much better in video, find it at: https://altwire.net/video/brandon-boyd-on-morning-view-23-an-altwire-video-podcast-episode/
In the latest episode of the AltWire Podcast, host Derek Oswald and special co-host Evan Etheridge dive into a captivating conversation with Brandon Boyd, the lead singer of Incubus. The discussion centers around the re-recording of Morning View, their experiences on tour, and insights into Brandon’s vocal changes and lyrical inspirations. This blog post recaps the most intriguing parts of their dialogue, offering readers an in-depth look at what makes this episode a must-listen for fans.
Revisiting Morning View, for Morning View 23
Derek and Evan waste no time diving into the heart of the interview—discussing Morning View 23. Derek asks Brandon how it felt to revisit the album in the same space they originally recorded over twenty years ago. Brandon describes the experience as both nostalgic and thrilling, pointing out the unchanged, albeit slightly decrepit, state of the house where it all began. He expresses the excitement and stress of performing the songs live to an audience who would inevitably compare these renditions to those from when the band was much younger.
The Recording Process
Brandon reveals fascinating details about the recording process. He explains how the band incorporated live drums from the live stream, blending them with new recordings made in various settings, including his home. He shares the joy of working with Nicole Row, emphasizing how her fresh energy contributed significantly to the project’s success. The conversation touches on maintaining the integrity of the original work while embracing new influences and methods. Brandon acknowledges the contributions of engineers like Rick Will and producers such as Scott Litt in capturing the distinctive sound of the original Morning View. He also highlights the involvement of long-time collaborator Tom Syrowski and newcomer Adam Hawkins, who played crucial roles in the new recordings.
Personal Favorites, New Takes & Vocal Challenges
Derek is particularly curious about which songs Brandon is most excited for fans to hear in the re-recorded album. Brandon mentions “Aqueous Transmission” as a standout track due to its complex and evolving nature. He also shares his excitement for the new version of “Echo,” which has been adapted to include a big crescendo ending that they’ve performed live for years. Another track, “Under My Umbrella,” promises to surprise listeners with its more profound, more pronounced sound. Brandon candidly discusses the natural aging process and how it altered his vocal capabilities. A significant turning point came when he had surgery to fix a deviated septum, which had plagued him for decades. Learning to sing again post-surgery was a challenge and has changed how he performed these new songs.
Touring and Staying Connected: The Hardships of Touring
Touring, with all its demands and challenges, is another focal point of the conversation. Brandon shares personal insights into the difficulties of being away from loved ones for extended periods. He mentions a particular rule he and his wife have about not being apart for more than two to three weeks, acknowledging how crucial physical presence is in maintaining solid relationships. When Evan and Derek discuss how the band handles tension while on the road, Brandon points to the deep familial bonds between the band and their crew. He explains how they support each other through tough times by making small gestures of kindness and enjoying unique experiences in each tour location.
The Influence of Literature and Philosophy on Brandon’s Songwriting
Evan’s curiosity about Brandon’s lyrical influences leads to another enriching segment. Brandon reflects on how various authors and philosophers have shaped his writing. Early influences like Robert Anton Wilson and classic beat writers played pivotal roles in his lyrical development, imbuing his work with a unique blend of introspection and intellectual exploration. In addition to literary figures, numerous songwriters have left an indelible mark on Brandon’s music. He names artists such as PJ Harvey, Jeff Buckley, and Leonard Cohen among his influences, praising their ability to convey profound emotion and thought through song.
The Final Thoughts and Closing
As the conversation draws to a close, both Derek and Evan express their admiration for Brandon, underscoring his impact as an artist. The hosts thank Brandon for his time and encourage listeners to support Morning View 23.
This episode of the Alt Wire Podcast offered an enriching glimpse into the mind and heart of Brandon Boyd. Through candid discussions about Morning View 23, touring challenges, and the intricacies of his creative process, fans gain a deeper understanding of what makes Incubus’s music resonate so profoundly. This podcast episode is a treasure trove of insights and inspiration for those looking to explore the magic behind a legendary album.
- 00:00 Welcome to the AltWire Podcast with Brandon Boyd
- 00:47 Diving into the Re-recording of Morning View 23
- 02:57 The Creative Process and Evolution of Morning View 23
- 14:19 Exploring Vocal Challenges and Personal Growth
- 17:05 Life on Tour: Family, Love, and Maintaining Connections
- 19:55 Band Dynamics and Tour Life Insights
- 23:29 Musical Influences and the Art of Lyricism
- 27:29 Wrapping Up: A Heartfelt Thank You
- 28:04 Post-Interview Reflections and Closing Thoughts
