Incubus – Interview [2000]

I caught Mike on the end of Incubus’ tour, which was already twelve weeks old, and chatted with him about various aspects of their music and band life. With about three weeks of vacation coming up before a trip to Europe, Mike seemed to be in high spirits. Read on and get a little deeper into the world of Incubus.

With only a few shows left, what is your mindset?

We are all going completely insane.

Will you have a real vacation or will Sony try to set stuff up and keep you busy?

Um, they always start out as real vacations and then we end up doing interviews and stuff like that. But I can’t complain about that.

What do you guys do on the bus to keep from killing each other?

We play lots of Tony Hawk Pro Skater on the PlayStation. We also watch lots of movies. Whatever we can do to keep ourselves from going crazy.

What do you think about the internet as a medium and fans’ ability to get their thoughts and creativity out for the world to see?

I think it’s a really valuable tool, especially for young people that don’t have the resources and means to travel around. I think the internet provides a place where people can reach out to other people in parts of the country and the world where they normally wouldn’t have access.

Do you ever get a chance to jump on the web and check out the fan sites?

Every once in a while. I don’t actually have a computer with me while we tour, which sucks, but every now and then I get online and check it out. It’s really cool how everything is progressing. It’s becoming such a bigger deal than it was even a few years ago.

The cool thing is going on boards and reading what people really think, which can have its share of good and bad.

Yeah, there are two sides to that. Everyone can talk to each other and place their opinions, but in the same respect no one really has to take responsibility for what they say. So it’s kinda one of those things where you can say what you want, which is cool, but not when you don’t have to own up to anything you say.

It’s the ability for people now to be completely anonymous that provokes such things.

Exactly. It’s like kids going after each other. I mean, sometimes it’s stupid, but you would hope people would be mature enough to handle that.

How does it effect you knowing that all these people, online and offline, care so much about the band and idolize you?

I think it’s really cool. It’s very flattering, but at the same time it’d be cool for those people to know that we are just a bunch of kids that started playing music in a garage just like anybody else.

Who, when you were growing up, did you look up to?

Bands like Primus, and there are so many different things. When we first started, I was really into Primus and the Chili Peppers. Those were my early musical influences.

Reading the tray card and the bands you thank, your musical tastes and friends are very diverse.

As far as what we do and what we like is very diverse. We don’t try to set any limits on what we do, stylistically anyway. To be frank, we are going to do whatever we want to do, no matter what anybody thinks. We like to please the people that are buying our records, but we have to be happy with it ourselves before anybody else.

Does that have to do with the need to really challenge yourselves?

Yeah. That is the whole thing. The challenge is to expand on what you’ve already done and to not do the same things over and over again.

How did you approach the studio this time around?

We spent most of the time writing before actually going into the studio. Basically, we came up with basic chord arrangements and put them together with the lyrics. And then when we went into the studio, there were a lot of things left up in the air. When we got into the studio, we left it to be more improvisational and spontaneous as far as certain parts are concerned. We didn’t want to do the same thing we did in the past, which is write everything and go in the studio and record it exactly the way that we played it.

I know it says the band co-produced, but how hands-on were you guys in the studio?

We’re very hands-on with everything. The producer we worked with, Scott Litt, is a really cool guy. He’s done really great work in the past with bands like Nirvana and REM. He didn’t have time to do it the way he would normally do a record because he owns his own record company, which recently disbanded, but he was working mostly on that at the time. So we’d do everything on our own and he’d show up every couple days or for a few hours a day and then sometimes he wouldn’t come in for a week. So we’d do everything on our own and sometimes he’d come in and tell us we could try this or that. He had very subtle ideas that we could try, some we liked and some we didn’t. He never tried to control what we were doing; he just added his input. He would come in sometimes and reassure us. It was kind of having like a psychologist. He was like our musical psychotherapist. (laughs)

The one thing I was really curious about is where the track “Battlestar Scralatchtica” came from?

We were just messing around. We knew we wanted to do something like that, but we didn’t know how. We had a couple free days and we went in and made the track. We had a couple friends who were djs come in and throw up some scratching. It was really fun.

When “Pardon Me” came up as the single, was that your choice or the label’s?

We left that up to the label. As far as we are concerned, any song would have been fine. I mean, they could have chosen any song because we’d stand behind any of them. The people at the record company work with radio, and we figured that was their job so we let them pick the song they could get behind best.

Did you go into the studio with a bunch of songs? I know you had a track on the Scream 3 soundtrack.

Actually, that was the only song we recorded that didn’t get used.

I was reading a lot of press on you guys and a lot of the time writers couldn’t help but to compare you to other bands. I was wondering if there are comparisons that you don’t mind and others that you hate?

There aren’t really any comparisons that I mind really. The only thing that irritates me sometimes is when we get lumped into the whole metal/rap contingency that is going on now, because I don’t see anything similar to us and a group playing heavy metal and a guy rapping over it. Maybe I’m oblivious or stupid, but I don’t see it. That does irritate me. I hate when I hear people say, ‘Incubus is a rap-metal band.’ There are a few bands that do that well, but there are a million bands that suck at it and need to stop it. (laughs) As far as comparisons to other bands, I don’t personally care about it. There are some comparisons to bands that I grew up liking and I find that complimentary. But it would be silly for us not to acknowledge the bands that influenced us because it would be disrespectful to those bands.

Right, because it’s impossible not to take your influences with you every day.

Right. And in the end, all we do is play music and it’s up to people to decide whether they like it. And we are lucky that people like it. So we are gonna keep playing it, and if you don’t like it you can fuck right off. (laughs)

+ charlie craine