00:00It's a song that has reminded people,
00:02oh yeah, I really like this meal.
00:05I'm going to go back to that restaurant
00:06and have that meal again.
00:08Another career-defining song.
00:09Yeah, the chefs have tweaked it a little bit.
00:12They like a little different salt.
00:20Hey everyone, my name is Brandon Boyd.
00:22And I'm Mike Einziger.
00:23We're from the band Incubus.
00:25And this is five songs that have defined our career.
00:28Gosh, Mike, what are the five songs
00:30that have defined our career?
00:32That's really hard.
00:33It's a tough question.
00:34We've written like 160 songs.
00:37It's more like a fan question.
00:38Sort of.
00:39If we could be so bold as to answer the question ourselves,
00:42I suppose.
00:42And we will be so bold.
00:44Let's be bold.
00:45Okay, go.
00:47I'll start.
00:48I suppose one of five songs that have defined our career.
00:52There's a song from an album in 1999.
00:57The album's called Make Yourself.
00:59And the song is called The Warmth.
01:01And it was never a single.
01:03But for some reason, if we don't play it in our set,
01:07it feels like something's missing.
01:09And that's kind of a way that I've learned.
01:13If we have created sort of an essential incubus song,
01:17if it feels like it's missing and when we don't play it,
01:19then The Warmth is definitely one of those songs.
01:21It continually has such a beautiful reaction with audiences all over the world.
01:30And I'm so grateful for that.
01:32Yeah.
01:32Hopefully they're not lying to me.
01:34The whole audience forever.
01:36Yeah.
01:37So I'm going to also choose another song from Make Yourself.
01:42A song called Pardon Me.
01:44It was kind of, I think, a lot of people's first, like, on a larger scale,
01:49first introduction to Incubus as a band.
01:51And it was really us trying to kind of make sense of all of our sort of different influences
02:00that were influencing us, particularly at that time.
02:04We were really discovering all of this really cool new drum and bass music
02:09that was coming from the UK to the US.
02:13And we were also, like, well, we also, like, rocking out really hard.
02:19So it was kind of like a collision of drum and bass and, like, rock music
02:25in a way that on paper probably sounds like it wouldn't work.
02:28And maybe to certain people, maybe it still doesn't work, but it worked for us at the time.
02:34So the song Pardon Me is definitely kind of the result of that.
02:38And I think that definitely, you know, helped define us
02:41and certainly charted our pathway forward from that point on.
02:45I like that we're moving kind of chronologically
02:48because then we can move on to the album that came after Make Yourself.
02:52It's called Morning View.
02:53And I think there are a bunch of songs that sort of help define our career on that album.
03:00But I'll pick one.
03:02It's called Wish You Were Here.
03:04And it was a single and ended up being a really kind of big single for us.
03:08It came out at a really, really weird period of time in not just sort of, like, American history, but
03:17world history.
03:18We had written this album. We recorded it.
03:21We were about to put out this single, Wish You Were Here.
03:24And the World Trade Centers in New York were attacked.
03:31So we were in New York on 9-11 and we were, like, actively starting to promote Morning View.
03:37And then it felt like the whole world was falling down.
03:41And we had two sold out concerts in New York City on, I think it was the 14th and the
03:4515th of September.
03:48And they were, it was likely that they were going to go away, those shows, just because of the circumstances.
03:53But we ended up playing and that song is sort of forever locked away in my memory bank as being
04:04sort of like a moment of lightness in an otherwise really kind of like dark period of time.
04:11And it seemed like it had that effect on audience as well as we, like, took the song and we
04:17released it and people seemed to be enjoying it.
04:19And then we kind of kept playing it at this point ad nauseam.
04:22We haven't not played it at a concert since then.
04:26So once again, it's like one of those things where if they don't play that song at a show, something
04:29feels like it's missing.
04:31Almost every single song that we've ever written has had that kind of effect with me.
04:35I think that I'm writing about one thing and then it ends up sort of, I discovered many years later
04:42that it's probably about something else.
04:44And it, I think that's only possible as a reflection and the way that the music is reflected through an
04:52audience, through listeners' ears.
04:53I know we're kind of going chronologically, but I'm going to skip backwards a little bit and just go back
04:58to the song Drive.
04:59It's continued to be a career defining song for us.
05:02Put that out, that song out in 1999 on our album Make Yourself and it kind of like, we made
05:09a lot of progress prior to Drive being released as a single.
05:13But we had had all this sort of momentum and really connecting with our audience.
05:18And then Drive came out and kind of like, really made a huge impact at the time.
05:25Because it's also a really different kind of song for us.
05:29You know, like there's no heavy guitar.
05:32There's no, it's not aggressive.
05:33It's a much more sort of introspective kind of mellow song.
05:38And I think also we had to prove to ourselves that like, we could write music like that.
05:45Like, I think like heavy music, aggressive music, I think like, it has a tendency to like, in a way
05:52can kind of box you in.
05:54To certain like, like, oh, you can't do this kind of music or you can't do that kind of music.
06:00And we weren't really, I think, consciously even thinking about that.
06:04But it was, it was always like.
06:07It was a stretch for us at that point.
06:08Yeah, like after the fact, it was kind of like, oh yeah.
06:10It was like something that we, we definitely like took a chance doing that.
06:14At least it felt like it in a way.
06:17And people really connected with it.
06:19I mean, we really connected with it at the beginning.
06:21So that's all the sort of validation that we needed.
06:25But then seeing the way people reacted to it was kind of a big deal for us.
06:28So I think it would be impossible to talk about our band without talking about the song Drive.
06:33And then, you know, here we are 20 something years later.
06:37And, you know, there was a TV show called Beef Series on Netflix a couple of years ago that was
06:44hugely successful.
06:45And that song made an appearance in the show in a very sort of visible way.
06:50And it kind of all came roaring back, like as like a reminder, like this thing that we wrote decades
06:58ago, like is still relevant in a totally new way that we never could have anticipated.
07:03And yeah, music is really big like that.
07:07Like it's a big place and it like has potential to reach people all over the world, not only across
07:13like geographies, but also across like time, you know, like over years and decades.
07:19So that's, yeah.
07:21I'm wondering, and you can just stop me if I'm being too bold, but I'm just going to project into
07:28the future for a moment.
07:29And there are so many songs in sort of what we've written together over the years.
07:33It's really hard to sort of consolidate it down into just five.
07:36No, let's pick a new career defining song.
07:39That's what I was going to do.
07:412025.
07:42So our number five pick for our career defining song is the first single from our new record.
07:46It's called Something in the Water.
07:48I'm going to project Into the Future a little bit.
07:50It's a song that has reminded people, oh, yeah, I really like this meal.
07:55I'm going to go back to that restaurant and have that meal again.
07:58Another career defining song.
08:00So the chefs have tweaked it a little bit.
08:02They like a little different salt on it.
08:06It tastes really good.
08:08It reminds me of what I ate before, but somehow newer and fresher and better.
08:13Can you taste it?
08:14Truffle salt.
08:15A little truffle salt.
08:16Yeah.
08:17Anyway, that's my answer.
08:30I'll see you next time.
08:31Bye.
08:32Bye.
08:34Bye.
08:34Bye.
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