A View To A Thrill

01/21/2003 5:00 PM, LAUNCH
Neal Weiss

With his exotic good looks and penchant for going shirtless, Incubus frontman Brandon Boyd is undeniably the heartthrob of alternative rock right now. But he's more than just a pretty face. Don't forget that the man is a true artist (when he's not making music, he paints and draws incessantly, to the point that he marks up his own hands and arms with ink when he runs out of paper), a man who states an intent to "live a life purely of creativity, a life where my main objective is to create." If he happens to sell a few million albums (or a few million pinups and posters) in the process, don't hold that against him.

Brandon recently met up with LAUNCH's own Neal Weiss to discuss the wholly fulfilling creative process behind Incubus's latest album, Morning View, how he keep his focus when (as a platinum-selling musician) art becomes commerce, and how he finds inspiration in the example set by U2. Here's how it went:

LAUNCH: If you can look back, when you play Morning View, what do you get out of the finished product?

BRANDON: When we finished Morning View, besides the actual process of making it, writing it, and recording it, that was probably some of the most gratifying music-making experiences of my life at that point...but upon finalizing it and listening to the finished product, there was an incredible sense of gratification, redemption, and joy that came out of it. Because it's one thing to just make a record, but it's another thing to make a record that you loved making. I think the end result is a little bit more profound. I've always made the analogy about making songs in some weird way...I don't have any children, but I would imagine it's similar to the concept of having children--the love that you put into each and every one of them would dictate how they turn out, so to speak. And so every one of our songs that we've ever written and recorded, for that matter, but especially on Morning View, they happened in a very particular way. They just kind of happened; we almost didn't try. There was just a lot of really good energy in the house and among the five of us, and just a really beautiful atmosphere--so the children, so to speak, came out shiny, I guess you could say.

LAUNCH: How about when you listen to the album now? Do you get something different out of it?

BRANDON: Yeah, you know, I put it in every once in a while. I can't listen to our music that often on CD; I mean, we play the songs every night, so I'd be in Incubus overload if I listened to our records all the time. But I listen to it now and then, and actually it's almost nostalgic: I listen to the record and I think of waking up in the morning slowly, having a cup of coffee on the porch, watching the ocean, sitting in the sun, and then around noon or 1 o'clock meeting all the guys in the big living room and sort of at our leisure making music. It was really truly an amazing experience, one that I hope we will be able to repeat in some respect when we do a record again. So yeah, I get a little nostalgic, even a little choked up sometimes.

LAUNCH: It's a record that came out after you'd started to have some success. And now there's even more success. Has that changed the experience of Incubus? Where you are now--is it different than what it was?

BRANDON: Yeah, it is different than what it was before. Not in any bad way, though. I mean, things have sort of sped up exponentially as new singles come out and concerts have gotten bigger. Stakes have gotten a little higher. To tell the truth, it's gotten more fun! There was a time for many years, actually, when we would play concerts around the country--and around the world, for that matter--where we would do small theaters or bars or clubs. It would be a very core group of people who didn't get their music from radio or from television; they got their music because they found it, or someone told them about it, which is the way that I've discovered most of my favorite bands as well. So there was that--there were no singles, it was just people would come and they'd listened to the record, to the entire album. So now it's much different, going out and playing a song that was a big hit and seeing the reaction like that. But then there's also a lot of the same people who've been coming to your shows for eight or nine years, singing the obscure songs. What's cool is there's people who are sort of in between, who may have discovered us because of a song they heard on the radio or television or something, but they've fallen in love with the more obscure album tracks, too. So it's wonderful. There's just a really big, beautiful mix of people. I hope they continue to accept us and allow us to do what we do, in the way that we do it.

LAUNCH: Have you given thought to the meaning of an arena tour? Do you reference the whole "classic rock" thing when you think about where you've arrived?

BRANDON: To tell you the truth, it's something that has kind of eluded me. Growing up, I went to see a lot of shows growing up when I was a teenager, and the first show I saw was an arena show: It was Bon Jovi and Skid Row in San Diego, an outdoor amphitheater of some kind. And then I saw the Lollapaloozas of the world. But most of the shows that I went to were at like, the Whisky A Go-Go or the Roxy, or a club called Anaconda up in Santa Barbara that's not there anymore. I'd go and see these shows, and I'd see my favorite bands up close. So playing in an arena, I don't have a very clear point of reference. I know I enjoy doing it. When we play arenas, it's really fun for us, because it's like, times 10: It's louder, it's bigger! But what we try and do when we play arenas is hold onto that feeling of up-closeness that I know. It's one of the reasons I fell in love with music--being able to really see the emotion on a person's face when they were singing, or seeing the guitar string come off the guitar when somebody messed up. So to me, that's the biggest challenge--bringing a level of intimacy into a big room. But I think that we can do that--I've seen bands do it before. I just saw U2 play Madison Square Garden a couple of months ago; I'd never seen them play before, and it was like, "Whoa." It was wild. They brought a tastefulness into an arena that I'd never seen before. Other arena shows I've seen, there were explosions and barnyard animals running around, and people throwing up in the aisles. There's ways you can do certain things, and ways that people decide to do them that sometimes become known as the "rock 'n' roll way," I guess you could say, or the way it is done. But then I saw U2, this little band from Ireland, and they did it in a way that was a little bit more, in my opinion, the way that it should be done in a big room like that. There's no way to substitute seeing somebody up close--it's the best thing in the world--but should you find yourself in big rooms, I think the best thing to do is to try to bring intimacy into it.

LAUNCH: U2 really is the best reference point for that, in my opinion.

BRANDON: Absolutely, at least that our generation has. There may have been stuff beforehand that I didn't get to see because I was too young or something but it was really, really cool the way that they did it. Every couple of songs, they would reveal something else that made you go, "Wow!" But it wasn't like "wow" in that Vegas, neon-light sense; all the movements were very slow and tasteful.

LAUNCH: So that inspired you, obviously. But why do you do this, bottom line? What is your artistic pursuit?

BRANDON: Wow, that's a really good question. I didn't even know that I wanted to be in a band, to tell you the truth. I wasn't sure I wanted to be in a band up until five years ago--and we've been in this band for 11 years. We were doing this, and I knew that I liked doing it, but I wasn't sure if I wanted it to do it as my "thing," you know? But the reason I stayed, and the reason I stay now, is because it is fulfilling in me something that I started and set out to do a long time ago, which was to live a life purely of creativity, to live a life where my main objective is to create. I believe that what a lot of people do in order to make ends meet, in order to fulfill what they think is a modern lifestyle, is they slowly destroy themselves--whether it be from a job that they don't like, whether it be from their diet, their drug habit, their relationship that they're in, it doesn't matter. It seems like a lot of people do things for the wrong reasons. And I made a decision when I was a child, actually, that I would never do anything for the wrong reasons, and that I would do the things that made me feel the most "me." For most my life, it's been the drawing--painting pictures and drawing. And then when I turned about 13, it started turning into writing and drawing, and then when I turned 15, my best friends in the world picked up instruments, so it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do to accompany them the way I knew how. Actually, I really didn't know how to do it, but I thought I did at the time, and that was to sing. And it's wonderful, because I guess you could say I'm continuing to give myself the opportunity to do just that: to create for a living. Yes, it can be the business of creating, or the business of art--a contradiction in terms--but I would like to think I'm finding a happy medium. Incubus is obviously the main focus, 'cause it does take up quite a bit of our time, but I have a sketchbook with me 24 hours a day as well as a pen in my pocket, and my left hand gets more ink stains than it probably enjoys; I'll probably die of ink poisoning, to tell you the truth, 'cause I write on my hands if I don't have a piece of paper to write something down or to draw an idea of some kind. Like, I just do it on my hand. So yes, I do very much pursue the other things. When we're home, I paint. Sometimes I'll do it on the road, if the guys don't mind the smell of acrylic on the bus!