Grammy nominated band, Incubus, have consistently elevated themselves, and alternative music to new creative heights. The California band’s sales have eclipse 23 million albums worldwide to date with multi-platinum and platinum certifications from around the globe. Consistently topping the Billboard charts, the band has had five consecutive Top 5 debuts and they maintain their status as a streaming phenomenon, averaging 4.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify and clocking over 1 billion-plus streams across all platforms.
The head to Australia this week for a run of shows that takes them countrywide both as headliners in the own right as well as co-headlining Face to Face Touring’s Lookout Festival. We spoke to founder member, guitarist Mike Einziger to talk about the band’s highly anticipated return to Australia, Incubus’s influences and Mike’s first guitar…
Sean: Hey, Mike. How you doing?
Mike: I’m doing all right, thanks Sean.
Sean: Ten days to go, suitcases packed, rehearsals well underway. How’s it feeling to finally be getting back to Australia?
Mike: We’re, like, incredibly excited. Like, we’re super, super psyched to be coming back in to Australia after having not been there for such a long time, so we’re… I can’t say it enough… We’re super excited.
Sean: And the wonderful thing is you get to spread yourself around the whole country, ending up with us here in Perth. We get to see you on the last day of the tour, which will be just fabulous.
Mike: Yeah, really looking forward to it, too. Perth is really beautiful, and it’s been too long since we’ve been there.
Sean: I’ve just been looking through some of the history of the band. Is it really hard to look back and think it’s thirty three years already? Has it felt like it’s just flashed past?
Mike: I mean, yes and no. It’s like, in certain ways, it seems like it’s gone by in, like, the blink of an eye. It’s just lifetimes ago that we started the band and went through the early phases of our career. Just seems like forever ago, like a different life entirely. But yeah, I mean, time really just does fly by, though. It really has been quite a journey, that’s for sure.
Sean: Well, of course, we’ve seen a whole bunch of albums from you guys, and you’ve never liked to be pigeonholed. You’ve always tried new things and tinkered with new sounds and played with different genres. The two recent re-recorded singles I’ve heard are fantastic. The new version of ‘Circles’ has just got such a huge stadium feel when you hear it as well. Are they going to be sneaking into the set?
Mike: Yeah, I’m sure we’ll be playing some of those songs from the ‘Morning View’ album, for sure.
Sean: You’re playing two different types of concert here. You’ve got your own headline shows, but you’re also on the festival shows as well. How does that go for selecting a setlist? Obviously, the festival shows are geared more towards the bangers that everyone wants to hear, but you must all have a few guilty pleasures from all the years you’ve recorded to squeeze into the set, too.
Mike: For sure. Yeah, we love playing songs that other people wrote that are really good too, so sometimes we do that. We throw the odd little cover songs in, like songs we wish we wrote. So, yeah, we do that and that’s always fun.
Sean: Of course, it’s been a while since the last album, ‘8’, and between ‘8’ and now we’ve had that dreaded pandemic where the whole world ground to a halt. Did that inspire you guys to get back to writing again?
Mike: You know, the pandemic, I think had a huge impact on everybody. I think it really made us appreciate just the fact that we get to play in a band together
and travel around the world and play music together. Like when that was sort of taken away, that option was taken away for a couple of years. And also just, you know, everybody having to stay inside their houses and all of the stuff that we all had to go through during that period of time, you know, I think just really made it made us appreciate the ability to come together and make music and then go out and play that music live in front of people again. So yeah, but it’s made the experience new again. That’s for sure.
Sean: Was there much time that you felt inspired to song write in that time? Are you much of a writer around the house? Do you pick up a guitar and a noodle away?
Mike: I didn’t do that much writing during the pandemic. There were a couple of waves of it where I did a bunch of writing and then didn’t do any writing for a little while. I’ve got a house full of kids and so we play music together all the time. Like my kids are into music. My wife is a musician. So we’re always writing. We’re always jamming and playing music together. So the pandemic, I think, was a really good time to be home with family from that perspective of not being on the road and, you know, just being together with my family. It was that from that perspective, it was nice to be able to spend time at home because for long stretches of my life, I’ve been on the road. So that provided kind of a nice contrast. Although, like I said before, I definitely like gave me a different appreciation for being on tour.
Sean: It sounds like in a few years time, there could be a budding support band that can come on the road with you there [laughs]. That would make things so much simpler.
Mike: Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. It’s in the works. That’s for sure.
Sean: You mentioned the kids playing music and stuff. Taking you right back. Where was your first love of music? Did you grow up in a musical household yourself?
Mike: I was in a musical household. My mom was actually a children’s music teacher when I was a little kid. So I would sort of go with her to all these classes that she would teach, with all these little kids. I was sort of a helper with helping other people with their instruments and carrying stuff around and that type of thing. So I was always around music as a young person. I really like fell in love with it. I fell in love with music at an early age, like all sorts of rock music and pop music. You know, when I was a kid, it was the early 80s… early to mid 80s was like my whole youth. Those were my younger years. So there was a lot of incredible music happening at the time, you know. There was so much in the mainstream so that I could get access to as a little kid, you know, stuff like, you know, Michael Jackson and Madonna and Lionel Richie. And it was just amazing music being made all the time. Now we go back and listen to it and everybody’s just like, you know, the 80s were crazy. And so that was the time I grew up and really discovered music and then started playing guitar when I was twelve. And by that point, I was on to like a lot of kind of heavier music and a lot of rock music like, you know, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and The Doors. And just I was really into that. And then I got good enough at playing to where I could teach myself songs. And then we were fifteen when we started Incubus. That’s when like, you know, we started writing our own music. And that was kind of a turning point for me personally. But then that’s when we started the band and we’re still here, which is crazy.
Sean: And still as fresh as ever. You know, the singles that have dropped this year are just sounding amazing, even more so as they are re-recordings from that classic album.
Mike: Thank you. Yeah. Appreciate that.
Sean: You were touching on bands like Zeppelin and that obviously they were very bluesy rock influenced in those 70s. Was there a lot of blues hitting you around in those early days for you?
Mike: You know, I was into a lot of different things. Anything that sort of caught my attention or I became curious about, I just sort of couldn’t get enough of it.
But in those days you had to work really hard to get access to music. If you wanted to hear an album, you couldn’t just pull it up on your phone or laptop or whatever. You had to find a way to get a physical copy of it and listen to it in a CD player or a cassette deck or on a turntable. That was a different time. And so I think that I was exposed to a lot of different music though. I had a lot of music, I just loved rock music. Though, in my early teens, I got really into the Seattle kind of more alternative rock music that started coming out you know, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Alice in Chains and all that stuff. Those were very formative years for when we started Incubus… Rage Against the Machine was another. It was very, very exciting. It was a very, very special time in music and there was all this music everywhere that like all of us just loved. And so we just wanted to be sort of surrounded by it.
Sean: It was definitely a time for a huge plethora of different genres, with so many groups of people loving so many different types of music. It’s just made it so refreshing.
Mike: Yeah, I mean there were just so many great artists putting out music at the time that a young high school kid could get really into, you know, but like there was sort of like what was more mainstream at the time, which was like, you know, the Pearl Jams and Nirvana’s and Soundgarden, all that kind of stuff. And then there was like, you know, some more underground music, like Firehose and, Dinosaur Junior and Sonic Youth and stuff more like on that end of the spectrum. And we listened to all of it, you know, anything that we could get our hands on like that, we just devoured. Anything that kind of, I think, identified with our youth culture that we were, I mean, we didn’t even identify it as that at the time. And that’s just what we were at the time. And so there was just so much to wade through. And it was awesome. We had the best time ever.
Sean: I was just listening to a podcast this morning, with Mark Knopfler on as the guest. And it got me thinking, he said his first guitar was bought for him by his parents for a Christmas present. What was your first guitar? Did you buy it yourself or was it a gift?
Mike: Yeah, it was a gift from my parents. But they knew that I wanted a guitar. So it was kind of like, and it was like a cheap sort of knockoff guitar.
Sean: That’s what he said too. Knopfler had the same.
Mike: Yeah, I don’t even remember what the name of the model was, but it was like just this really crappy thing but I thought it was like the greatest thing on earth.
And I taught myself how to play Metallica songs and, you know, Black Sabbath songs, like all this music that I was listening to. I taught myself how to play it. And it was just such a cool experience, like kind of a constant, like an experience of constantly discovering things, you know.
Sean: Well, Mike, I know you’ve had a long day of interviews. I just want to wrap up with a couple of general ones, if I may. My restaurant question – if you could invite three musicians, dead or alive, to join you for a bit of dinner, who would you have sat with you for the evening?
Mike: Oh, that’s a really good question… a really good question. Um, you know, so many of my friends are such interesting musicians and people that I’ve played with and created music with and like the personalities, you know, are just amazing. I had dinner with Elon Musk, Skrillex and Tyler, the Creator one time.
Sean: No way?
Mike: Yeah [laughs]. Elon wanted to meet them. So I sort of brokered this dinner meeting with all of us and it was really fun, actually. But in answer to your question I don’t know, it’d be something fun like… it’s hard for me to think about people that I don’t know, you know, that I’d want to meet. I don’t know. You know, they always say like, don’t meet your idols, right? Or don’t meet your heroes because you might be disappointed. I know so many interesting musicians, and there are plenty of them that I’d love to have dinner with too.
Sean: What was, what was the last album you listened to?
Mike: The last album that I listened to was… I don’t know the name of the album, but I have seven year old twin daughters. Well, they’re six. They’re going to be seven really soon and all they listened to is Blackpink, and they love Blackpink. So I can’t remember the name of the album, but you know, songs like ‘How You Like That’ and ‘Pink Venom’ on constant repeat, those songs are bangers.
Sean: Very final question, Mike, to let you go. If you could be credited with writing any song ever written, what song would you choose?
Mike: Oh, man, that’s a crazy question [laughs]. You know, I think when you write music, the only hope that you have is that it’s somehow expresses a piece of who you are and that, you know, maybe people will connect with it. My experience has been that if I connect with a piece of music that I’ve written in a way, in a certain way, and other people connect with it also, like, that’s just been my experience on this earth with music. So I don’t know, you mean like any song that I didn’t write?
Sean: Any song that’s not yours that you can have for twenty four hours, you can be credited for it. You can’t have ‘happy birthday’ for the royalties [laughs].
Mike: Oh man [laughs]. I don’t know. That’s too hard of a question to answer. You know ‘Window Licker’ by Aphex Twin is an awesome song. Yeah. Awesome video too. You should watch it.
Sean: Well, it wasn’t on my list but it is now. Mike thank you so, so much for your time. We wish you and the band all the best for your rehearsals and packing. Don’t forget your kangaroo boxing gloves and your anti-koala spray. [laughs] And, we can’t wait to see you in Perth on the 20th of April.
Mike: [laughs] Yeah, man. We’re excited to see you as well. Can’t wait to be there. Thanks Sean.
Sean: Cheers Mike, safe travels.
