Incubus Want to Honor ‘Make Yourself’ 20 Years Later
This year, Incubus will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Make Yourself with a massive North American tour. The entire band dropped by Loudwire’s studio to reminisce about the landmark album, which turned an obscure funk-rock band into mainstream favorites.
It actually took a long time for radio stations to start playing “Pardon Me,” which turned into one of the year’s biggest hits. An alternate acoustic version of the track began gaining some traction, allowing Incubus to perform on morning radio shows. “It was the first time any of us had heard our music on the radio, which was exciting, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of fanfare,” singer Brandon Boyd recalls. “We had to go in and massage it three or four different ways before it actually started getting rotation.”
Continuing to speak about “Pardon Me,” Boyd describes the experience of a song, birthed from so much pain, bringing Incubus such fortune. “I think that there’s always potential in suffering to have moments of reckoning and to make some sense in the suffering … You have an arena where you have permission to express yourself in the larger sense. Sometimes it comes out dark, sometimes it comes out light and sometimes you’re able to make sense of both of those things.
Anticipating how it may feel to revisit an entire album two decades after its release, guitarist Mike Einziger shares, “I feel really appreciative that people really connected with [Make Yourself]. I think it’ll be meaningful to play those songs with that in mind, as a collective body of work from a specific period of time versus one song here, one song there. We’re honoring that specific group of songs.”
Watch our interview with Incubus above. The band's 20 Years of Make Yourself and Beyond tour begins in September. For the full list of dates, click here.
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