Making “Make Yourself”: Incubus’s Story of Grit

“It took us about 8 years to figure out how to write a song.”

– Brandon Boyd 

 

 

During their long years of obscurity, Incubus relied on the kindness of other people to literally survive. 

They have a specific memory of opening for Korn. At the time, they travelled from show to show in a beat-up van, broke and underfed. When they saw the catering for Korn backstage, and knowing that the food wasn’t theirs to eat, they could only stand and salivate, like strays.

Fieldy, the bassist for Korn, noticed them in this state, and asked, “Are you guys hungry?” The band sheepishly nodded. “Go eat!,” Fieldy told them. They wolfed down their meal like it was their first in days. Because it probably was.

 

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For the lot of us, we get easily discouraged when we don’t see any major sign of progress or success with our artistic endeavors. At the first hint of failure or rejection, we get butt-hurt and throw in the towel, thinking that we’re not meant to be on this path. But the worst part is, we might spend the rest of our lives regretting what might have been. 

But imagine the opposite of that. What could happen if you sucked it up and kept going, despite all the disappointment?

It’s like that visual of a guy who tunneled underground to find diamonds. He quits and turns his back, not knowing that he is just a few more swings of his pickaxe away from finding what he was looking for. You just never know when the tables might turn in your favor. 

This is the story of how Incubus tunneled through nearly a decade of disappointment before they finally had their breakthrough.

 

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In 1991, in Calabasas, California, a group of high school friends bonded over their shared love for the strange likes of early-day Red Hot Chili Peppers and Primus. It was a no-brainer that they should play music together in a band.

One day, they started brainstorming for a band name, just so that they could play at a party in somebody’s backyard. After a random flip of a page in Thesaurus, their 15 year old pubescent minds decided that Incubus was a good enough name for now. 

As they embarked on being serious musicians, the band struggled to gain any real traction. Shunned by major record labels, Incubus went on to make independent recordings, most notably their debut album, Fungus Amongus, which they released in 1995. With their eccentric blend of funk and heavy metal, they appealed to a particular niche of listeners — most of whom were men, who had a palate for weird music such as theirs.

But outside their small tribe, Incubus was not very well-liked. They were particularly criticized for drawing heavily on their influences and their lack of originality. One review of Fungus Amongus by AllMusic wrote, “There’s much to dislike, notably frontman Brandon Boyd, who growls like he wants the voice of anybody but himself.” Meanwhile, SPIN Magazine wrote that they were “Primus-obsessed” and even “goofy”. 

Incubus eventually managed to secure a deal with the record label Immortal Records, after which they released their first proper studio album, S.C.I.E.N.C.E. in 1997. The album was an improvement from their earlier recordings, in that it was relatively more melody-driven.

Still, S.C.I.E.N.C.E. sounded too technical and confusing for a mainstream audience, and the lyrics lacked introspection and weight. It was a considerably remarkable feat, however, as most of the songs were written when the band members were still in their teens. 

The modest success of S.C.I.E.N.C.E. did open up a few opportunities for the band. For one thing, they started travelling internationally to play in festivals, and to open for other bands, including Korn.

On the outset, this seemed like a dream come true for any budding musician. But the reality was much more complicated. Incubus was still a complete unknown.

Their performances were met with the unwelcoming sight of the audience members standing still with their arms folded, and glancing impatiently at their watches every few minutes, as they waited for the other bands that they actually came to see. If that wasn’t discouraging enough, the band was also pelted with all manner of objects as they played their set.

Despite the seemingly endless setbacks, Incubus did the only thing that they knew. They kept pushing forward. 

 

***

 

Coming home from the grueling tour in 1999, Incubus found themselves on the cusp of a major change. 

As musicians, the tour certainly taught them to become more objective and intentional about their music. It opened them up to the larger perspective of audiences who had no idea who they were, or what their music was about.

And on a personal level, the band members were now 23 years old. They were starting to come to terms with adulthood, and were settling into a more mature understanding of themselves and the world around them.

Particularly for Brandon, this already turbulent experience was exacerbated by heartbreak. He returned home discovering that his long-time partner had had an affair while he was away. It was a “terribly, terribly chaotic time in my life,” he said. “I was really coming into an understanding of who I was in that moment, who my friends were and the choices I was making, and the people I was sharing myself with.”

It was the time for Incubus to decide who they wanted to be, both collectively as a band, and as individuals. This search for an authentic self-identity would ultimately inform the theme of their coming album, aptly titled Make Yourself.

 

***

 

Incubus’s approach to making Make Yourself was both intuitive and deliberate. They went in a musical direction that felt most natural to them at the time, which meant moving away from the heavy and eccentric music that they had grown up listening to, and moving into a mellower, more melodic sound. With that, they started relying more on their own authentic ideas, while at the same time, channeling their influences more selectively, rather than merely mimicking them. 

Lyrically, Incubus wanted to talk about weightier subjects. They intentionally wanted to bare more of their emotional and vulnerable side, which were otherwise underexplored in their previous work. Along the same line, they realized that Brandon’s potential as a singer and songwriter had been massively underutilized.

As guitarist Mike Einziger remarked, “There’s a formula of yelling and screaming over guitar riffs — that’s not what we do well. We have a singer with an intelligent voice who writes great lyrics, and we wanted the music to be much more of a platform for him.”

However, it wasn’t easy to encourage Brandon to open himself up more in his songwriting, at least initially. In fact, there was a lot of tension within the band as they were figuring out their musical direction, that they even checked themselves into group therapy. 

“I really wanted Brandon to be more vulnerable,” said Mike. “We had conversations about that; some of them were uncomfortable. I felt like a lot of the music we’d written up until that point was personal but some of it was almost cartoonish, which is awesome and something that came very naturally to us, but I felt like we could really connect with people and write music that could make more of an emotional connection. That’s challenging and a bigger risk.”

Gradually, Brandon did start to talk about himself more in his lyrics, as a way for him to deal with his heartbreak and his quarter-life crisis. As he put it, the songwriting process became an “open poetic therapy session” for him. 

Brandon’s newfound vulnerability can clearly be heard in how intimate the lyrics are. With beautiful songs like Pardon Me, The Warmth, Stellar, and Drive, there is a similar sensation that you get from reading another person’s private journals. It feels awkward at first, but the more you notice your own deeply-repressed thoughts and emotions being reflected in the lyrics, the less alone you feel in going through your own life.

In Pardon Me, Brandon channels his anger and world-weariness from having gone through heartbreak. The song is inspired by an article that he had read about a person who supposedly burst into flames spontaneously. Brandon expresses his desire for a similar fate, singing, “I’ve had enough of the world and its people’s mindless games.”

In The Warmth, Brandon reminds himself to not let life’s negativity bring him down. He remembers that life is fleeting, and that he must open his heart to the beauty and good that do exist all around him, while he still can. As the lyrics go, “Remember why you came and while you’re alive, experience the warmth before you grow old.”

Stellar describes Brandon’s experience of finding love again. He likens it to a “transcendental feeling, like floating in outer space.” Being in love again felt like a welcoming respite from worldly mundanity. “Meet me in outer space,” he sings. “We could spend the night, watch the Earth come up. I’ve grown tired of that place, won’t you come with me? We could start again.”

Drive deals with the ever-present fear of uncertainty. It is essentially Brandon’s resolution to himself, to continuously overcome his fears, and to take responsibility for his own decisions — or figuratively speaking, to take control of the steering wheel. The iconic chorus line says it all: “Whatever tomorrow brings, I’ll be there.”

It’s incredible to think that all of these songs come from one album — even more so, that Incubus was just getting started. 

 

***

 

Make Yourself changed everything for Incubus. Pardon Me and Stellar catapulted the band to global stardom. Drive was a late-bloomer, unexpectedly blowing up after the band had already sold a million copies of their album. The song remains as the band’s biggest hit to date.

With the album’s success, they had their seminal “first moments”. It was the first time that their music was played on the radio. It was the first time that their music videos aired on MTV. It was the first time that they performed in large venues. 

Their audience’s demographic profile also started to widen. For the longest time, their concerts used to be more of a “boys’ club”, as Brandon described. But as a change, more women started coming to their concerts too. 

Most remarkably, after Make Yourself, nearly all of Incubus’s subsequent albums were also highly successful, commercially and critically. “It took us about 8 years to figure out how to write a song,” as Brandon remarked. “Make Yourself was where I learned how to write lyrics, and I learned how to sing too.”

However, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Not everybody was happy with the band’s success.

Incubus did receive intense backlash from their subset of fans who had followed them in their early days. As Mike said, “They wanted us to be more of a metal band and complained we had lost our heavier edge.” For some time, the band received hateful letters, saying, “You sold out.”

But it was a small fee to pay for an album that charted the band’s career, their lives, as well as their fans’ lives.

In 2019, Incubus went on an exclusive tour to honor the 20th anniversary of Make Yourself, which they performed in its entirety. It was a moving celebration of the album’s legacy — what it meant to the band, and their fans, in that the album is a timeless, universal call to action — to make amends with yourself.

Speaking about the tour, Brandon remarked, “When we were out on tour celebrating 20 years of Make Yourself it brought with it a new perspective that was really wonderful. To see rooms filled with people showing us how much they related to those songs — and in a lot of ways still relate to those songs — was truly a remarkable experience.

“It ended up being more powerful than when we were originally touring the album because I think I didn’t really understand what I was saying then. It comes close to almost a transcendent experience because you start to see how similar we all are. It ends up being this beautiful communal experience, which is quite humbling.”

 

***

 

As an artist, it does help to be talented at what you do. But talent doesn’t mean much if you don’t have the grit to stay the course. Because it’s not going to be easy. Nothing worthwhile is.

As I wrote in one of my previous articles, your grit is your most valuable asset. You need to have what the physicist Michio Kaku calls “butt power”. It’s the ability to show up every day, stick your ass to your seat, single-mindedly focus on what you’re doing, and to not get up until you get it just right. 

This long, hard slog is an acquired taste, and you need to learn to enjoy it as much as you can. As Kaku said, you just have to “grit your teeth” and “sweat blood” as you tinker with your work.

Not everybody has grit, which is why not everybody does creative work.

Understand though, that grit isn’t a matter of merely waiting for your success to come as you keep doing the same things. It’s about being actively engaged in your progress of getting better at what you do.

The 8 years that Incubus spent in obscurity weren’t dead time. They weren’t passively hacking away at their tunnel with their pickaxes, so to speak. They were deliberately maturing, honing their craft and finding their voice, as they kept trying different approaches and learning from what worked and what didn’t work.

One last thing: understand that there is never an end in view in doing creative work. The point of having grit isn’t just so that you could arrive at a particular milestone in your art. The point of having grit is to always have grit. Doing creative work is a never-ending process of discovering and rediscovering yourself and your art.

Incubus embodies this very well. After Make Yourself, they could’ve easily rested on their laurels. But they didn’t. They have kept sonically redefining themselves in every subsequent album, never staying complacent in just one genre or style. Sometimes it works well, and sometimes it doesn’t. But they have kept going, and that is what really matters.

To quote Ben Kenney, who joined Incubus as a bassist at a later period post-Make-Yourself, “The search continues for us. We’re still trying to figure out what Incubus is. It’s been an enjoyable adventure, and I think the sound reflects that. We’re still searching for it. And I hope we never find it, because that means we can keep going.”

The moral of the story is, have butt power. Your breakthrough might just be right around the corner.

Even better, may you never truly find that “breakthrough”. Because the process is the point.