Interview: Incubus' Brandon Boyd
PLUS: New music, new comics and new ComicCon
Howdy folks. Took a week off last week to mend a nasty stomach bug. Back to the stack I go!
►Incubus’ Brandon Boyd talks solo project, Incubus and more!
Incubus front man Brandon Boyd has released two solo albums in his career to date, The Wild Trapeze and Echoes & Cocoons. But in 2013, he teamed with mega-producer Brendan O’Brien to release a collaboration called Sons of the Sea. I was fortunate enough to be working for AMNY, a newspaper in NYC at the time to snag this interview.
AMNY was funny, I could do whatever I wanted with the audio as long as I released it after the print pieces came out. This was before the hey day of podcasting (where everyone has a podcast now) but for some reason I never released this on my radio show, podcast or anything…until now! Music fans rejoice and let me know what you think! Hit the play button below to check out the interview.
►More New Music From A.G.O.
At the very beginning of the Brandon Boyd interview I mention I was going through a really bad breakup and his music comforted me. What also comforted me was making my own music with my band A.G.O. at the time. I was extremely fortunate to be surrounded by such talented musicians (including my eventual Secrets of the Sire and Rogue Wav co-host Hassan Godwin on bass!) and I used the music they created to vent about everything going on in my life at the time.
For followers of Secrets of the Sire you’ll recognize Kiss The Earth as our theme song for the 4+ years we produced that show. It’s also as close to me being able to write music as I get. I can’t read music, and I’m not good on the guitar. But I can sing (debatably well), write lyrics and play drums. So for that track, I had the words and I had the drum beat. I brought Hassan over and played and sang him the beat and lyrics and he took my melodies and created the music based off that. We recorded a demo before we even had a full band, and when guitarist Dave Feld and drummer Paul Cesario joined us, we played them the demo and the rest of the guys took it from there.
For Home, this was a riff brought to us by one of my best friends on the planet Joseph Paoli, who was our original guitarist until he up and moved to Texas at the time to be with his girlfriend (and future wife – good call Joe!) It’s a song I’m vocally really proud of and one that I annoyed our producer/drummer Paul with back in 2021 to make sure there were a lot of intended effects added to better enhance the final product. Much like when I create comics, I’m good with the bigger picture stuff – something belongs here… this is a big moment and we can use something there – I’m just not great at figuring out the details sometimes. Enter Paul and his amazing wizardry in the studio. Again, a track I’m extremely proud of both vocally and lryically. It was the first song I ever genuinely could muster a long drawn out scream for and it hits home (pun…sort of intended?) every time.
►Come visit me at C2E2 next Week!
The next stop on the ComicCon tour has me in the Windy City for C2E2 April 26-28th alongside Dren Productions publisher James Mascia. We’ll be pimping our awesome books and art prints, so stop by booth 1677 all weekend long!
►New Comic Alert!
Finally, I’m happy to announce the sequel to the sequel of the best worst movie of all time: PLAN 79 FROM OUTERSPACE! Seventy plans later the Invaders are BACK…but this time, we’re taking the fight to them! Coming to Kickstarter April 30th, I’ll send a preview link to start signing up for the project next week. In the meantime, check out this GORGEOUS cover from series artist Javier Ortiz:
That’s all for this week, folks! I’ll be coming at you from C2E2 in next week’s post and sharing some more awesome Plan 79 news!
See you in seven! – Mike