Ahead of Irving Show, Incubus’ Brandon Boyd Has a Familiar New Morning View

We’ve recently seen a flood of our favorite bands from the 1990s and 2000s come through North Texas with 20th- and 30th-anniversary tours celebrating their most famous albums. As fans, we'll keep eating it up. There's nothing better than going to a show and screaming your heart out to your favorite songs while basking in the warm, soft glow of nostalgia. Music has the ability, unlike anything else, to instantly transport us to a specific place or moment in time — and the destination is different for each listener.

“We find versions of identity in music and come to, sometimes, enlightening conclusions about periods of times in our lives or where we are in that exact moment,” Incubus frontman Brandon Boyd says ahead of the band's Dallas concert. “I see limitless potential in music and I suppose in art, from a wider perspective. I suppose that's why I've been sort of magnetically attracted to it my entire life. I see it as a universalizing idea, almost like an ethos.”

When 2021 came around, ushering in the 20th anniversary of their double-platinum album Morning View, Incubus started plotting. The pandemic meant that live shows were out of the question, so the Californians returned to a familiar place: the house in Malibu overlooking the ocean, where they wrote and recorded the original album two decades earlier. They “commandeered that living room,” as Boyd says, and performed the album in its entirety while the world watched via livestream, a glorious moment for Incubus fans everywhere.
The livestream was so well received, in fact, that the band decided to release the session as a documentary. But that was just the beginning of their celebration of one of the most significant albums of their career.

“We figured we would put that out as like ‘Morning View Live,’ as a way to celebrate it,” Boyd says. “But it's really hard to hear what you're making objectively enough to offer an informed opinion about how it might be received. I did my very, very, very best, and it occurred to me that this would be … OK. It would be ‘Morning View Live,’ and some people might like it, but I didn't think it was good enough.”

This high bar for creativity is hardly surprising for a band that has pushed the boundaries of alternative music since 1991. Boyd recalls the days before Morning View as “a very interesting, albeit chaotic time.” In 2001, Incubus already had their first taste of success, coming on the heels of a major tour in support of their 1999 album Make Yourself, which produced some of their biggest hits, including “Drive” and “Pardon Me.”

“In our heart of hearts, we wanted to make our next record in an environment that was … not just a windowless room,” Boyd says. “We were realizing a deeper dream of ours, which was to make music in environments that were inspiring, just to see what would happen to the songwriting and recording process.”

That curiosity led Boyd and his bandmates to hole up in an abandoned house near the ocean for nearly six months, and that's how Morning View was born. As they intended, the California aesthetic really shines through, with sun-soaked, laid-back vibes in tracks such as “Nice to Know You” and “Wish You Were Here.”

Now, 20 years later, they’re ready to revisit this material in a big way.

“It's an album that we put all of our heart and our soul into, and we're still, to this day, we're very proud of it,” Boyd says. “So much so that we were willing to go through the relatively laborious exercise of recording it again, and then we're gonna go out on tour and play it from front to back for two weeks straight.”

This new version, called Morning View 23, celebrates the lasting impact that the album has had since its original release, while acknowledging where the members of Incubus are today, as musicians and as people.

“So much has changed, that it would feel almost reductionistic to try and describe here and right now,” Boyd says. “I guess what I'll say is that everything has changed, and so much so that I'm almost back around to the front again where it's as if nothing has changed.”

Reimagining a classic is not without its risks, though. Fans can be brutal when you mess with something they hold so dear. The band learned this from some initial mixed reactions to the new version, which Incubus takes on tour later this month.  The tour will stop at Irving’s Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory on Sept. 6, with Coheed and Cambria.

“Of course, there was gonna be some pushback from our hardcore listeners of decades at this point, like, ‘Why would you re-record this? There was nothing wrong with it,’ ‘I don't like this version as much,’ ‘Your voice doesn't sound as good as it did when you were 25,’ those types of comments in various forms and different levels of delicacy and/or eloquence,” Boyd says. “But an overwhelming number of positive responses outshine the negative ones.”

The fear of criticism was never going to stop Boyd from pursuing this project, however.

“I don't like not doing things, especially creatively, because of a fear of a reaction," he says. "If it actually intimidates me or frightens me in some way, I’m going right towards it, even if it ends up being a mistake. Because in the mistake, you learn incredible things, but not doing something because you were afraid of what the reaction might be can end up haunting you. If people don't like it, the original version exists; it will always exist.”

Incubus plays at 7:30 p.m., Friday, Sept. 6, at Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory, 300 W. Las Colinas Blvd., Irving.