Interview

Babble & Beat - Where are you calling from?

Ben - I’m at a hotel room in Philadelphia right now.

Babble & Beat - How long have you been on the road so far this tour?

Ben - The tour started in January but we had a two month break in the middle, because Mike [Einziger] had an operation for Carpal Tunnel [syndrome].

Babble & Beat - So you had to postpone a lot of Europe dates.

Ben - Yeah, we postponed Europe and Canada. A bunch of stuff had to get moved around and we have been slowly making the dates up.

Babble & Beat - Incubus has entered in and out of many musical genres with every album release. What genre would you say the band is headed in with your latest album, 'Light Grenades'?

Ben - Every artist says the same thing, ‘you can’t classify me’ and that kind of shit. The truth of the matter is, it’s rock but it doesn’t lean toward any particular nook or cranny in rock, as much as we're just getting better at figuring out what we’re good at, and how we can maximize our abilities together.

Babble & Beat - This is your second release with the band. Which album is your favorite of the two?

Ben - It’s tough because there are moments on each record where I get caught up. The more recent one is more exciting because it is newer.

Babble & Beat - What is the inspiration behind the song ‘Anna Molly’?

Ben - Well, Brandon wrote the lyrics, so he would have the best take on it. My interpretation is that it is a tragic love song, where you can picture everything about this person and imagine your soul mate, and it’s a song about how you might never find that.

Babble & Beat - Some people have criticized the album cover for 'Light Grenades', saying that it’s a rip off of Green Day’s 'American Idiot' cover. Was it inspired at all by Green Day?

Ben - Not at all. Alan Aldridge is the artist who did our record cover. He has done Beatles and Pink Floyd album covers – he has done a lot of important psychedelic record covers. He is a friend of Mike and we had done a couple of things on the side with Alan’s artwork before, so with this record coming up we really wanted to work with Alan again because he is a brilliant artist. Alan had an advanced copy of the record, sat down and listened to it, and he came back with this drawing of a grenade encompassing the words of the song titles, and information from the actual record.

Babble & Beat - 'Light Grenades' debuted at #1, but then dropped to #37 in the second week. How strange is it to hold the record for the biggest drop from #1?

Ben - You’re the first person to tell me that! I pay so little attention to what happens on the charts, because you look on the charts and there will be some ridiculous pop record from some artist with no talent, and right next to it will be the soundtrack to Shrek 3. I don’t consider what we do to be the same thing as that.

Babble & Beat - Since you don’t judge how well you are doing as a band from the charts, what is your gauge on where the band is at and how successful you are at the moment?

Ben - The success thing for me is that I pay my mortgage on time, and I get up in the morning and play concerts. When people buy the records, that’s great... but we are going into a different era where it’s not going to be about just making and selling records. I believe it’s going to be about performing a good show and having people wanting to come out to see you, because you can’t buy a concert experience – yet.

Babble & Beat - Do you think illegal downloading of music is why we are headed in that direction?

Ben - People blame it on that quickly, and that is definitely a component, but I don’t think that’s why. I think that after 30 or 40 years of recycling Rock-and-Roll, and thinking that if you put a blue suit on it this month and a red suit on it next month that it is going to sell. The formula has just been beaten to the ground, and eventually people get bored of it and move on. The general public doesn’t go out and buy rock records anymore, they go out and buy Akon records – that’s not Hip Hop or R&B, that’s some other nonsense to me. I get on stage and perform a show, and that’s what my job will become in the future.

Babble & Beat - When you were with The Roots, did you ever tour with them?

Ben - Yeah, that’s actually how I met the guys in Incubus. I was touring with The Roots and I just happened to be playing bass that tour, because my usual role in The Roots is playing guitar. I was playing bass for the two month tour because the bass player wasn’t able to tour, and that’s when I met all of the Incubus guys, and toured together, and somehow they got into their minds that I was a good bass player [laughs].

Babble & Beat - I’ve heard that you play 6 different instruments. Is that right?

Ben - My first instrument is the drums. I also play bass, and guitar, and a little bit of keyboards and I sing – that’s pretty much all you will get me to do in public.

Babble & Beat - What is your favorite thing about playing live?

Ben - There is the fact that it’s kind of unpredictable, and if you can really focus you can really find a lot of ways to surprise yourself. I improvise a lot playing – I don’t usually play the same thing twice. Even if it’s really simple, and it sounds like the same thing, I try to really obsess over the nuance and the detail and that makes it kind of intense.

Babble & Beat - What do you have in store for us at tomorrow night’s show at Jones Beach?

Ben - I think you will see a good thing getting better. I’ve been in the band for 4 years now, and it’s starting to sink in. Those guys have been together for a long time, and I’m starting to learn my role within the band and trying to stretch out and expand. You will see some guys who are not quite aging rockers yet, but we aren’t kids anymore [laughs].

LINKS:
To read our Incubus concert review from August 9th, CLICK HERE.

Official Incubus
Incubus MySpace