What have you learned from compiling the Vault? What have you learned about yourself and the band? Has it been a discovery or a rediscovery process at all?
It’s been both of those things, like you said discover and rediscovery. It’s been humbling, fun and scary, and beautiful and sort of nostalgic and everything under the sun. It was a little bit of a daunting prospect when we first started out, to really be going through all this material, and a part of me was resigned to the fact that there was no way that I could really listen to all of it before letting it go. So, I listened to and viewed most of it, but then I came to this place where I was like, ‘For better or worse, this is us, this is what we do.’ I’ll let the kids and the fans that listen to our band sort of filter through it and decide what they like and what they don’t like. It’ll be interesting that some of it will make us cringe making it as artists, and some of it will make us proud, but the process of putting it all together was really a trip, and it really put a lot of things into perspective for me and I know for the rest of the guys in the band.
As a band, we get caught up in the pace and the whirlwind of this adventure of being in this band, we do forget sometimes that we have been a band for almost 20 years and we have written a lot of music together and played a lot of shows and traveled many miles together and seen some wonderful things—and going through the Vault process and putting the whole thing together, it kind of highlighted all that and really opened my eyes to really how big of an adventure it has been. It reminded me how exciting it can be when you look at it through the right filter. So, it really reenergized us to really push forward into the future of our band creatively and literally as well. It made me really excited to come out into this tour and we are having a lot of fun.
Does this feel like a milestone tour as well and if so, how do you think it’s going to affect the performance?
You know it has been, we have been playing longer sets than we have in the past couple of tours and it doesn’t seem like it, it actually feels shorter. It doesn’t feel like we have been onstage for almost two hours, and it’s funny, because as a band we have always been in agreement that we didn’t want to be that band that was onstage for too long. We go to see our favorite bands, and we don’t want to see them for more than an hour, an hour and a half, because we are getting kind of old and our backs start to hurt. What’s interesting is that we are playing in the whole spectrum of the Incubus experience every night and a lot of it is singles and a lot of it is sort of obscure album cuts from a lot of different records, and the enthusiasm from the audience is what makes it fly by. We were onstage at the hour and 50-minute mark, and it feels like we had just gotten started. All of the kids are there full force every song and what’s really amazing about it, is that we are not a new band by any means. It seems like a lot of the crowds are energized and reenergized, and I can see people in the audience that have been coming to our shows and then I’m seeing kids before that I have never seen before and they are young. They are 13 years old to like 40, it’s like a dream a come true, and it’s a lot of fun.
Have you begun writing for the new record?
Yes, yes, it’s the kind of thing where we never really stop writing. We go through creative spurts as a band, but as individuals, we sort of catalog and bring things into the band, that stuff never stops. We have dozens and dozens of good ideas already brewing for what will be the next album. I have to assume we are just getting started, because Michael has been away at school for the past year, and Jose has been a new dad for the past year, so like I said, we are really just getting started, so I am very excited to say the least. Like I said before, everyone is kind of reenergized.
