What you said there about the guitar really brings me to another question, you covered ‘Let’s Go Crazy.’ I think that Prince is such a great guitar player, I think that’s been overshadowed by the purple pop kingdom that swirls around him and that he’s more known for.
Amongst the five of us in the band we have five hardcore Prince fans, Purple Rain, the album as well as the movie was hugely, hugely impacting to me. You ask every guy in the band at some point, and they would probably relay the same level of enthusiasm, but I will just speak for myself at this time. That album was one of the first times I heard music a certain way, and the something happened to me when I heard Sgt. Pepper’s and a lot people would be angered that I put Prince in the same category as the Beatles but Purple Rain, it really tripped me out. I was a little kid, and I never heard music like that before and it was mystifying to me. The first time I heard Sgt. Pepper’s, I was even younger and it was mystifying. I mean, it was really magical; it tickled my brain and my soul. As I’ve got older, I have grown to appreciate how accomplished of a songwriter Prince is and was and continues to be, my fascination reemerged a couple of years back and we started messing with ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ and we’ve been playing it, we were doing it at a couple of European festivals to very mixed reactions, and we really weren’t going to put it on a greatest hit record. It came out as a like a random idea, and everyone is like, ‘Yeah!’ Then the next day, we were like, ‘No, we shouldn’t do that.’ Just because the song is done, you can’t really improve upon it. At a certain point, we thought maybe we were taking the idea too seriously and we should get back to the fascination part of it. Get back to that little child in us, like, ‘This is a fucking awesome song and a fun song to play, let’s just put it on there.’ What you hear, the music take on the record, is the first and only take that we did in the studio. We fixed the vocal dubs together and the guitar solo and it was done. All we are doing is paying our respects, an homage, to a great songwriter and so it was a lot of fun.
How is the Make Yourself Foundation going?
We’re on tour, so our Make Yourself Foundation actives are back to normal. We do nightly meet-and-greets that listeners will bid on on E-bay. It’s the thing that we have been able to raise the most money for a few different foundations for. I believe that it’s 50 people a night, so we are able to raise a considerable amount of money at the end of each tour, and it’s been mostly a lot of environmental organizations, but a lot of humanitarian ones as well. It’s full force, it’s moving and grooving. We’re pretty excited about it.
Monuments And Melodies is available now. Catch Incubus on Aug. 5 at Radio City Music Hall in NYC, Aug. 7 at PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, NJ, or Aug. 8 at Festival Pier At Penn’s Landing in Philly. For more info, visit enjoyincubus.com.
