Incubus Covers Prince On New Album
Incubus frontman Brandon Boyd isn’t scared of releasing a greatest hits album, even if it shows his age. After all, he got into some of his favorite artists, like Elvis Costello and Leonard Cohen, through their greatest hits collections. “It was weird at first, coming to terms with the whole idea of doing it,” Boyd says about compiling Monuments and Melodies, a two-disc set of hits and rarities. “Years and years ago, we came to terms with the fact that we weren’t a new band anymore, and it was a little bit of a humbling process to go through. I guarantee there are people out there like, ‘Wait a minute, I feel like I was just in high school discovering this band, and they have a greatest hits record out?’ ”
Formed in Calabasas, California, in 1991, Incubus are inching towards their 20th year, making the band only a year younger than Pearl Jam, contemporaries of Counting Crows, Dave Matthews Band and Rage Against the Machine, and actually two years older than Oasis. The band’s earliest experiments in funk and rap metal are a source of tremendous embarrassment to Boyd, and any tunes from that era are conspicuously absent from Monuments and Melodies, as he says those songs “continually haunt me in the darkest portions of my dreams.”
The collection’s first disc brings together all of the band’s major hits, such as “Drive,” “Pardon Me,” “Warning” and “Stellar,” as well as two new songs written specifically for the compilation. The second album comprises odds and ends that didn’t make Incubus’ previous LPs, including a faithful, recently recorded take on Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” the first cover song the band has ever put to tape. It’s a song Incubus has been known to close its live sets with, but the band had trepidations about making a studio version.
“That song definitely walked a very fine line for us as far as whether or not it should have been done in the first place,” Boyd says. “We thought it would be sort of sacrilegious to try and redo it. But as we were mastering the album, somebody said, ‘Just finish the Prince song, just to see,’ so we finished it and said, ‘Dammit, it sounds really good. Fuck it.’ And we just put it on there.”
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