Incubus learns to embrace greatest hits CD

By John Benson

Imagine for a second that you’re a rock star with a huge fan base that over the past decade has purchased millions of albums. Such success has provided you with the luxury of taking a year off to do whatever it is you want. Perhaps you can hang around the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel & Casino pool for months on end. Or you can finally record that rock musical about Jack the Ripper.

Well, when this exact scenario was laid out in front of Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger over a year ago, the Southern California native, naturally, decided to go to college. But the college he picked was Harvard University, and the classes he took were in music, physics and evolutionary biology. This isn’t normal rock star behavior.

“Well, Harvard is a pretty amazing school,” said Einziger, calling from Salt Lake City. “I think it’s obvious why anyone would want to go there. I guess why now is we came to the end of a long cycle of being on tour, almost two years, and we knew we were going to have a little bit of time off. And it just felt like a good idea to me.

“I felt inspired to be in a classroom and just to be learning and studying. I never really had a college experience when I was younger, because we pretty much went on tour straight away after graduating high school. So I figured this just seemed like the right time to do it.”

As strange as Einziger’s choice of leisure activities may be, it fits right into the unexpected behavior of Incubus, which got its start in the early ’90s when its members were still teenagers. Early on, the band was pegged as part of the nu- metal zeitgeist; however, over time the outfit has settled into an alternative-rock vibe that has produced plenty of rock radio hits, including “Wish You Were Here,” “Nice to Know You” and “Drive.”

Now comes another surprise. Incubus, which returns to Cleveland for a July 29 show at the Time Warner Cable Amphitheater at Tower City, recently released its first greatest hits effort, the double-disc “Monuments and Melodies.”

If you’re thinking the decision to release an Incubus best-of set feels premature, that was initially the exact sentiment of the band. So what changed the group’s mind?

“We had an obligation to the record company at some time for a greatest hits album,” Einziger said. “So the idea of it just came up. And immediately, I think we were all kind of put off by it. Everybody was sort of [of] the mind that was a kind of cheesy thing to do. I think that’s the sort of knee-jerk response to it — that it’s either the signifier of the end of a band’s career or the band is going to break up or they ran out of steam or material.

“Then the idea of putting it out was interesting because I actually really started thinking about it. A lot of the music I grew up listening to, a lot of the bands that I felt were important to me, especially during my teen years, I was introduced to through their greatest hits records. So it seemed like a good time to release a greatest hits record, where we actually have an entire record’s worth of songs that have been played on the radio.”

So, nice to know you, but no goodbyes is how the members of Incubus are viewing the release of its first greatest hits album, which features one CD of radio hits alongside another disc’s worth of odds and ends. More so, Einziger said he’s not afraid of viewing “Monuments and Melodies” as a chapter end to Incubus, as long as there are plenty more pages to be written in the group’s story.

“Hopefully, it’ll become an important piece of the history of our band and almost sort of like a turning point for us into a new era of our career,” Einziger said. “We actually feel very lucky. We’re right in the middle of the tour, and it’s actually the most well-attended tour we have ever had in our career. So we’re in a really great place. It’s a nice opportunity to take a step back and look at all the things we’ve done.

“It’s been a really kind of wildly fantastic voyage for all of us. We’re just as shocked as anybody else that we’ve been able to maintain this for such a long period of time, and we’ll continue to do it. So I think it’s a good thing.”