Make Yourself
Make Yourself is the third studio album by American rock band Incubus. It was released on October 26, 1999, through Epic and Immortal Records. The album received double platinum certification by the RIAA and produced three charting singles—"Pardon Me", "Stellar", and "Drive"—all of which reached the top three on Billboards Alternative Songs chart, with the latter topping the chart and also becoming the band's sole top ten hit to date on the Billboard Hot 100, where it peaked at No. 9.
The album is the first to be recorded with new turntablist Chris Kilmore, who joined in February 1998 and replaced DJ Lyfe.
Composition
Style and genres
Make Yourself has been labelled as an alternative metal, nu metal, alternative rock, and funk rock album. Slant Magazine claimed in 2001 that Incubus "blur the perceptions between metal and alt-rock" on the album. It has also been described as having more ambient tones than their previous work. In a 2000 interview, singer Brandon Boyd said that the band weren't concerned about whether the album was going to fit into any particular music scene.Writing and recording
The songs for the album were written following an exhausting tour for their full-length major label debut S.C.I.E.N.C.E.. Touring for S.C.I.E.N.C.E. began in mid-1997, once they had finished recording it, and covered the entirety of 1998, with the band playing over 300 shows that year alone. The S.C.I.E.N.C.E. touring cycle concluded in January 1999, following a run of shows with Black Sabbath and Pantera. The shows with Black Sabbath were as part of their reunion tour, and Incubus was put on this tour on the insistence of the Osbourne family, who also put them on the 1998 edition of Ozzfest, since Jack Osbourne liked their music. Brandon Boyd reflected in a 2020 Kerrang! article, "when we got home, we started coming up with ideas and gave ourselves eight weeks to write the record and in those eight weeks, all the songs that appear on the album came out." In a 1999 interview, Boyd mentioned that "Nowhere Fast" originated through improvisational live jams during the S.C.I.E.N.C.E. tour, remarking "we've been exploring drum-'n'-bass here and there on stage, playing little improvisational ditties in between real songs from the records. José would start playing a drum-'n'-bass he'd made up, I'd play my didgeridoo to it, and started forming out of live things like that." For Make Yourself, turntablist Chris Kilmore intended to use a scratch record of sounds he had recorded over the years. However, it took two and a half weeks for Kilmore to get this record made, which led to him not being present for the early portions of the writing process.While the album has since been considered to have a more accessible sound than their previous works, Boyd claimed in 2020 that "we didn’t actually say out loud to each other that we needed to write a more commercial record; we just wrote in the same way we knew how to write and Make Yourself is what came out." However, guitarist Mike Einziger did note in 2020 that the band wanted to make the album more mature and less "zany" than earlier works such as S.C.I.E.N.C.E.. In a 1999 interview from when the album was being written, he further said that it was going to have more "ambiance" and be more focused than S.C.I.E.N.C.E.. In 2020, he stated there was a "genuine creative desire to step up our artistry. We really wanted to become great songwriters graduate from the zany music we spent our high school years writing." Einziger added that, "I really wanted Brandon to be more vulnerable. We had conversations about that; some of them were uncomfortable. I felt like a lot of the music we’d written up until that point was personal but some of it was almost cartoonish, which is awesome and something that came very naturally to us, but I felt like we could really connect with people and write music that could make more of an emotional connection."
Einziger also noted in a 2011 Ultimate Guitar interview that he knew the band's change in direction would potentially alienate fans of their earlier work, which had more of an experimental funk-based sound. He compared the change in sound from S.C.I..E.N.C.E. to Make Yourself to the change in sound from 2006's Light Grenades to 2011's If Not Now, When?, which saw the band temporarily go in a soft adult contemporary direction. In this same interview, he said when they started writing Make Yourself, he felt as though the band had naturally come "to the end of an era" with their music, saying this mirrored how they felt when they started writing If Not Now, When?. He added that on both occasions, he felt like it was time "to do something very different that was going to polarize the people who had been previously listening to us."
Tensions arose between band members during the making of the album, which led to them briefly entering group therapy. Boyd reflected on the tension in a 2001 interview with Spin, saying that "when we're making music together, it's like five men making love — in a very platonic sense. It's very erotic because your spirits are intermingling, you're becoming one. It's also why it can get so heated. You're tapping into this electricity that's very primal."
Regarding his experience writing the album, Boyd remembered in 2020, "when we were touring S.C.I.E.N.C.E, I’d been with my girlfriend for quite a long time, and then it came to light that she’d been having an affair while I was gone, so I was dealing with a pretty high degree of heartbreak when I went into Make Yourself. The writing process ended up becoming like an open poetic therapy session for me. There was a little bit of anger, definitely heartbreak but also a sense of hope around finding a new love. From my point of view, the songs very clearly describe the arc of that experience." Prior to discovering the affair, Boyd had been dating this woman since 1991, which was the same year that Incubus formed. In a 2000 interview, Boyd said that when "Pardon Me" was written, he was also dealing with the deaths of a family member and a friend, in addition to these relationship troubles. He said that he was "being bombarded by life" at the time, and that this inspired the song's lyrical themes. The lyrics to "Stellar" were inspired by Boyd's new girlfriend Jo, who he met during the making of the album. She would later appear in the song's music video, with Boyd saying in 2020, "it was a very different kind of love than the love I experienced as a teenager. It felt much more expansive, hence the 'meet me in outer space' imagery." Boyd wrote the melodies to the song after Einziger showed him the main guitar part for it.
Regarding the hit single "Drive", Boyd said "a lot of those topics are still things I wrestle with. The song is about reckoning with fear and uncertainty and I’m still in a kind-of active dance with that, as I probably will be my entire life", adding that "just because you write something down, put a melody to it and a bunch of people like it doesn’t mean it was a thought that was complete – it’s not as if I became enlightened around the idea of not letting fear dictate the course of my life." Einziger said, "I could never have predicted was going to be a smash-hit song, but I knew that it felt special to us. It felt like an honest encapsulation of being vulnerable and I felt like people would connect with it." Before recording the final version that appears on the album, the band worked on a demo version of the song at their homes which closely resembled the final version, with Einziger saying, "I remember singing the lyrics to me in the car as they appear on the album. The version we made before we recorded it properly was really the same."
When the album was being recorded at NRG in North Hollywood, Chris Kilmore had his own DJ setup in the hallway. He adds, "there were a bunch of other bands there. 311 was there a lot of the time, and Jurassic 5 was there a lot of the time. And because I had that turntable setup in the hallway, I was always out there practicing and trying stuff." The day the instrumental song "Battlestar Scralatchtica" was recorded, Brandon Boyd was missing because he had a dentist appointment. Kilmore states, "we weren’t going to waste a day. So we wrote a cool little track. I was out in the hallway scratching, and Nu-Mark and Cut Chemist walked by. I was like, 'Hey. Do you guys want to scratch on this track we just did?'. We went in, laid it down, and that’s how 'Battlestar Scralatchtica' came about." Around the time the record was being made, Kilmore also contributed DJ scratches to the album Introduction to Mayhem, by the nu metal band Primer 55.
Touring
To support Make Yourself, the band and Buckethead opened for Primus on their Antipop tour in 1999, including at a millennium show on December 31, 1999. Early the following year, they performed at the SnoCore Tour with System of a Down and Mr. Bungle. The members of Incubus have since spoken of their pleasure at getting to play with Primus and Mr. Bungle, two artists whom they cite as influences. Mr. Bungle were met with a hostile crowd reception at some of the shows with Incubus and System of a Down. Mr. Bungle's bassist Trevor Dunn remarked in 2013 that "we were sort of the grandpas of the tour", adding that his band dressed up as the Village People at these shows in an attempt to anger the "metal kids" in the audience. Brandon Boyd later reflected in 2018, "Mr. Bungle was hugely influential to both of our bands, and they were playing second, like before Incubus and System of a Down." He added, "Mike Patton would be a real rabble rouser, and say horrible things to the audience. We would be on the side of stage cheering, fanboys."Following this, Incubus went on an American tour with 311, which lasted from late April 2000 to the beginning of July 2000. From August to early September 2000, the band performed at that year's edition of Ozzfest. It was their second appearance at the festival, having earlier appeared at the 1998 edition. On October 12, 2000, the band performed the single "Stellar" on the Late Show with David Letterman. They had also performed the song on an August 2, 2000 episode of the Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn. Between October and November 2000, Incubus and Taproot supported Deftones on their "Back to School" tour for the album White Pony.