For our third-ever installment of Setlist Insider, we had the honor of digging into the data with Incubus! And they - Brandon Boyd, Mike Einziger and Jose Pasillas - want you to know, the data is incomplete. This, of course, didn't make the edit, but the band who cut their teeth by playing house bar mitzvahs let us know that there are scores of setlists missing. Even their most-played songs, which rank in the hundreds, should hover in the thousands, they told us. (Since we're a wiki site, if you're a huge Incubus fan, you can help!) Ah, but the point here isn't accuracy, it's storytelling! And that they did - from the Fungus Amongus album release show to why they take no time off. Watch:
Artist statistics + band history:
Brandon: "We've played "Drive" the most. Play count, 893 times, we've played drive. That is a vast underestimation by the way."
Jose: "Yeah that can't be right."
Brandon: "This is really interesting because we had a song called "Shaft". It's so funny that we named the song "Shaft." Oh, the things you do when you're 16 years old. The three of us started our band in 1991. And so, and we were like, literally kids.
Mike: "February 25th, 1995. That show was probably our album release party for Fungus Amongus."
Jose: "Does it say where?"
Mike: "The Troubadour."
Jose: "We had nine songs."
Mike: "Probably played a couple of them more than once too. Like prolong the pleasure."
Brandon: "Prolong the pleasure of the experience."
Brandon: "We also, we kinda cut our teeth at local bar mitzvahs. When we were still a high school band and those were some of the first paying gigs we ever got. And so they were really-"
Mike: "Pro gig. Piece of the gate."
Brandon: "Right? It was really exciting remember?"
Jose: "I think we got like a thousand bucks."
Brandon: "Yeah, we got paid like a thousand dollars as 15, 16 year olds. And that's how we ended up buying some of our first, like real gear. So the sound could be better at the next bar mitzvah. It's pretty epic, yeah."
Concert map:
Jose: "Out of all the hundreds of different places we've been to, there's still thousands of other places to go to."
Brandon: "There's something amazing about having the opportunity to make art and play music as like a way of life. And it does get kind of exhausting sometimes."
Mike: "Like we don't take breaks. We think that we do, but we don't."
Brandon: "Yeah. For us taking breaks historically means we're writing.
What a cool job. What an amazing gift to be able to show up and people wanna sing your songs with you. You know what I mean? So that's probably most of the reason why we've been, for lack of a better word, prolific.
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