Make Yourself (1999)

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 Billboard's 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.

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 [Pasillas, drummer] would start playing a drum-'n'-bass he'd made up, I'd play my didgeridoo to it, and [it] 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 [and] 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."