Incubus
“Stellar”
from Make Yourself
Sony, October 26, 1999
Here’s an interesting case of coulda woulda shoulda. I used to hear this song all the time on modern-rock radio ten years ago, when I had a job driving around Manhattan as a production assistant on the show David Milch did before Deadwood–one of the very few songs of that era that could get me to leave modern-rock radio on for longer than three seconds at a time. Hearing it on the radio again the other day made me realize both why that was and why I still didn’t run out and buy an Incubus record.
You’ve got a perfectly lovely, bubbly little guitar part that conveys the song’s spacey central metaphor by sorta curling up and outward over and over again, like astronauts twirling around in zero gravity. Beneath that there’s a pleasant two-note bass pulse to give it a little forward motion. And there are some striking images in the lyrics, too: The opening “meet me in outer space” is obviously the descendent of a very long line of moonstruck rock lyrics, but lead singer/shirtless handsome man Brandon Boyd delivers it quietly, not with the come-fly-with-me brio you might expect. The following line, “We could spend the night, watch the Earth come up,” is a clever little reversal of the usual romantic evening. And I really do love the way he suddenly kicks the song up like twelve notches before the chorus: “We could start a-GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIN!!!!!” Whoa, where’d that come from? For the second verse that bit’s even better because it accompanies a really direct and really sensual set of lyrics in which Boyd explains to his beloved that taking her to outer space “might be the only way that I can show you how it feels to be inside you.” That might be a little too direct for some listeners, but I’ve always found that sort of sentiment to be very candid and very sexy (“Not Enough Time” by INXS and “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails being two other cases in point).
It’s not until I heard the first chorus itself this time around that I realized “Oh, so that’s what’s going wrong here”–it’s the drums. They pound away way too hot in the mix…and on one and three, like an audience of white parents trying to clap along to the gospel song their children are singing at a middle-school chorus concert! It’s crazy–completely kills any kind of groove or flow, makes that big chorus sound like inert shouting rather than passion. And what’s more, it continues at just slightly a lower level throughout the second verse, making it a slog rather than a weightless orbit. For a band that I think is supposed to be at least slightly groove-oriented, it’s a pretty shockingly obvious misstep, and it transforms a potentially really lovely modern power ballad into something with some nice moments that you don’t really ever wanna listen to on purpose. Coulda woulda shoulda.