10 Best Album Art Pieces as Chosen by Incubus’ Brandon Boyd

As the year winds down, Incubus vocalist Brandon Boyd is turning his focus to his solo music, announcing that his latest solo effort, Echoes and Cocoons, is set to arrive next spring. Coinciding with that announcement, we've also got new music with the song and video for "Pocket Knife" arriving, complete with artwork for the single done by Boyd himself. And it's the artistic single artwork that inspired us to reach out to Boyd to get his take on his favorite pieces of album artwork.

The marriage of his music with artwork should come as no surprise to those who've followed Boyd's increasing entry into more artistic vessels. "I’ve always felt that music and art were joined at the hip. There can be one without the other but it’s always been my contention that the experience is more enriched and dare I say better when audio influences visual and vice versa. Diving more deeply into painting has made making music even more special to me and I’m so thankful to have had the opportunity to continue to develop both ends of that creative spectrum," says the singer, who also founded the Moonlight Arts Collective this year.

As for the new song, "Pocket Knife," viewed and heard below, Boyd reveals that it was inspired by the lessons learned after having nightmares as a child. His mother taught him how the use of totems could help him gain agency over what happens in his dreams and that's carried over into the music as he attempts to teach his younger self that lesson through song.

That's just one of the tracks on the new album that addresses how he's dealt with a quickly changing landscape over the past pandemic-influenced year. "It forced everyone, literally everyone, indoors for cruel amounts of time and we collectively lost our minds there for a while," says Boyd. "Writing music and painting are how I process my experience of being alive so I suppose I was reflecting and reacting, adapting and dancing amongst a swiftly tilting planet, as it were. The album was recorded between John Congleton’s studio and my desktop here at home; neither of us left our respective houses while recording, we played a game of digital musical telephone and it was a lot of fun even in spite of the strange circumstances."

Stay tuned for more info on Echoes & Cocoons as it becomes available and be sure to check out Boyd's new single "Pocket Knife" and the song's single artwork. below The track is available at this location. We'll turn it over to Boyd for his list of the 10 Best Album Art Pieces and why each resonates with him just below the new music.

Brandon Boyd, "Pocket Knife" Single Artwork

Brandon Boyd, "Pocket Knife"

"I decided to do this Top 10 Album Artwork list in no particular order as I don’t have a most favorite anything, especially in music and film," says Boyd. "I sort my history with art, music and film into sub categories so I have countless favorites that span across my lifetime. I also limited this assignment to what I actually have in my possession in my collection of vinyl, so there are definitely a handful of 'favorites' that are being left out. All that being said, shall we begin?"