Incubus, courtesy Shawn Hanna.

Morning View may Incubus’ third album, but given the breakout success the band had coming off of 1999’s Make Yourself and “Drive,” it’s entirely plausible the pressures going into recording a follow-up could have been very similar to that of a sophomore effort. Instead falling prey to those forces, the band insulated itself without letting the outside noise of expectations cloud the process.

“Honestly, we got to that place creatively by doing whatever the fuck we wanted to do; we didn’t listen to anybody,” Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger said. “We didn’t care what label people thought. We didn’t care what managers thought. We literally didn’t listen to anybody.”

Einziger said he focused on the mantra that if he really liked and connected with something, then other people probably would, too.

“We were doing what we thought was fun and exciting. To me, it was all fun and excitement,” Einziger said. “I didn’t feel the pressure, or maybe the fun and excitement was the pressure—I don’t know.”

Turns out, people connected. Morning View delivered multiple smash singles like “Wish You Were Here” and “Nice to Know You,” and sold millions of copies around the world. Flash forward 23 years, and Einziger said he realizes there was no guarantee the go-it-alone mentality would actually work; fortunately for Incubus, and the band’s fans, it did.

“It’s one of those things now I look back on as an older person and think, ‘Wow, I thought I knew everything,’” Einziger said. “Somehow we got lucky, or whatever you want to call it, but it worked.”

Einziger said it was easy to tell that the album was resonating with fans quickly because of the energy he, singer Brandon Boyd, multi-instrumentalist Chris Kilmore, drummer José Pasillas and then-bassist Alex “Dirk Lance” Katunich were bringing to the material at shows, as well as the overall positive reaction. What he didn’t expect was the long-lasting and generational nature of what the success of the album would mean. At the time, Incubus was primarily playing shows to college students who were the same age as the band. Now, those fans are still coming out—and bringing their kids along with them.

“I couldn’t have explained to my younger self how that would feel or what it would mean, but it’s meaningful in ways that I couldn’t have imagined,” Einziger said. “Just to have people like a song is one thing, but for that song to connect with them and become a part of their lives, and then to have them pass it down to their children—the magnitude of what that all entails, I think young people just can’t understand that.”

With that in mind, the band hatched the idea to celebrate the album by bringing it back to the stage in its entirety on tour. In many cases, the band is returning to the same venues it played on the original Morning View tour.

“We did it an an experiment at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles last October, and it just felt amazing,” Einziger said.

The shows are a celebration of that feeling of catching lightning in bottle, when a band and its fans connect at such a level that an album becomes “classic.” It’s the type of success that, at the time, Einziger said he didn’t appreciate just how rare is to achieve.

“All that stuff felt so logical as it was happening, but now as a more seasoned adult, I realize just how many things were not in our control,” he said. “The fact that here we are over 20 years later, and people really still care about that music—it’s unbelievable.”

The band did a similar anniversary-style tour with 1999’s Make Yourself, but that was a very different animal. It was just a handful of intimate rooms, not a national arena tour. The band also revisited the past by re-record the album with Morning View xxiii.

“There are definitely lots of things that I started playing differently, and other members of the band started playing differently, kind of subconsciously,” Einziger said. “Going back and listening to the original recordings, which I hadn’t heard for a long time, and then realizing how differently I was playing these parts then they were originally recorded.”

Einziger said it’s fun to see fans debate about which changes they like and which they don’t, as they continue to engage with the material.

“Whether or not our fans want those changes or not kind of doesn’t matter,” he said. “The original versions of those songs aren’t going anywhere; they’ll always be there.”

One aspect of the band that will not be the same is a change in bassists. Longtime member Ben Kenney (since 2004) stepped away to focus on his health. Incubus recently made Nicole Row a permanent member. A former member of Panic! at the Disco who’s played with Dua Lipa and Miley Cyrus, Row has serious chops. Einziger said she brought a fresh perspective to the material.

“She really understood what we are as a band at a very fundamental level, but she did bring a new set of musical sensibilities in that I think are very complementary to the rest of ours,” Einziger said.

Incubus is also halfway into a new record. He hopes it’s ready near the end of the year.

“The deeper into our career that we get, one of our goals has always been not to repeat ourselves,” he said. “It would be easy to try to write a song that sounds very similar to a song what we wrote in the past that people really connected with, but we’ve really taken on a lot of aim in not doing that. … So far, the music is very different.”

Follow writer Mike DeWald at Twitter.com/mike_dewald.