Mike Einziger: The Einstein of Incubus

Incubus, the alt-rock group with a worldwide, cult-like following, filled up every single one of the 17,376 seats for their career debut at the Hollywood Bowl on a recent Monday night.

The large venue felt surprisingly intimate when the boys gathered together at the front of the stage to play a few of their tunes while sitting closely together in a semi-circle. Brandon Boyd led the band in a healthy mix of newer tunes and old favorites, all while maintaining an impressive level of connectedness to the fans in attendance.

Mike Einziger, lead guitarist, played an incredible show that was highlighted by a couple of mind-bending solos. His supernaturally fast-moving fingers were displayed on black and white screens for everyone to enjoy.

"The most exciting part is when you're literally on the brink of total destruction and it all just somehow, someway, comes together. For some reason I kind of get off on that."

As if being the lead guitarist for Incubus wasn't time-consuming enough, Einziger decided to go off and compose a nine-movement symphony. The piece, entitled End. > vacuum, was played by a 50+ strong, chamber orchestra at UCLA's Royce Hall last August.

"I had all this creative energy stored up and I just needed to get rid of it - wanted to get past it - so I could, you know, get on to what was next."

The composition process took place over the course of a year, with Einziger writing in hotel rooms and on airplanes.

"It was just kind of a collection of music that I didn't know what I was going to do with. It was all very quilted together and the whole plan for having it performed came about in a relatively short amount of time.

All of the visual components that coincided with the music were planned days before the show. It was a big, chaotic mess and it was really fun, but a bit scary because something like that has very high potential to turn out disastrous, but I just felt like it would all work and it did."

One of two people that he had on stage with him during the performance (aside from the orchestra) was good friend, Blake Mills.

"Blake's a really incredible guitarist, a multi-instrumentalist musician who was part of a band called Simon Dawes (a Malibu-based band that has since disbanded.) He played with Band of Horses and toured with Jenny Lewis all last year.

He's a tremendous talent and the way he plays guitar, well, I actually don't have any concept of how he does what he's able to do with the guitar, it just kind of blows my mind.

There's no limit to what you can learn about music. You could spend the rest of your life studying it and never even come close to absorbing the amount of knowledge that's out there."

That last sentiment, as true as it is, does little to help my understanding regarding why Einziger decided to enroll at Harvard this past year. He, of all people, doesn't need any instruction on how to play music.

"I'm studying things that are very outside of music. The world is a really huge place and there are a lot of areas of knowledge that as a traveling musician you just don't tap into."

When Mike reveals that he's studying physics and evolutionary biology at the Ivy League school, I can't help but to draw the comparison to Albert Einstein. The celebrated physicist with kind eyes and trademark-curly hair was fascinated by Mozart's symphonies.

Sorry, Mike - the hair and symphony were enough to get it in my head, but then you had to go and start talking physics. You left me with no choice.

"I'm a full-time student. I live on campus, I go to classes like everybody else - I'm not, you know, like doing an online thing," he laughs.

"I'm inside of it. I'm literally sitting in all of my classes with all of the other students just trying to keep up with them. It's an epicenter for the most madness I've ever experienced, but in a good way.

People are figuring out the nature of matter and devising plans to feed the world and figuring out how to get nuclear waste out into space and away from the Earth and there are just a lot of incredible things happening. It's really, well, there are no words to describe what it's like there."

Multi-platinum-selling rockstar composes critically-acclaimed symphony before going on to attend Harvard:

Einziger's resume could (rightfully) lead anyone to believe that he's above "average people"-type silly musings, like, say... celebrity sightings. But, when prompted about whom he would like to see in attendance at the Los Angeles show, Einziger proved his humanness when he smiled and let on that he'd "be really stoked if Kobe Bryant showed up at the show. That would be pretty amazing.

We played on the Conan show a few weeks back and he was the guest and to be perfectly honest, I was starstruck - really in awe."

So are we, Mike. So are we.