Brandon Boyd (Incubus) is streaming “Petrichor” off his upcoming album “Echoes And Cocoons.” He said the following about that:
“I come from a place in the world where the sun is almost always shining, and as wonderful as that is, it does carry with it a kind of bias towards happiness and a constant stress around well being. The irony of course is that it’ll drive you crazy trying to be happy all of the time. There is wisdom in sadness and grief, the kind of things we glean from “walking through the valley” can’t be replicated by merely speaking or reading about them, we need to be sad sometimes and enter darkened spaces in order to be more fully realized people.
When it rains in Southern California, it’s such a rare event that it almost feels like we’re being invited to embrace the dark, weep for what is lost, and then emerge new and washed clean of those old feelings that were stuck on us and starting to rot in the punishing sunlight. There’s a lyric in the song that says,
‘You were covered in ashes,
I was covered in dust,
ever opaque in our epithets,
come on it’s just…rain!’I think it speaks for itself. Then there is the pure olfactory bliss of that moment when the rain first hits the ground and the inimitable smell it produces, petrichor, and all that it suggests. Once again, coming from a place that doesn’t see much rain, I’ve come to see those moments when it finally arrives as a performance we so desperately had been waiting for. Hence the chorus and completing lyric in the song,
‘Rain-comes, senses fed.
Petrichor-wash away all your…
Pain-from-heart and head.
Give me more!
Bravo! Encore!
Here it comes again!
And there it goes.
Here it comes again.’”