Speaking to LiveDaily by phone earlier this month from Vancouver, British Columbia--where Incubus [ tickets ] was about to start its current North American tour--guitarist Mike Einziger said he couldn't wait to feel the comfort of being on stage again.

"We're going to be playing new material and old material," he said. "For me, I'll be just getting back into what really actually feels like home to me, which is being on tour and playing concerts."

Incubus is on its first proper tour in two years, this time in support of its new album, "Light Grenades," which debuted at No. 1 on The Billboard 200 chart.

The album was produced by Brendan O'Brien, who worked on a slew of Einziger's favorite albums, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Blood Sugar Sex Magik."

"Just sonically, that was one of my favorite albums," Einziger said. "That was one of the albums that inspired us to start a band. [O'Brien] played keyboards, and was definitely a part of that record."

The producer's credits also include Pearl Jam's "Vs.," Rage Against the Machine's "Evil Empire" and Stone Tempe Pilots' "Tiny Music ... Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop."

O'Brien, who also produced Incubus' "A Crow Left of the Murder," is one of the few producers or music-industry insiders to whom the band has opened up, Einziger said.

"Rather than telling us what he thinks needs to happen, a lot of times he'll just show us what his opinion is musically, which is so great," Einziger said. "He's an incredible musician. He just acts like a band member. We don't agree all the time. Sometimes he'll make suggestions that a lot of us don't agree with. Other times, he'll make suggestions that are very functional in the song."

O'Brien oversaw a portion of the band's songwriting. Generally, however, the songwriting process begins with one of Einziger's musical ideas, and then makes its way through the rest of the band--singer Brandon Boyd, drummer Jose Pasillas, turntablist/keyboardist Chris Kilmore and bassist Ben Kenney.

"If it's something I get excited about, I'll give it to everyone else in the band," Einziger said. "I'll give them to Brandon, give them to Jose and let everybody just kind of hear everything. If Brandon responds really quickly to it, that's when we know we have the beginning of the song, the basic pieces of a song. I'd say half the time Brandon doesn't respond to things that I give him. So I keep writing. It's a process. Once Brandon's kind of responded to it and gotten excited or inspired, we get in the room together and write a song together."

Einziger admitted that he struggled to write music for "Light Grenades."

"I was taking a longer period of time than I ever had to come up with the basic ideas to give out to the other guys," he said. "It's kind of my fault that [the album] took a little bit longer. I don't feel I have control over when I'm going to be able to write something that I feel excited about.

"Every once in awhile, you sit down and something cool happens. Who knows why or how, but it just does. Sometimes it happens more frequently and less frequently. It felt like, during that period of time, it was less frequent than it maybe had been in the past, which was fine. We didn't have any time constraints. I didn't feel any pressure that anything needed to be done at this particular time. Even in the context of speaking in general, we still made this record much more quickly than most bands make their records, anyway. We've just always worked really, really, really quickly. Our last record we made in two-and-a-half weeks."