Echo

There's something about Echo that isn't heard every day: a song that sways between the ethereal and the earthly without falling into either extreme. Mike Einziger's guitar draws lines that seem to float, but Alex Katunich's bass and José Pasillas' drums give it an unexpected weight, as if the song breathes in two distinct tempos. It's not a fast or aggressive track, nor is it slow or melancholic: it's like walking down a long hallway where every step echoes, yet never loses its direction. Brandon Boyd's voice plays with that contrast, sometimes whispering as if talking to himself, and other times rising with an intensity that demands attention. It lasts three minutes and thirty-four seconds, but within that time, layers of sound unfold that don't repeat the same way anywhere else on Morning View.

They recorded this album in a house in Calabasas, California, during a winter that forced them to work with closed windows and maximum heating. They weren't aiming for a perfect record, but one that sounded as if it had been captured in the exact moment it was created, without filters. Echo was born there, amid those gray days and that concentrated energy, as if the title wasn't just a word, but an instruction: repeat every note until the sound became something of its own. When it was released in October 2001, alongside other tracks like Wish You Were Here and Nice to Know You, the album ended up selling over two million copies in the United States, a record for them at the time. Even years later, in 2024, they re-recorded it entirely —this time with Nicole Row on bass— in a version that, ironically, bears the title Morning View XXIII.