According to Incubus lead vocalist, Brandon Boyd: "Promises, Promises, is a story about a girl and a guy — go figure — and the girl has built up so much armor around herself with the things that she knows how to do...And so, I used these metaphors in the song of, like, magic, like she's an illusionist, so she creates these illusions around her...And she's gotten so good at it that she meets somebody who potentially could be someone that could help her break through those illusions and those walls, she can't really recognize that he could be the real thing, or they could be the real thing, so she's asking him for one thing: 'Don't make me any promises."[2]
