’68 mainman Josh Scogin breaks down his new album Give One Take One in song order.
“One of my top favourite things to do is to create art,” Josh Scogin tells Kerrang!, before following it with, “My all-time least favourite thing is to define it.” Luckily, the ’68 leader is more than happy to chat to us about each of the 10 songs on new album Give One Take One.
Taking in topics such as suicide, the fluidity of the English language and the importance of a blank page, Josh and drummer Nikko Yamada cram a lot into their third LP, with the pair’s noisy collision of punk, blues, garage rock and indie calling to mind the likes of Every Time I Die and Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes, while retaining something that is oh so personal to both men involved. Which is no surprise when you hear of Josh’s woodland lyric-writing techniques below.
“Let me attempt to thread that fine line and find a happy middle ground where I can give a bit of insight and maintain my sanity," he offers, before taking us deep into Give One Take One. One song at a time…
“This was actually the very last song I wrote for the album. We were originally scheduled to record in January of 2019, and I had a completely different vibe of a song for track one. It would have set everything up much differently and shaded the entire album in a different hue. I can’t go into the details of the alternate universes behind it because it will almost certainly see the light of day on a later album.
“While we were on tour overseas I got a call that the recording was going to be postponed until the summer of 2019. Quite literally the day I returned home from that tour, the song – that you now hear as track one – just hit me. It wrote itself, I was just along for the ride. I was merely a vessel that was at the right place, at the right time, and the song just decided to reveal itself through me. That feeling was so paramount, in fact, that I needed to just stay out of the way and let the magic happen. I needed to just ‘step aside and let the audience sing along’.”
“This might have been the first song I wrote for the album – or at least that opening riff is. Soon after our previous album [2017's Two Parts Viper] was released, I was on tour overseas and this riff came to me while I was soundchecking my guitar. Since I didn’t have any way of recording it at the time, I just played it over and over and over. If you play a riff enough times, a path will always appear. So when it was time to do the proper soundcheck – all instruments, drums vocals and everything at once – I just told Nikko to make up something to this new riff. We continued to play this song – it was hardly a song, more like one riff after another that we were winging – as our soundcheck, and by the end of the tour I had it locked down in my memory.”
“James Brown once said, 'The one thing that can
solve most of our problems is dancing.’ I’d never written a song you could
boogie to, so I challenged myself to attempt one. Here is the
result; I will let the listener decide if I succeeded or not. Regardless,
it is one of the most difficult songs for me to play guitar and sing at the
same time, so I love it.”
“I was writing a song that ended up not finding a home on this album when I accidentally played the opening four notes you hear on track four. I immediately fell in love and was swept away, I fully abandoned the song I was working on and started down this path. Musically it all came to me very quickly, but the lyrics kept me up at night. I was still writing lyrics while in the studio recording the song; nothing I wrote seemed to be equal to the music. At some point in the studio I thought about how books often read like, ‘He said…’ and, ‘I said…’ and so on. For some reason that clicked with me and felt right for the music. I had about 70 per cent of the lyrics written when I stepped up to the microphone to record my vocals – I assumed the rest would come to me in the time of need. Thankfully I was correct.”
“This entire song was written with one challenge that I set for myself, which is equally silly and yet strong enough to motivate someone like me to attempt. Unfortunately I can’t explain that challenge because it involves the beat and I don’t speak the language of a trained musician. So, someday when you see me in real life you can ask me about it and I will do my best imitation of drum hits with my voice and I can explain it to you. For now, I will just tell you about how we did not record bass for this track, we used a Moog synthesiser instead and tried to just make it sound as fat as possible.”
“Let’s see if I can oversimplify this enough to not bore everyone to death. When writing a full album, at first you are just taking stabs into the dark. You sling stuff up against the wall and you see if it sticks or not. Eventually, something will always stick. Somewhere along the way, you look back and see the songs that you have created and at some point, inevitably, you start to see the colour of the album – the shape of what’s to come. I hate puzzles, but let me see if I can use a puzzle metaphor to make this more clear. At first you are given the corner and edge pieces to a puzzle, you don’t yet know the picture you are trying to create, but you place those pieces where they belong anyway. Then you are given more pieces and at some point – once you have shown that you are willing to put in the work, once you have proved yourself to the muse – she will give you the top of the box, so that you can see what the picture is that you are striving towards. This song, The Silence, The Silence, The Silence was ‘The Wind’ granting me access to see the box-top picture.
“It is a long and complicated journey that would need a book or two to give it the accuracy it deserves, but I’ll just say this: The song was given its title because at one point in its life, it was going to be an instrumental. Something I have never done before. As cliché as it sounds to say, ‘I was starring at a blank page,’ I quite literally was. And at that moment I started thinking, ‘Who am I to assume I can write something that is better than the purity of a beautiful blank page?’ I started seeing worth in the blankness. So I was going to leave it blank. Maybe the silence can say far more than what I am able to write down? After all, silence can speak volumes.
“I don’t believe in writer’s block, but that is a topic for another day. When I do feel underwhelmed with my work, however, I have a system in place has never failed yet. I call the whole system A Shotgun Message because I just start writing anything and everything that pops into my head – a blind faith in my stream of consciousness. The first thing I do is walk into the woods with nothing but three pens and my notebook. If I feel like this will be relatively quick, I usually start a fire. Otherwise, I might just live out in the woods for a day or so if that’s what is needed from me. The point is, nature and I hang out. We mix. We mingle. I breathe and walk and if it is hot enough I will jump in the pond or a river. Nothing is off limits. Eventually when the time is right, I sit down with my pens and paper and I just begin. I write words, I write sentences, I draw, I have even been known to just write single letters, standing alone all by themselves. During this particular Shotgun Message I had scribbled the line, ‘Let’s just get straight to the point, a blank page will make you bleed, but I am not allowed to talk about it.’ At that time I was looking at a blank page as the enemy. An enemy that I needed to remedy or fix.
“In the studio, the song remained an instrumental for quite a while. Then, without warning, I felt an overwhelming urgency to put this line into the song. I still don’t know if I was betraying the moment of peace that I had with the blank page, or if I was merely given permission because of my faithfulness up until then. I might never know, but I liked the idea of blatantly singing about something that I have just claimed as something I am not allowed to sing about. It gave the song and the rest of the album a sense of freedom and reckless abandon. It fully shaped the entire album, at least in my mind.”
“This song I can’t really get into. It is too personal; it means too much to me. I will just say that we recorded three entirely different drum tracks and in the end just decided to use them all. So while you listen to this song, at certain points all three are playing at the same time. Kudos to [producer] Nick Raskulinecz for figuring out how to mix all of that in a coherent way. He is a champion.”
“I had started writing lyrics to this song, and before I got too far along I just wrote, ‘etc etc’ which was a lazy way of basically saying, ‘Just keep on writing this type of stuff until the song is done.’ Well after wrapping up a few other songs, I came back to this one, and for some reason those three letters just jumped out at me. ETC, which is obviously short for ‘et cetera’, became the pivotal point for this entire song. I started studying other words that we use in the English language that are clearly not English. I wrote down as many as I could think of and forced as many as I could into the song. It became a fun little challenge for me, like how many of these types of words could I use? Words like, ‘bona fide’, ‘cliché’ and ‘accoutrements’.
“Suicide is a complex topic, to say the least. One of the biggest tragedies of the topic is that, ‘It is fake, until it is true.’ In other words, ‘They just want the attention’ is what people tend to say, until the day that it becomes a reality, until the day it becomes too late. Having both family and friends that decided this was the best path for them to take, it weighs heavy on my chest. So I wrote this song.”
“There is no turning back. Once this album drops, we can stand on top of a hill and we can look with our eyes and we will see our former selves, but we will never be able to return. Such is life and everything within it. New house, new habits.”
Give One Take One is out now via Cooking Vinyl
