Josh Scogin is not someone who likes to sit around and twiddle his thumbs. Between Norma Jean, The Chariot, and now ’68, he’s has been on the road almost his entire adult life.
“The day after I graduated [high school], I went for a full three months out of the summer and I’ve been touring pretty much ever since,” Scogin says. “I can’t imagine what being burnt out really looks like.”
Scogin has been able to sustain such a long career because he never gets tired of band life.
“I like all of it. I like the long drives. I like the weird adventures of sleeping in an airport or showing up jet-lagged and still having to play a show. All that stuff is just… it’s an adventure.”
Scogin would probably tour endlessly if he could, but last year, the COVID pandemic prevented that. As his noisy blues duo ’68 prepared to put out their third LP in March of 2020, all tours were suddenly canceled, and their album release was postponed.
A full year after its original release date, ’68 were finally ready to unleash Give One Take One onto the world in late March 2021, via Cooking Vinyl.
By now, some of the lyrics have a new meaning. For example, on the first track, “The Knife, The Knife, The Knife,” Scogin cries: “We’ve got the vaccine so the disease will not shake me.” This song was metaphorical when Scogin wrote it in 2019, but now it feels more literal.
“That’s the beauty of art,” he says. “You have one meaning, but people take it another way, and then the environment around you can make it shift into another thing. That’s why art is so beautiful.”
Give One Take One is the kind of record that begs to be heard all the way through, from front to back, as it follows a musical arc. In an era where many artists are focused on churning out hit singles, Scogin still prefers to look at the album as a whole.
“I think a generation before me, they grew up on A-sides and B-sides,” he explains. “So, when they thought about vinyl, they thought about A-sides, all their hits, and then B-sides are all the weird tracks. I grew up with full albums. I love vinyl, I have a huge collection of vinyl. But I still think the CD, as an artist, is my favorite way for someone to hear us, even though I know they never do. Because you listen to the whole album as if it’s equal.”
Something fans of Scogin’s work have come to expect throughout all the bands he has performed in is a raw, unpolished sound, sometimes even leaving in some of the mistakes to make the piece of art sound more authentic.
“With every album I’ve ever done, I record standing up,” Scogin says. “I record in big, huge chunks, if not completely from the beginning to the end. And plenty of songs where it kind of needs it, we just record it live. I don’t ever wanna over-polish something to where I feel like it’s no longer human. I embrace the human part of it. I embrace the fact that sometimes I’m gonna bend the note a little bit out of sorts.”
In this regard, the music video for Give One Take One’s second track, “Bad Bite,” is a good analogy for Scogin’s larger body of work. Scogin hand drew the entire video himself on the computer, promising himself that no matter how many mistakes he made, he would never hit Apple + Z.
“I wanted to do a video where all my mistakes were clear,” he explains. “I had this idea of doing an animated video because there’s something very symbolic about it. If you stop it on any frame, there’s probably a mess-up or two.”
Indeed, if you pause the video, many frames have their fair share of errors. But when watching it as a whole, it looks like a truly beautiful piece of art. It’s not perfect, it’s human.
Listen to Give One Take One below, and pick up a copy on vinyl here (be quick, only a few remain!).
Follow ’68: Facebook/Twitter/Instagram
Images courtesy of ’68.
