When someone at Sony sends you an email casually informing you that Joe Scarborough has a band, your instinct is to duck. Is this going to be like when Bruce Willis made that blues album? Or worse, when Scarborough’s fellow politico John McEnroe tried to rock out? “I get it,” Scarborough says. “Everybody’s got a band. John McEnroe’s got a band. It’s a punchline.”
Except — and this is the real twist — Scarborough’s songs are good. Like, actually good. And it turns out, this isn’t some crisis-induced vanity project. “Music’s always been the most important thing in my life,” he says. “Other than my kids. I swear.”
Turns out the former Congressman and current Morning Joe host has been writing music since he was ten. His mom, who got her master’s in music at the University of Kentucky, started him on piano lessons as a kid. “Of course, being a five-year-old boy, the last thing I wanted to do was sit in a class full of girls and play piano.” Naturally, he quit. Naturally, he started sneaking back to the keys not long after.
Through law school, through Congress, and even while hosting one of the most influential political shows on television, Scarborough stayed in bands. “The only time I didn’t have a band was when I started TV,” he says, “and even then, I was still recording.” By his own count, he’s written more than 400 songs. “I finally just said, enough. This is what I love the most. I’m going to do it.”
Cue the self-inflicted avalanche: a plan to release an EP every month. “The first month they may go, ‘Hey, Joe Scarborough’s band doesn’t completely suck.’ Second month: ‘Well, those are eight songs that aren’t the worst I’ve heard.’ And then maybe after a year, someone’s like, ‘Wait… I actually like a few of these.’ It’s musical attrition.”
And sure, he’s fully aware of the skepticism — he counts on it. That’s why the music itself does all the talking. Each song skips genres with the agility of a caffeine-high teenager on TikTok. There’s the brooding ’80s electropop of “Mystified” (think Psychedelic Furs meets M83) right next to the brassy charm of “Let’s Fall in Love” and the Weezer-meets-Who punch of “Monkey House.” “I guess I’m a millennial,” he jokes. “Because there’s not a genre I don’t want to try.”
You can partially thank Pro Tools. “I’ve got a studio in my house now,” he says. “I can bring in horns, distort guitars, tighten up the room sound, or blow it wide open. That freedom didn’t exist 20 years ago — not unless you had a major label budget. Now you can get weird for cheap.”
He brings up When Will You Go, a song written over the Fourth of July weekend, just days after the President of the United States tweeted a personal attack on Scarborough and his now-wife Mika Brzezinski. “Yeah, that one kind of wrote itself,” he says dryly. “We were already booked in the studio that weekend, so… I went with it.”
Don’t expect a protest album, though. “I got into music because it’s a break from politics,” he says. “But sometimes they collide.” The next EP, he admits, leans more political. But he tries not to bludgeon. “You don’t want to get hit over the head with it,” he says. “Not unless you deserve it.”
Even his gear nerd side comes out — lighting up when talking about discovering an old Mitchell Pro 100 amp that Rivers Cuomo used on The Blue Album. “I couldn’t get the right distortion I wanted,” he says, “and then I found this thing. Suddenly it wasn’t Best Friend’s Girl, it was Island in the Sun. Which was fine. I’ll take either.”
The new EP also features “Party Line,” inspired by — surprise — Psychedelic Furs. And “Catch Me If You Can,” a “straightforward indie rock” track that closes out the release. Scarborough acknowledges there’s still plenty of stylistic ping-pong, but he’s trying to shape each EP with a little more cohesion. Not too much, though. That would be boring.
This whole project, if you hadn’t caught on yet, is as much about defiance as it is about music. “I sat down with Mika a couple years ago and said, ‘I’m gonna get killed. They’re gonna slaughter me for this.’ And she said, ‘Yes. But you have to do it anyway.’”
That’s the energy behind every song. Not self-pity, not defensiveness. Just the willful, semi-crazy persistence of a guy who’s finally doing the thing he always wanted — and doing it like a man who knows the wave is gonna knock him down, but paddles out anyway.
“And the thing is,” he adds, “I’ll be back next month. With four more.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the "Mystified" video.
