Atlanta Rockers ’68 Share Track-by-Track of Venomous New Album ‘Two Parts Viper’ [Exclusive]

Atlanta, GA’s heavy rock duo ’68 issued their latest offering of gritty punk-infused rock, Two Parts Viper, on June 2nd, 2017, via Good Fight Music / eOne Entertainment (be sure to grab your own copy RIGHT HERE) and to celebrate the release – and push it to even more new fans – we linked up with Josh Scogin to get this exclusive track-by-track.

01: “Eventually We All Win”
– This is the first song on our album. I wrote it while drinking coffee one morning. I was at my computer working on something and I started tapping my ring on my coffee mug. I really liked how it sounded and this melody started coming into my head so I opened up Pro Tools and recorded the idea. The noise you hear on our album is actually me still hitting a coffee mug with my ring. Nothing else sounded right so we just rerecorded that. The working title of this song was “Coffee Forever”.

02: “Whether Terrified or Unafraid”
– I wrote the lyrics to this song while I thought I was dying, all alone in a parking lot in Atlanta, GA. I know this begs many questions but unfortunately it isn’t something I’m very comfortable speaking about yet….but I will say that I had written “I could have been anyone from anywhere but I chose to be me from right here” because I figured if I did die, I wanted people to find that, next to my body, as my last statement.

03: “Without Any Words (Only Crying and Laughter)”
– One day on tour, in the middle of a set (I think in Europe) I kicked into this song (an early version of it) because I had just written it and I love it so much. Michael, my drummer, had only heard the song once (keeping in mind it was only a demo) earlier that day and yet we still pulled it off pretty well.

04: “This Life is Old, New, Borrowed and Blue”
– There is a part in the beginning of this song that sort of connects the intro to the first verse, and I made it up on the spot. I knew I needed something there because it didn’t sound good to just have the two parts side by side, but I went in to record scratch guitar track with no previous ideas. As I was recording I just invented the part you hear on the album impromptu style and it was funny enough we kept it. We also had to keep the “scratch” guitar for that part since I could not really duplicate it again without a whole lot of hubbub.

05: “No Montage”
– I have nothing really interesting to say about this song. I love it a lot but no stories come to mind, so I’ll tell you about the title. Obviously, all the titles of this album run together like a loose sentence. The title “No Montage”, refers to how, life has, unapologetically, no montages. Hollywood movies have ruined good work ethic with montages. I think people see these enough and start to actually expect their complex problems to get sorted out in one 3-minute pop song. Real life, however, takes real work if you want something done right. In other words, If you are actually Rocky Balboa and you actually in real life need to defeat Ivan Drago, then you’ll need to train for hours every day for months and months…..no cool songs playing in the background and no triumphant ending to your work out every single day.

06: “No Apologies”
– This was the last song I wrote for the album. The part where I’m just talking was originally about 10 times longer because I was feeling pretty confident and I had been listening to Arlo Guthrie a lot. It was only in the eleventh hour that I stepped back and was like, “What am I doing? This is insane!” So I cut it down to the 4 or 5 chunks you hear now. It was definitely for the better to shorten it. I was loosing my mind for a few day at the end of recording but I snapped out of it just in time to fix this song thankfully.

07: “The Workers Are Few”
– This song has the most realistic guitar solo I have ever recorded. Real guitarists might still think it sounds hilarious but I don’t usually like typical sound guitar solos. Usually, I just make noise or feedback or something for a verse and call it a guitar solo, this song I actually played real notes and such….sort of.

Check out the entire new album Two Parts Viper

08: “Life Has Its Design”
– There are no guitars in this song. It was a challenge I set for myself to see if I could do it and it still feel like ’68. Most of the songs I write are centered around guitar riffs. So I wanted to do something different (at least for me) I think it came out really fun.

09: “Death is a Lottery”
– This song’s working title was “Sigourney’s Weaver” for about 40 seconds. Once I had written the letters SIG though I panicked because I had no idea how to spell her name (I should probably mention all my notes and lyrics and short story ideas and everything is still written in a journal notebook thing. Not on my computer or phone so I don’t have spell check or anything….I mean, I can obviously still look stuff up but usually I’m trying so hard to keep up with my brain I never look stuff up in the moment like that)…..Anyway…..having the letters S and I and G already committed on the paper and having no idea how to spell her name, I just named the song SIGNATURES. So the working title for this song ….and what Michael and I still call it is Signatures.

10: “What More Can I Say”
– I actually wrote this song during the last album. It never made the album though because I wrote it super late in the recording process, we were nearly done. Also, I never felt like it had a good home on that record ….so I made the decision to just leave it alone. Once I started thinking about writing for this album, I remembered the song and started recording little demo versions of it. Some reason it still never seemed like it has a home on this album either, so it almost didn’t make it again but while in the studio a couple changes were made to it and now I love it.