JOSEY SCOTT
SALIVA
A lot of vocalist’s make the mistake of drifting into only one category, album after album, repeating the same vocal formula, destined never to grow, or becoming stagnant and vocally weaker after a few albums and a few years of touring. Josey has continued to progress with each new release since Saliva’s 1996 self titled debut up through their last release Back Into Your System. With each new release, the songwriting has matured and grown. Harmonies have enhanced, and Josey’s voice has grown in strength, range, and individuality.
Saliva’s newest release, Survival Of The Sickest, is no exception. The leaps and bounds in growth are very evident on all tracks. This album is an album for vocalists. A vocal event if you will. Josey can produce the throaty hard-core edge vocals popular in today’s music. Just listen to songs on Back Into Your System, like, Raise Up or Superstar. He can sing just as hard as singers from bands such as GodSmack and Disturbed, while maintaining a beautiful resonant quality, most noticeable on songs like Always and Rest In Pieces.
Saliva’s newest single, coincidentally the title track, “Survival of the Sickest”, is an homage to good old fashioned ass-kickin rock-n-roll, comparable to early AC/DC. They are bringing the fun back to rock-n-roll. Finally, rock singers are coming back! Josey proves that he is a seasoned professional and rock star veteran. So let’s hear what this veteran has to say:
Jaime: How old are you?
Josey: I actually just turned none of yo damn business. I just kidding, I’m 32.
Jaime: How long have you been singing?
Josey: Since I was 8 or 9.
Jaime: Have you had any major influences?
Josey: My dad.
Jaime: A lot of singers I hear remind me of someone else. Like I’ll say, “you remind me of Robert Plant.” I don’t hear any similarities in your voice. Your voice is really distinct.
Josey: Oh thank you. My dad was a big influence of mine when I was a kid. He was a country gospel artist. We used to sing old Merle Haggard and George Jones songs. I hated it as a kid but I respected him for it when I got older because that was what set the pace and helped me learn my way around my voice, and I’m still learning. But I definitely learned my way around from singing old country songs. I got a lot of my harmonies from country, gospel and bluegrass music.
Jaime: Do you remember when you first realized you could sing?
Josey: When I first realized I could sing, I used to call this radio station everyday and request Journey. I used to always request “Who’s Crying Now”. This DJ who knew who I was, was like, “Oh GOD, all right, we’ll play it.” I would set my little Wal-Mart transistor radio across the room, and then take my little tape recorder and push record. Then I’d turn the music up and sing into the tape. I was making a makeshift Karaoke machine, basically, and I’d sing, “One love feeds the fire…” My parents broke in the room and said, “You can sing! We know it now.” Then they had me in every damn talent show, and contest. Like I said, I hated them for it then, but I respected them for it when I got older because they taught me to sing at such a young age.
Jaime: One thing I’ve noticed, of course you’ve all ready kind of explained, is, you’re very raw, so I was wondering if you’ve had any training? I was assuming that you mostly sang naturally.
Josey: Just my dad. As far as melodic singing goes, and falsetto…
Jaime: I don’t really hear any falsetto in your voice.
Josey: I don’t really use it a lot. I did on Back Into Your System. I used it a little bit on…
Jaime: Like on Always…
Josey: Well no, mainly on Rest In Pieces. When it breaks down to (sings in falsetto) “when you find it in your heart to make this go away and let me rest in pieces”. Then we have another song on this new album called Bait and Switch that goes (sings) “what in the hell am I fighting for”, then it goes, “what in the hell am I trying (falsetto) to prove”. So there’s little falsetto things thrown in here and there. I like how guys, like the guy from Coldplay incorporate falsetto, because…
Jaime: It’s a tool…
Josey: Yeah, it’s a tool…
Jaime A lot a people want to put it down…
Josey: Look at the Bee Gee’s for heaven’s sake. They made a career out of it.
Jaime: What were some of the earlier bands you were in before Saliva?
Josey: I was in a band called Blackbone, and that was the only other band I was ever in.
Jaime: Was it hard rock like this?
Josey: Yes, it was hard rock like this. A lot of melodic singing mixed with some rough stuff.
Jaime: Not to jump around, but I love your harmonies. Do you guys do them live? Please tell me you do.
Josey: Yeah, yeah, we do a lot of them live. We don’t do the layering live. I got all that layering from Freddy Mercury of Queen.
Jaime: I understand that, but I love harmonies. I asked Brent Smith of Shinedown about live harmonies. They don’t do them live. They are an incredible live band, but they would sound even better with harmonies. And you like Journey, so you know where I’m coming from.
Josey: If you see the show tonight you’ll hear a lot of them. I love harmonies. Harmonies sell records. Harmonies make a great song.
Jaime: Back Into Your System is a great album. I don’t understand why you didn’t release more singles like Superstar2? Or how about Raise Up? What a great rock rap song. With the popularity of Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock, that song would have been big, not to mention that you blow them away….
Josey: Thank you…
Jaime: And you’re so much harder like Godsmack or Disturbed. Trust me, I love the songs that are out, but there were so many more harder potential hits on that record that I just don’t understand why more singles weren’t released?
Josey: I absolutely agree with you…
Jaime: Hopefully this time around…
Josey: But you can shoot yourself in the head about it, or… you know…just go on…But this album, Survival of the Sickest, coming out August 17th, is another album chocked full of hits. The reason that is, I think, is that we give every song it’s individual support. They are like our children. We treat each one like our 1st single. I think if you do that, then you’ll end up with a great record.
Jaime: Have you had any trouble with your voice?
Josey: I haven’t, man, I’ve been lucky. I had to quit doing cocaine. I think when you first get famous and get a little money, you’re like, “Oh my God, girls, drugs, money”. And I’ve never had that. All five of us grew up poor. Still, we’ll go to like the Palm restaurant in Beverly Hills with the record company and order lobster. Chris, Paul, and I will order two. Even though we are financially comfortable now, we still have that mentality of, “ Man I better get extra, because I might not be able to eat later.” What I’m saying is we still have that poorness ingrained in us. But that is part of our integrity; appreciating where we came from.
Jaime: Do you still do cocaine at all?
Josey: No, not at all
Jaime: Good, because cocaine numbs the throat. You’ll end up damaging your voice trying to sing when your throat is numb. You could blow your throat out and not realize it at the time. Another thing you don’t want to do if you have vocal trouble is take cortisone shots. They are terrible. They’re as bad as cocaine.
Josey: Yeah I’ve gotten a couple of those. I’ve seen singers out there that I won’t name, abuse it. I’ve only done it twice. The only times I’ve done it was an emergency situation. One was an opening night of a Cingular wireless tour that we did. There was a lot of money on the line. I woke up with a cold in my throat. Not a cold in my face or in my chest, but in my voice! I was like (whispering),”I can’t talk, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I went to the doctor, and he gave me two shots, and I was singing before I left the office. It’s a quick fix, but like you said, it’s terrible.
Jaime: You could take licorice root. It’s nature’s cortisone. It will reduce the swelling of the vocal cords. Zinc is good too. Try some slippery elm root to soothe the throat.
Jaime: You’ve got that real raspy sound on a lot of songs. Do you manipulate your voice to sound like that?
Josey: I keep it right in the bottom of my throat and breathe through my diaphragm, so that my diaphragm takes the grunt of it. Kurt Cobain taught me about it before he died. I read something that he said about learning how to scream. You have to learn how to scream.
Jaime: Do you tighten your stomach a lot to do this? Because over tightening the stomach will cause you to strain your voice.
Josey: Yeah, I don’t do it a lot. I’ll set and watch TV a practice breathing into my stomach instead of my chest. That way on stage I can grab with my stomach instead of my upper chest. That’s what saves my voice. I also pull the scream with my throat but I don’t sing it from my throat.
Jaime: Do you pull it down?
Josey: Yeah, I just change the shape of my throat as the scream is coming out.
Jaime: What I like about your throaty sound is, you are working the whole mid area, right around your break point. You are right there, and it is so strong. A lot of singers either scream really high pitched or mainly real low pitched. I tell you what is weird. I can do Priest’s Painkiller, but when I sang Always in a cover band, it was tougher for me to sing it throaty than Painkiller. I don’t know why. I’ve been singing for years. Journey was easier for me. Something about it?
Josey: It’s right in that middle weird place that’s hard to do. I think for me it’s all about breathing. It was always hard for me to sing my songs at first because you write them in the studio, and you sing them in the studio, but you haven’t ever sang them live. You don’t know where to take the breath, and you don’t have the breath signature of the song. After we’ve been on the road for 2-3 weeks, I get the breath signatures down, and I know exactly where to breathe.
Jaime: Breathing is a main essential of singing.
Josey: Before I forget, I want you to make sure you put this in the interview. The smartest thing a man ever told me, he’s Madonna and Janet Jackson’s vocal coach by the way, was this. I was having trouble lifting notes in the studio while recording Back Into Your System. I quit drinking and doing drugs, so my voice got so healthy, that I had to relearn how to maneuver my voice a little bit. After I got done singing with him he said, “You just don’t know what you really can do. You have an amazing high voice and you can reach a lot more than what you think.” I think the way we feel about our voice keeps us from hitting stuff we probably could hit if we had the right coaching or training.
Jaime: it’s a mental mind game.
Josey: Oh yeah, it’s a big mental thing. But the smartest thing he ever told me and I’d love to share this with other people is, ”You are straining when you go to hit a high note. Like on Always when I sing “Always, Always, I just can’t….live…..” He said that it sounds like I was straining when I reached for that high note. He said, “don’t strain trying to reach for that note, lift the note before it, and then you are all ready there. So I lift the words “I just can’t” before I get to “live”. It’s just like lifting a heavy box to set it on a shelf. Instead of lifting the top and nearly dropping it, lift both ends, and then shove it in.
Jaime: That’s great. All notes should be easy to reach. It’s all about resonance.
Josey: Do you ever do lip bubbles?
Jaime: Oh yeah, all the time. It’s part of my Vocal Stress Release warm up program. That brings me to my next question. Do you do any kind of warm up?
Josey: : I don’t, I know I should.
Jaime: You’ve got to check out my book Raise Your Voice. I’ve got all kinds of warm ups. I do lip bubbles, I gargle water, and I do this thing where I slide real high and low like a siren. Listen. “AAAAAAAAA…” I don’t strain when I do that either and it’s all full voice.
Josey: So you’re a Tenor, huh?
Jaime: I can hit Soprano notes in full voice. I don’t think I’m a Tenor. When I was in college, I was told I was a bass because I can sing really low, and I always cracked pretty low, until I learned how to sing. I used to bug people like Mark Slaughter and Jim Gillette about how to sing really high.
Josey: Mark Slaughter has more octaves than anyone in the world they say.
Jaime: Not true. Jim Gillette has over 6 octaves.
Josey: They say Mariah has 8.
Jaime: I’ve heard Jim hit notes higher than Mariah. He can go a full octave above Soprano C. I can hit a Soprano C#. In whistle notes I can go up to an A above that, but it’s hard to do. But nobody really wants to hear that anymore. But if you can sing higher, anything that is lower will become easier.
Jaime: What do you think makes you such a good singer?
Josey: I think the reason I’m such a good singer, or people say I’m a good singer is because I just love to sing. Every time I’m on stage and I sing Always or Superstar, I’m taken back to that time and place when I wrote that song. Music is like the sound track to your life. When I sing them, I really feel what I felt when I wrote that song. It’s not acting, it’s not something I play on stage. It’s really me. It took me long time to make peace with the two people that I am. Josey and Joseph. The man I am at home, the husband, son, father, and brother I am, and this rock star I am. But then I felt so much more peaceful when I figured out that they were both just me. They aren’t a person I play on stage or a person I act like I am, they are a person that I am.
Jaime: Singing is your job, and you are lucky enough that your job is your passion.
Josey: And now I am so much happier now. I can be a good husband, father, son, brother, band member, and stage performer, and they are all me, and I’m happy with all of them.
Jaime: Speaking of being a father, is that your son talking on the beginning of Superstar2?
Josey: Yeah, he called me up in the studio. That was a real phone call.
Jaime: How did you get the Spiderman gig?
Josey: I was on tour with Nickelback and we talked about doing a song together. The Spiderman opportunity came along and Chad wasn’t interested. I was like, “dude, this is crazy. This is Spiderman.” He was like, “It’s gonna be cheesy”. I said, “This is going to be the fucking bomb. Any American comic book hero as iconic as Spiderman is going to be gigantic at the box office. We’d be fools not to write a song for this”. So I flew up to Toronto. We tinkered around and came across the idea for Hero. It was 5 minutes and the song was flowing like boom, boom, boom.
Jaime: You did a song for Daredevil too?
Josey: Yeah, I did one called Bleed For Me for Daredevil. I wrote a new song for Tom Cruise’s new movie, Mission Impossible 3, called Save the Day. I love doing movie soundtracks because it’s another way to challenge yourself creatively, by getting into the script of the movie for that character you’re writing the song about. I’m also starting my acting career this year too. I’m doing a film called Hustle and Flow with John Singleton who did Boys in the Hood. I’m filming that in July, Red West is my acting coach….
Jaime: How are you going to find time to tour and act?
Josey: Airplanes! Ha-ha.
Jaime: You’ll be busy, especially with a new album coming out. What’s the 1st single?
Josey: Title track, Survival of the Sickest. I also did a duet called Razor’s Edge, which might be the 2nd single, with Brad from 3 Doors Down. It’s a vocal event on this record, as far as having good vocal records around. If you’re a vocalist, you’ll appreciate it.
Jaime: As far as good vocalists are concerned, I’ve been depressed for a long time.
Josey: Oh yeah, I can imagine.
Jaime: Then bands like Saliva came out. Other bands like RA, Shinedown,and Evanescence followed. There’s also a new band called Alter Bridge that I predict will do really well. It’s Creed minus Scott Stapp. Let me tell you, the guy can sing! Great singers are definitely coming back.
Josey: Singers are coming back! Thank GOD! Pearl Jam and several other bands came out and they took the sex and fun away from rock and roll. Actually, the sexuality went where? It went to country music and hip-hop. Now DMX and Garth Brooks have pyrotechnics at their shows, but I think that curve is coming back around with a new twist and a new face on it. I think that Survival of the Sickest is our record to turn this shit around, and bring the sex back to rock and roll. Bring that escape, and that parking lot party, and that energy we used to be baptized in back to rock and roll. What goes around comes around.
Jaime: I hope so, because I can’t take much more. Ha-ha. I know plenty of kids probably ask you this but if I came up to you and said I want to be a singer, what can you do to help me? I’m just starting to sing now, what do I got to do?
Josey: I would say practice everyday. Practice, practice, practice!!! I used to sing for 4-5 hours a day. I would get a good coach. Get that guy in New York that does Madonna, Janet Jackson, Sebastian Bach, and does me. I think his name is Don Thompson.
Jaime: That’s Tony Harnell’s coach. Do you remember TNT?
Josey: Oh yeah. I loved 10,000 Lovers. Wasn’t Tony Harnell’s father an opera singer?
Jaime: : His mother was.
Josey: I would tell kids to practice, practice, practice, and sharpen their sword so that it’s lethal, and never give up. You can’t give up. No matter how much you starve, no matter how much you ride around in a van with a torn up trailer and change drive shafts in every other town, and you’ve got oil leaking out on the ground, and you’re eating hot dogs out of a cooler, you cannot give up. You can’t give up. My mother told me one time that she couldn’t believe that I had weathered the rejection that I’ve seen in my life, because I’ve been turned down by every record label twice.
Jaime: Thanks for a great interview Josey.
Josey: No problem, but there is one more thing I’d like to add to this interview. I learned how to sing my vowels by listening to Ozzy. Like when he sings, “the light in the window is a crack in the sky”. All of his A, E, I, O, U’s are really over pronounced. I think that pronunciation is a really important part of great singing.
Jaime: I notice on a lot of your songs that when you sing higher on words like “me” you pronounce them “may”, which is actually correct technique. Is that natural or did you learn that from someone?
Josey: That’s just the way I sing. I think that’s part of what helps to distinguish me from other singers. When you hear a Saliva song you know it’s us.
Jaime: One more thing, you are a smoker, which isn’t good for a singer, and your band wants you to quit. Ha-ha
Josey: Yes, I am a smoker, and my band wants me to quit. Now you’ve made me want a cigarette. Ha-ha
To learn more about Josey Scott and his band Saliva, go to http://www.saliva.com
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