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When Josh Lane was young, his parents gave him a karaoke machine as a reward for a good report card. Not long before that, he got a keyboard for Christmas. The start of any musical journey can be difficult to pinpoint, but Lane credits those two gifts as instrumental in fostering his early passion. Now, he’s the singer of rising band Thee Sacred Souls. Seems like the gifts did the trick.
“I liked music early on. When I was seven or eight, I was writing little songs from my mom. They were cheesy, obviously,” he tells me with his infectious brand of earnestness. Lane “put the music on the back burner” during adolescence, focusing on playing football and normal high school-kid stuff. “But when I graduated, I realized music is going to be a part of my life.”
Below, he and I discuss falling in love with making music; Thee Sacred Souls’ new album, Got a Story to Tell, and the process in making it; his relationship with clothing, style, and Blackness; why he doesn’t care about wearing brands; and plenty more.
Fit One
How did your music career start and what’s the journey been like?
When I was graduated, I’d sit in the back seat of my car with my acoustic to write songs at a park. I went to community college and took art for the first semester, and I switched to music because I realized that I was never going to be a successful visual artist, but I could always love it and fall back as a hobby. Now all the arts that I like inform my life and inform my art—which is music—in the little world that I try to put together with it. Ended up transferring to a Christian college and finished up there for music. When I was 25, I started to fall away from that faith. At 26, I fully kind of separated myself. Then 27, I moved to San Diego chasing a girl and music dreams.
Is this when Thee Sacred Souls come about?
I met Alex and Sal because I met Alex through Instagram, and we were DM’ing each other. We liked each other’s music. He invited me to jam. I didn’t know that a month before that he had met Sal and they started jamming. They wanted to make the kind of soul that they grew up on. So, I went over to his garage and jammed. I showed some songs I was working on. I was trying to do something like dream-pop. It sounded soulful because I’m a Black man, but I wasn’t trying to make soul. I was into Beach House and Tame Impala and Melody’s Echo Chamber. I was trying to do something like my version of that. I thought he would play drums and help me produce it, but for him, he thought, “This guy can sing in this group.”
Fit Two
You started to touch on it, but what made you fall in love with music?
I realized the world you can create with music. Sitting with a keyboard and writing melodies and learning that you can stack other melodies on top with tracks, that’s when I fell in love—the idea that out of my mind and out of this instrument and sonic device, I could create a musical world. I think it drew me closer to the idea subconsciously that there’s a whole world inside of each one of us that either lays dormant until you die or wakes up as you experience things and people. That’s why the whole idea of a muse is cool to me. Like, visual artists who have a muse, that person woke up something dormant in them that they wanted to extract and put out. I get it now. I see the vibes.
What was different about this new album, Got a Story to Tell, or the process in making it in comparison to the first one?
One of the key elements that was different was that we were on tour when we got the news that we should probably be working on a second record. It added a pressure, and maybe a stress that was new. Alex Garcia, the drummer, also plays guitar, and he does a lot of the instrumental writing. He actually works really well under that pressure. He can sit in a green room and just play guitar until an idea comes out and that’s therapeutic for him. We’re just a little different how we approach writing. I need time to live life off the road. It was really stressful for me. The first album felt brand new, like a new relationship. This one, we felt a little more mature in the industry. This is an art form and it is beautiful, but it’s also a career and a workplace.
Fit Three
What are three non-negotiable albums you think everyone should listen to?
Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, Eugene McDaniels’s Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse and Al Green’s Lets Stay Together.
Does style play a role in your music?
Yes, style plays a role in everything because everything we do, whether it’s a negative or positive, it’s a form of self-expression. When you boil it down, human life is just a bunch of these chemical reactions in your brain and your body follows suit. We came here, I think, to express ourselves. Artists get that pretty intuitively, and that’s why art is so intertangled with philosophy. I’ve always thought of my articles of clothing as an expression. When it comes to vintage, like high-waisted trousers, I would’ve not thought that was cool without Alex exposing me to it. At a certain point, on my own, I genuinely saw how that drape and shape feels expressive. I don’t care about brand names. But when whatever I wear to express myself feels right, I sing better. If I look how I want to, it conjures up the alter ego for the stage. When I’m walking the streets with friends and I feel like I got the colors and the shapes that I want to express through, it’s an antenna to your creative world as it oscillates with everyone else’s. Even when it comes to house wear, I want to get better with my leisure wear just for me. When I go to the grocery store, I’m not dressing up, but what kind of sweats, shoes, T-shirt-sweater combo am I vibing with? It’s just fun. It’s playful. Creativity is playful.
Fit Four
Was there a first moment you became interested in clothing and style or do you remember how you started to begin the journey?
It was always music that prompted my fashion. When I was in college, I was into jazz like everyone else in my school, but I was also really into folk, ’60s and ’70s folk. I was also into that pop-folk stuff, the hey ho stuff. So, I was wearing really cringey things, for me at least. I was having a hard time with my proximity to whiteness and my posturing at the time because until I graduated Christian college and went and lived by myself, I didn’t really grapple with my relationship with myself and my relationship with my race and my desire. I thought I had this desire to be close to whiteness to be accepted because everyone around me was that. I started reading about the Harlem Renaissance more and started to read literature and poetry. I’m like, “Oh, I relate to that.” They’re Black people who love being Black, but they’re creative and they’re artists. I had this idea that white people were the artists. It’s so fucked up, but it was the internalized racism that I dealt with.
My fashion started to really pick up when I started to do that because the self-awareness started to become a self-expression. I had awakened the conscious me. I was like an NPC before that. I started to think that I had style right before this band, but it wasn’t like how I feel about style now. I’d say I leveled up in the creativity when I started to have different tools, which was these vintage ’50s cuts, and I started to look and be like, Man, genuinely, it’s not because I’m in this soul thing. I like those cuts. I like the ’50s shirt jacks that stopped waist high so that you go with high-waisted pants. I would wear them with some modern chinos that were a nice square cut or a Japanese denim that’s really wide. It just started to get way more playful and genuine and original for me at least around 2019, 2020.
Fit Five
What are some of your current favorite brands to wear?
I’m not trying to be that guy, but I don’t really wear brands. I only have friends whose brands I like because of what they stand for, and also, they’re cool. Afew friends in New York have a clothing line called Sol Wave, and it’s just these shirts that take the spirituality of Eastern thought—simple T-shirts and sweats that have cool messages on them, and the visuals are dope. I have a friend in San Diego, Erwin, who has a clothing brand called Future Is Color. The cuts are nice. I love the visuals. That shirt is my favorite t-shirt, with the Black cowboy on it. They’re statement pieces. It’s a statement to have a big ass picture of a Black cowboy walking around, especially when you’re in spaces where people want to erase the fact that Black cowboys were there from the origin, the same as white cowboys and Mexican cowboys. Another friend is out here in San Diego as well, and his brand is called IMperfect. It’s kind of like a surf brand. It’s more than that, but he also builds surfboards. But it’s important too because his name’s Mike Lynch, he’s a Black surfer, so I think that’s cool too. My favorite thing about fashion is shape and color. I like things that hide my shape in certain spots. I like shirts sometimes that are a little tighter, not muscle necessarily, but just a little tighter to follow the form. And I like pants that are a little more square and shape-y because it’s fun.
If you had to wear one outfit for the rest of your life, what would it consist of?
Probably a pair of comfortable, either wool or Japanese denim pants that have some flow to them. I’d have to think about the color, but a pair of socks that have one solid color to them. Definitely would need to either wear some zero drop sandals, so that my feet could breathe, or some Birkenstocks. If it’s one forever, then this is the idea. Probably a flowy T-shirt. I’m not even a T-shirt guy like that. It would be that Black cowboy T-shirt by Future Is Color. Then some kind of a light jacket, maybe midnight blue. And some fun ’90s Japanese prescription transition shades that are also glasses.
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