Singled Out: GUIDES' Just One Take

Pittsburgh heavy rockers GUIDES just released their new single "Just One Take", and to celebrate we asked vocalist Jonathan Joseph to tell us about the track. Here is the story:

All of our material is deeply personal to me. I only really know I have a song when hearing it or even just reciting the lyrics makes me feel something deeply. Honestly, it should have the ability to make me cry.

With that said, our latest single, "Just Take One," may be as personal as it gets for me. When I was sixteen, I lost my best friend in a car accident. It was the kind of tragedy that completely shifted the way I processed life, and it triggered struggles with mental health that would stay with me. I was already playing in bands at the time, so I wrote an early version of this song as a way to cope, but also as a way to honor our friend.

About eighteen years later, one of the friends who helped me shape that original version of the song died of an overdose. When it came time to write new material for GUIDES, revisiting "Just Take One" felt inevitable, but it was also an extremely emotional experience in the studio. It was not just bringing back an old song. It was bringing back a whole part of my life, and the people who were there with me when it first existed.

Ironically, while I was rewriting the song, I was also in a serious car accident myself. I was rear-ended by a Mack truck and was extremely lucky to walk away with recoverable injuries. After losing someone that way when I was young, surviving something like that myself made the song feel even heavier. It reminded me that all it takes is just one dreadful day to change our lives forever. It also made me feel, in a way I can't fully explain, that someone was watching over me in that moment and that maybe someone still wanted me to be here.

Some parts of the song were added and changed, but a large piece of the original lyrics remained in the final version. The chorus is exactly as it was back then. There is a line in it, "guide me to the way, back to breathe again," that people might assume is a reference to the band name GUIDES. But those lyrics came long before the band did. I don't really see that as a coincidence. To me, it feels like the song found its way back at the exact time it was supposed to.

Even the production carried that feeling for me. We made the song with producer Zac "ZROKK" Diebels, whose band Simon Says was one of the first bands I ever saw when I was twelve years old. That show blew my mind. It was one of the moments that made me decide I wanted to get on stage and scream into a microphone when I grew up. Getting to work with him twenty-five years later on a song this personal was surreal. I can't help but feel like my friends who are no longer here may have pulled a few strings for that to happen.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more here

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