It’s 2017, and Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough is standing under the soft lights of a New York bar, guitar in hand, his voice a little hoarse, his heart wide open. The man known for political sparring and hard news has turned inward — revealing a side that few have seen: the songwriter, the romantic, the survivor. His debut E.P., Mystified, is more than a musical experiment; it’s a confession, a reclamation, and perhaps most of all, a love letter born from heartbreak.
Scarborough has always written songs — in middle school, through law school, and even during his days in Congress. “I’ve been writing my entire life,” he told Vanity Fair. “When I was a football coach, I wrote songs. When I was a lawyer, I wrote songs. When I was on TV, I wrote songs. It’s something I have to do.”
But Mystified isn’t the work of a hobbyist. It’s the first step in an ambitious project: 200 songs over four years, released through RED Music. The E.P.’s five tracks draw from deeply personal chapters — his divorce, his faith, his longing for peace in chaos. The title track, he admits, came from “the low point” of his life. “After my divorce, I was flattened. I crawled into my studio and needed to put that pain somewhere. Music was how I survived.”
There’s a darkness that runs through Mystified, but also a tenderness that glows at its edges. “Let’s Fall in Love,” the lone ballad on the record, was inspired by a complicated muse: Mika Brzezinski, Scarborough’s longtime co-host and now fiancée. It’s a song about pride and surrender — the kind of love that bruises before it heals.
Scarborough admits that when he first wrote it, Mika almost didn’t hear it. “We were in a fight the night I wanted to play it for her,” he recalls. “She said, ‘I’m not coming to your show until you apologize.’ I was being stubborn, but eventually I just… gave in.”
That moment of humility became the bridge of the song itself:
“I’m not going to beg,
Oh, what the hell, look at me beg.
Baby, please, let’s fall in love.”
He laughs now when he tells the story — how art and life collided in the most human way possible. “I went ahead and apologized,” he said, “and she came to the show.”
Their love story has since become the stuff of newsroom legend — two cable news hosts who went from on-air tension to real-life connection, proposing under the sunlit sky of Antibes. But the songs remain the purest record of that journey — the heartbreak that came before, the hope that followed, and the music that helped bridge them both.
“I don’t do this for fame or critics,” Scarborough said. “I do it because I have to. This is how I breathe.”
And maybe that’s the real headline — not the politics, not the punditry — but the man who turned his heartbreak into harmony, and found love again in the music he almost didn’t share.
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