David Paich recently shared insights on the ‘Broken Record’ podcast about the challenges Toto faced with their record label in their early years. He revealed the label’s complaints about the band’s music style:
“A lot of the comments were, ‘There’s no thread [to the music]. You guys don’t have a sound. What is the sound? We can’t tell if you’re an R&B group or, a rock n’ roll group, or an adult contemporary group. What are you?'”
The keyboardist mentioned their battles against being boxed in a single genre:
“We just said, ‘This is it. This is what we are. We do all this stuff.’ That’s why we wanted to be different. We wanted to just do good music of any kind, any genre.”
Toto’s Breakthrough
Despite the struggles with record labels, Toto made a big debut with their first single, ‘Hold The Line,’ in October 1978, getting into the Top 5 on the charts. Paich recalled the first time he heard the song on the radio by saying:
“I was at my sister’s apartment, and I heard this faint piano. And I said, ‘That sounds really familiar. That actually sounds like me playing. Oh, fuck! That’s our record! It’s on the radio!’ And everyone, we were all calling the radio stations requesting it like teenagers.”
The Band’s Rise To Fame
‘Hold The Line’ helped drive the sales of Toto’s self-titled debut album to over 2 million copies. The band’s fourth album, ‘Toto IV,’ added to their international success, especially with the hit song ‘Africa.’
Reflecting on the 1982 track’s success in an interview with Prog magazine, Paich explained:
“It’s a phenomenon to me; I can’t put my finger on it. If it wasn’t a hit, I’d say, ‘That’s a nice little album cut.’ We thought the hits were already on the record. ‘Rosanna,’ I thought ‘Make Believe’ was going to be a giant hit. Africa came out of nowhere; it was an 11th-hour song, it barely made the album.”
Four Decades In The Industry
Toto marked their 40th anniversary in the music scene in 2018. They celebrated the event with the release of ’40 Trips Around The Sun,’ a compilation album of their greatest hits.
More recently, in their 46th year, they have announced plans for a North American tour with Journey, scheduled for February-April 2024.
