Day 16: XIV

I didn’t grow up with any brothers, so I relied on my cousins to fulfill the responsibilities that would have come with those relationships. Most of my cousins were boys, and older than me, so I had a lot of choices when it came to deciding who I was going to try and keep up with and how. I can almost completely credit my cousins, and the posters on their walls, and their collections of 45s and LPs, and their concert shirts, and the bands they played in, and the radio stations they listened to, with the fascination with music I developed and still holds me today. If pressed, I’m certain I could name any one of my cousins and quickly dig up a memory I have of them that would somehow be associated to a specific song.

They didn’t always agree on everything musical -- some were more into metal, some pop, some laid-back 70s singer/songwriter music -- but almost universally they were fans of Toto. You remember Toto, don’t you? Even if you weren’t alive back then or were too young to care about any music other than the theme songs to your favorite cartoons, you have to remember something of Toto. “I bless the rains down in Africa” Toto? “Rosanna?” “Hold the Line,” which still gets dragged out by classic rock radio on occasion? 1983 Album of the Year Grammy Award Winner for Toto IV? Yeah...now I’m sure things are coming together. My cousins all loved Toto so I had to keep up, and Toto albums played a not insignificant part in the growth of my nascent record collection back in junior high. None of the AC/DC or Billy Squier fans at my school were that impressed, but I didn’t care. My cousins thought they were cool, so they had to be.

It might be almost more accurate to think of Toto as a rotating musical collective than a band, since even though there have always been core members, they’ve had a lot of people coming and going, and coming back, and going again while past replacement players or singers came back as replacements once more. But it’s never mattered. Throughout the decades they’ve remained a group of talented writers and musicians, and even though time and culture somehow decided that their popularity would reach its peak back in the early 1980s, Toto has remained a working band ever since. “Isolation” was the cassette I listened to on my off-brand Walkman more than any other during my one-way 40-minute school bus ride in 11th grade. I played “Fahrenheit” so much in my first year of college, I have specific memories about my earliest explorations of the St. Cloud State campus associated with it. I remember buying “The Seventh One” while visiting two of my cousins in Tucson during one spring break, and hoping the album would make it back home in one piece while traveling in my suitcase. I loved the hard rock direction of “Kingdom of Desire.” The melodic rebirth in “Tambu” defined an entire summer vacation for me, particularly with the unsteady heartbeat rhythm found in one of the best overlooked ballads in all of popular music, “I Will Remember.” When “Mindfields” came out in the mid-1990s, the music started to feel like they were phoning it in, and there was something of a dry spell from the band after that, at least for me, with a series of greatest hits and live albums taking the place of new music. I was excited for the comeback when “Falling in Between” was released in 2006, but as good as the album was it didn’t have staying power for me.

This past spring I saw on iTunes that Toto had a new album coming out, “Toto XIV.” As I thought back to how their more recent albums didn’t mean as much to me as the earlier ones had, I was on the fence about buying it. I felt there was all too much of a chance it would become yet another album in the music library I’d listen to for a week or two and then forget about. But then I saw one of my older cousins, who is still remains the greatest Toto loyalist of us all, post this on Facebook last month:

If you haven’t bought the new Toto album, Toto XIV, you NEED to!!! Enough said.

It doesn’t take too much arm-twisting to get me to buy new music, so that was all the nudge I needed to change my mind. Before I even played through it a first time though, I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t get distracted by something else until I knew the album really well. So I went out of my way to listen to it a lot -- during the weekend afternoons, in the car, in my classroom before and after school, falling asleep at night...any moment I could. On purpose. And I feel like I got to know it pretty well. It even got me to dig out and revisit some of my old Toto albums. The thing that struck me the most about listening to all of this music from the band, old and new, was how much one of my friends would probably love this band if he was ever exposed to them beyond their few hit singles. Being a musician himself, one of the things he prizes the most in the music he listens to is melody. Musicianship and strong melody is still as much of a part of what Toto is doing now as it was back in 1982.

But....

I think if I was ever asked to take the Toto albums in my library and rank them from best to worst, this one would wind up in the bottom half. Not that it’s a bad album; it isn’t by a long shot. For me, it just isn’t great. The performances are as strong as ever, although one of the three guys taking on lead vocals sounds noticeably off his game compared to where he used to be (luckily he only has a song or two). There are a few songs on here I think are great, and they’ll probably be included in a playlist or two in the future, but a lot of the other songs, while having different elements I enjoy, just seem to take up space ("Chinatown" being a good example of what I mean, if you know the album). I’m glad I got to hear new music from the band, and I’m glad my cousin (and his daughter) love the album so much. It just isn’t connecting with me as a whole. 

However, listening to this one did inspire me to play through a lot of their older stuff, which has been great fun. I guess sometimes the best thing about a new album from an old band is how it can remind you about the music that came before it. And if that spurs you into rediscovering how important those older songs once were to you, that isn’t such a bad thing.