Do You Wanna Die? – An interview with the Toadies

Well for us, it’s still, you know, two guitars, bass and drums, basically. Pretty analog on our end. In the past, we’ve had a little bit of computerized, you know, maybe a very little use of synth and stuff, but not, not much, really. So I think it’s more about how the music gets recorded, like our first album that we recorded in 1993 that was all recorded the two inch tape and, you know, edited with a razor blade, and then by the time we recorded our second album, Pro Tools was coming in.

So we recorded, you know, pretty much all the stuff we recorded in the 21st Century has been digitally recorded until this latest album with Steve Albini. He is was strictly, strictly analog. So it was back to two inch tape and razor blades. And, you know, I found it pretty refreshing.

There are definitely some advantages to recording digitally, as far as you know, editing or splicing two different takes together or whatever. But, you know, in this case, we rehearsed and really drilled so we had the songs down, and we just went in the studio and recorded them. And really, I think that’s the best way. That’s how it should be done.

How do you think that digital delivery of streaming and downloads affect your writing and recording process of an album, from choosing the track listing order, and mastering, and anything else there?

Um, I’m not sure if it changed really, like, I know that the way people listen to music now is kind of, you know, piecemeal. It’s not, not everybody goes and listens to an entire album in a sitting and I’m guilty of that sometimes myself, like, you know, take your favorite songs from an album and put them on a playlist or whatever. But I think for the Toadies, we’ve always kind of looked at all of our albums as a whole, as kind of a listening experience in itself. It kind of takes you on a journey, you know, the way a good album should. And so that’s what we just keeping on in that direction. You know, the same way, like, a live set list, you know, has everything is placed in a certain way.

So, so it’s not front loaded with all the fast songs and then, you know, the slow ones in the middle and so on. It has to sort of meander and evolve, and, you know, change the mood from song to song. That’s kind of what an album does.

Do you have any examples of what you think is like a perfect album?

Oh, wow. Perfect album, man. I think that there are a lot. Paul McCartney’s Ram album is one of my favorites. I guess it’s actually Paul and Linda McCartney’s Ram. But for me, there’s no skips on that, and it’s very eclectic. And there’ll be, you know, like a rock song followed by an acoustic, mellow type song followed by kind of an orchestral epic. And it definitely keeps your attention, you know, from the beginning to end.

You talked about the like your set list ebbing and flowing in cadence. I think of albums like Beck, where one entire album’s fast and catchy, and then the next album will be super slow and mellow. Like, like Sea Change. I think was such a great album of just all mellow songs.

Agreed. Well, we haven’t yet, but we feel like each album has its own feel, and sort of even though we might not be thinking it at the time, maybe after it’s done, we’ll see that it has sort of a, sort of an overriding theme or something or or a mood or something it’s trying to get across. But I don’t think that it’s, it’s not something we initially set out to do, you know, like, this will be our acoustic singer-songwriter album, and this one will be our jazz epic or whatever.

You’ve been playing tracks from Rubberneck for decades now, how have you found of your experience and growth as a player? Do you find yourself playing those songs differently than you did 30 years ago?

Um, yeah, it’s kind of interesting. A few years ago we did a tour that was an anniversary of the release of that album, so we played the whole thing in sequence, and when we were rehearsing and getting ready for that, I went back and listened to the album, which I hadn’t done in a long time, and found that before I listened to it, I thought, yeah, I still play it the way I recorded it, and then going back and listening, I found that I changed some things, maybe added some things, or taken things away.

So that was, you know, it was kind of eye opening. I guess over time, it sort of evolves, like the basic structure and tempo and everything stays the same. But, you know, there’s slight variations that I’ve kind of added over the years, so then when we listened to it and tried to learn them, relearn them the way they are on the album, I found myself, “Okay, I’m gonna go back to playing it the way I originally did.”

And you know, that was already three or four years ago, and they’ve already, since then, kind of evolved in a different way. I don’t know that the average listener would notice it, but I noticed it. Like I might play this fill slightly differently or something like that.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the Drumeo series on YouTube, where they’ll have drummers come and play like listen to a song they’ve never heard before, and then lay down a drum track to it. They’ll listen to a drumless version of it.

I haven’t seen that.

It’s phenomenal. It is these career musicians that will come in, and they’ll hear System of a Down for the first time, or, you know, The Zombies or something like this. And it’s a song that, if you’re familiar with it, you know how it goes. Tonight, Tonight from Smashing Pumpkins was one, it was the drummer for a Cirque du Soleil, and he tries his hand at it and what he puts out is completely unique.

And then when they played the original track back for them, and you hear like Jimmy Chamberlain, he’s super snare heavy throughout the entire track, you start picking up on these things that you would never notice as a casual listener.  It’s a super interesting series.

The era of 90s alternative rock, I think, is romanticized. Do you look back fondly on the industry in the 90s and compared to how it is now?

I look back fondly. I mean, there are major differences like that was before, before streaming or digital downloads or anything like that. So you had to be a little bit more intentional with your like, your music purchases. Like, you had to physically go to a store with the intention of buying a certain album, or going to a store and browsing and thinking, I’m planning to come home with something, but I don’t know what, and now you can just be sitting on your couch and do that.

In a certain sense, people had a stronger connection to the music because, you know, they got in their car and drove to the record store and shopped and browsed and chose this particular album or whatever and came home and listened to it. And so you kind of make a connection. And nowadays you just dial it up on your phone or computer, and listen to it, and you might enjoy it, but it seems like there’s a bigger chance that you might forget about it by the next day.

You know, it’s like that was good, and then, you know, something else has popped up on your radar to take its place. So I think that’s a big, a big difference between then and now, right?

I do find it interesting that that vinyl sales are continually rising, not to their levels of their heyday in the 80s, but certainly more they’re selling more now they have since the 90s. And I think there is a want from people. I think there is a, not to use romanticism, but there is this idealized sense of, “this is how you are supposed to experience music. You pick up an album, you touch it, you put it down, you sit there, you listen to it.”

I think, I think there is a point to that. There are times for that, but there’s also times where I just want to listen to something while I’m giving the dishes.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I think they both have their place, you know, like there’s certain albums. Whether it’s a classic album that you grew up with, or something it’s like, I want that on my shelf in my collection, or something that you might have just discovered. That made a big enough impression on me, but I think it’s worth owning the artifact so I can pour over the record sleeve and read the lyric inserts and the credits and all that kind of stuff. A friend of mine (Chris Penn of Good Records), he passed away about a year ago, but he owned a record store, and he said, “You can’t roll a joint on a digital download.” And I was like, you know that’s another cool thing about an LP record.

Yeah, but it is cool. I think people seek that, that deeper connection with the music they love, like they want. They want something they can hold in their hands. And I think that’s cool. You know, it was lost for a little while when, when CDs went out of fashion, and, you know, streaming was the new thing. The entire world library of music at the tips of your fingers, and that’s really cool. And like you said, you know, I just want something for when I do the dishes.

Then, you don’t have to go through the trouble of digging through your vinyl for just the right thing and putting it on, you know, you can just go, “I want to hear this.” And boom, it’s playing. So, you know, there’s something to be said for that.

We had a book of CDs, like, my entire collection was in my vehicle and that was stolen and I lost it all. And some of these were, you know, high school friends’ bands and bands that I saw at some dingy venue in the late 90s and early aughts, and I’m never going to hear that music again. Like, it’s not on Spotify, that band is long since gone. You know, having, having a physical copy is certainly, you know, going to prevent against that.

Yeah, there’s a certain sense of permanence to it, you know, like, you know, if, God forbid, some catastrophic thing happened and the entire electrical grid went down, you could still rig up a way to listen to a record. Say you’re on Gilligan’s Island and make two speakers out of coconuts and a pine needle to play the thing.

Yeah. Even those people that have solar powered homes like they’re still going to be able to play their records, even if they can’t access the internet. And looking at your bookshelf, are those some, some comic books I see on the top shelf there…

Yep, over here (gestures to bookshelf).

Do you Do you have a favorite comic or, like, comic character?

I gotta be basic and say Batman has pretty much been my favorite since I was a little kid. And he sort of evolved over the years, but sort of stayed the same. You know, the trappings and the surroundings have evolved, but Batman is still Batman,

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder how much the character would never have happened if Bruce Wayne went to therapy,

Right? And I also see people argue, you know, here’s this billionaire going out and beating up people. So, you know, you got investing in the community, right? So you got to kind of suspend your disbelief a little bit to get into.

Yeah, he, he’s fighting a demonic clown and a golem made of clay. Like, these aren’t, these aren’t things that are going to be, you know, necessarily affected by living wages. With all of the Toadies albums that you’ve been a part of, do you have a favorite?

Well, I know it’s probably cliche of people to say their most recent one, but the fact that we recorded with Albini, which is something when we first got signed to a major label to record our first album, Rubberneck, they asked us who we wanted to produce it, and we said, Albini.

And they had a million reasons why we shouldn’t use Steve Albini to record the album. So it’s been more than 30 years that that we’ve wanted to work with Albini. So that’s one reason why this latest one is my favorite, but also the fact that the label we had been on up until a few years ago kind of just dissolved. The owner decided he didn’t want to do it anymore, so we were without a label, but we knew we wanted to record an album, so we saved up the money we made playing shows in order to finance the record ourselves.

We paid for the recording and the mixing and the mastering and all that stuff, all of this before we had a label. So, it’s ours. You know, this is something, something we created and did on our own, and then afterwards, we kind of shopped around to see if anyone wanted to release it. So that makes it a little more personal to me as well. The subject matter of the songs, the lyrics that Vaden wrote, come from a really personal place of dealing with some mental health issues that he’s struggled with his whole life, that a lot of people struggle with.

So him being vulnerable in that way, I think, also make it a pretty special album. Just in a lot of ways, it just the sound of it is really great. It’s my favorite. And I don’t think I’m saying that just because it’s the most recent. It just it was a special experience during the writing and recording process like it just it means a lot to me and the rest of the band. But having said that, you know, Rubberneck, I mean, we wouldn’t have a career if that hadn’t been a big success back in the mid 90s.

So, and I would say the overwhelming majority of people that come to see us play live, you know, they want to hear the songs from Rubberneck that they grew up with. So that’ll always be a special album, and it’s afforded me the opportunity to make a living playing music, based on the success of that album, and specifically the song Possum Kingdom. We’ve been able to build on that and just keep going year after year, making new music. So that one will always be special. You know, the first one’s always special, and the latest one’s always special.

When I described the Toadies to people, I call it “swampy grunge.” I’m wondering, how do you describe the sound to folks?

Yeah, I mean that that’s a fair description. Like before I joined the band when they were just one of many local bands playing around the Dallas/Fort Worth area. I really latched on to them because they seemed unique and that they even back then, before I was in the band. There were lots of elements of punk rock and even some metal in the music they were playing. I think what you’re referring to as the “swampy” sound was kind of the sound of Texas blues.

I’m thinking of like the song I Come from the Water from Rubberneck. It has that sort of that swing and that kind of blues feel to it. And it didn’t seem like, in that era of grunge, anybody else was really bringing that element to it and I thought it just made them unique. It’s like if you combine the Pixies with ZZ Top, and they’ve always been two of my favorites. That’s kind of that sort of Toadies DNA right there.

Yeah, I think, I think you’re right. I think it’s the blues that I was picking up on. Maybe leading into that kind of New Orleans Bayou feel, but like that swingy blues, yeah, it’s probably what I’m picking up.

You know, being from Texas, that kind of that surrounds us here, you know, the music is everywhere, country and blues and, you know, we’re not that far from New Orleans. I guess there’s something in the water down here. And I thought that was when I was just a fan, before I was in the band. I thought something about that really, really spoke to me.

Yeah, I’m in the PNW, and the music out here often mirrors that foresty, open feel or an uneasiness that comes with such vast wilderness.

 So you do get this, like local DNA seeping into a scene. Like we have bands like Modest Mouse and Decemberists that are PNW-based, and give off a vibe. And you can see it in what the grunge bands look like, like the classic grunge look of flannel shirts and everything, you know.

Oh yeah, that’s just, that’s everyday wear up there.

Yeah, I moved. I moved up here from from Southern California, an hour outside of LA where it was shorts and T shirts and vans. And now I have an insane amount of flannels now, like, “Oh, I get it.”

Yea, in Texas, it’s hot more often than it’s any other temperature. That humidity seeps into the music itself.