Though “Burn,” the latest advance taste of the upcoming Toto XIV, illustrates just how well a reconstituted lineup is operating creatively, this new album still might be their last.
The song, in fact, grew out of a stand-alone composition by singer Joseph Williams, something that co-founder David Paich heard and loved. Well, in part, anyway. Paich decided to collaborate with Williams on an update that took a circular piano signature that once ended the original demo and turned that into the principal pulse of a new construction called “Burn.”
This track turned into a match-light moment for Toto XIV, the group’s first album since 2006’s Falling in Between — a period in which it seemed all but certainly Toto would never record again. Paich’s fellow co-founders Steve Lukather and Steve Porcaro (the latter of whom had been absent as a principal contributor, along with Williams, since the late 1980s) then gathered for what turned into a lengthy gestation process.
The results on Toto XIV bring in every piece of their legacy, from prog to pop. (Really, so does “Burn.”) But it also clearly took a lot out of them.
“I doubt very much we’ll make another album as Toto,” Paich tells Billboard. “I think this is our last record because of how much emotion we spend on it. It comes from our hearts and everything. It just wrings you out when you’re making a record because everybody’s so passionate about it.”
Once Toto XIV officially arrives later this month, the band is set to spent the late spring and early summer touring in Europe before presumably returning to the U.S. for dates into 2016. By then, it’s easy to see Toto taking a lengthy haitus — and who knows when, or if, the creative impulse might strike around something like “Burn” again?
“I want to say ‘never say never,'” Paich concedes, “but until we actually make another album, we can consider this to be the last Toto album. Everybody’s still writing all the time and making music and doing stuff on their own — because we each have studios and stuff — but whether we’ll get in the studio and make another album as Toto, that’s something no one knows yet. It hasn’t been revealed to me in my crystal ball yet.”
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