We're heading towards the end of the year which always makes us think of our favorite songs! This month, we caught up with Toby Gad a Grammy-winning, multi-platinum songwriter/producer who has written some of our favorite songs from Beyoncé's If I Were a Boy, Fergie's Big Girls Don't Cry and Demi Lovato's Skyscraper to name a few! We wanted to know more about how he got into the industry, his passion for songwriting, collaborating with fellow entertainers and his legacy project, Piano Diaries!
ATHLEISURE MAG: When did you first fall in love with music?
TOBY GAD: First it’s so great to be able to talk with you and thank you for having me! I started with music when I was maybe 5/6/7 years old? My parents had a jazz band and probably when I was already in my mother’s womb, I heard all of these jazz songs that they did. They had a very limited repertoire so I always felt that one day I wanted to be able to write different songs because by age 3 I knew all 30 of the songs that they played!
AM: I love that!
How do you feel that your parents influenced you as jazz artists. My great-uncle was the late tenor saxophonist, Joe Henderson -
TG: Yes! Amazing amazing saxophonist!
AM: I love jazz, I love a lot of the elements of it. How did it influence your music?
TG: My mother always listened to Keith Jarrett, the piano player.
AM: Love Keith Jarrett!
TG: The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett is probably the one record that I have listened to most in my entire life. It’s accompanied me my entire life and it always makes me feel like home. It’s such a great record and just how Keith Jarrett just improvises. He used to start concerts by just playing one note and then taking it from there without making any plans. He’s just very intuitive and just playing in the moment and I just thought that that was so special. I try – I mean, I’m not that good on the piano. I try to do it myself too sometimes and I lose myself in the piano playing. It’s just such a beautiful feeling when you just watch your hands take you places and explore.
AM: We saw Keith Jarrett a few years ago at Carnegie Hall here in NY and you’re right!
TG: I was there too! I saw him also in Carnegie!
AM: Yes! It was such an amazing show and I felt that I barely breathed during that concert, it was transformative! It was so beautiful and I’m so glad that I had a chance to see him because I had never seen him in person but have heard his records. Such a genius!
When did you realize that you wanted to work in the music industry?
TG: My brother and me, we always had ambitions. At first we emulated our parents and they rehearsed in the living room and when they were done, we would take over the instruments and pretend that we were musicians too. Then I think at the age of 6 or 7, we started to have our own set of a few Rock & Roll songs and we would play them in the intermissions of our parent’s jazz band. When our parents went back onstage, we went through the audience and collected money. That was our first experience of, “wow, we can actually make money with this.”
AM: Exactly!
You’re a music producer, you’re also a songwriter, what’s your creative process like and where do you start in terms of creating a song?
TG: It's very much lyric driven. It's always collaborative. I usually start with a conversation with the artist and see where they are at that time in their life. Are they heartbroken, are they in and out of love, angry, happy? What’s the mood of the day? And out of that conversation, sometimes, quite often something sticks – some line.
Like with BC Jean, when she said, because she was angry at someone, she said, “if I were a boy, I would kick his ass” and I was like, “what did you just say?” She said, If I Were a Boy (editor’s note: originally performed by BC Jean and later that year performed by Beyoncé) and I said let’s get back to the studio now and write this song. That’s often how it happens.
AM: Wow!
What do you love about being a songwriter?
TG: Well, it’s the feeling of coming full circle. Like you do something that starts so small with an artist and you record it and then if you’re lucky, it travels around the world. Then you hear it on the radio wherever you go. That is an incredible feeling when people know you by your song. It’s amazing and I love that.
AM: How do you get inspired and where does that part kick off for you?
TG: It’s always the artists that inspire me. If I know that I am going to work with someone, like recently I worked with James Arthur and Tom Walker and those are voices that I love. I love listening to their voices and working with them, I really looked forward to it and it inspired me to really work hard and to create some good music for them.
AM: You’ve had so many accomplishments from 3 Grammy Awards, Grammy nominations, and so many people that you have worked with. What do you look for when it comes to collaborating with an artist? Are there certain things that a person or group has to have in order to go forward?
TG: It's always important to me that the artists are kind of their own boss, they have something to say, they are driven to collaborate and to write their own lyric with someone like me. It’s very important that the artists are part of the creative process and that the music that they record somehow feels a bit autobiographical. Then of course, the voice. I love great voices. I worked with Celeste recently and there are just some singers who I could hear it day and night.
AM: I mean, when I was prepping for the interview, realizing the work that you have been on from Big Girls Don’t Cry, If I Were a Boy, I Do – these are songs that I really love! What have been some of your favorite projects that you have been part of?
TG: I think that Love Song to the Earth has been a song that we did for the Paris Climate Accord and that was a song that just meant a lot to me. At my heart, I’m an environmentalist as well. I care for the planet a lot and that was a little contribution that we could do and I wrote the song with Natasha Bedingfield, John Shanks, and Sean Paul. We got more and more artists on it and by the end, we got Paul McCartney on it as well. Jon Bon Jovi as well as a number of other big name artists wanted to be on this song too. So that was a great experience!
AM: Well, you have worked with a number of artists, but you have also crossed over into a number of genres in music. Does the process change for you when you’re working on an EDM song versus a pop song?
TG: I think that for me the core is that you can always play it on the piano. A lot of good EDM songs start with a good vocal and from there you can explore all different directions. Now, with Piano Diaries, it’s stripping these songs back down to the bones and it’s just for the vocal performance and the really marvelous piano and maybe a little string accompaniment and then the remixes which go all kinds of places and I just have fun with them. But I think that all of these songs at their core, if you can just play them at the piano, that’s great!
AM: What led you to want to create Piano Diaries and to embark on this legacy project?
TG: Well most of my career has been next song, next artist, next session and trying to get a hit, hit, hit! This is the first time in my life that I feel like I can take a breath, look back, and reflect a little bit. I’m happy to rediscover these songs, but I feel that I wanted to record them in a way – how I hear them today and with artists of today, but then I also want to hear the bones of it. For people to be able to hear how it could sound stripped down and just let the lyric carry it. Then of course, to have fun with these new originals and then make crazy remixes.
AM: I love that! I mean, what is it like to work on something that obviously we already know what it’s like, but now having to reimagine it? Is that stressful or is it almost like a sense of freedom?
TG: There’s a real challenge for the original version with piano vocal to create something that feels new.
AM: Yeah.
TG: And to make sure that the singers perform it in a way that feels very original. Like for instance, the next single, Skyscraper, will be with an artist, Camylio a Universal Republic artist with a very strong voice and he sounds so different from the Demi Lovato version, but he kills it.
The current single, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Victoria Justice has such a beautiful soft voice on it that sounds so different from how Fergie sang it when we did that song back then.
AM: I can imagine that that is such an interesting process.
What was it like working with Victoria Justice on that?
TG: Victoria and I, we go way back! Back when she had this very popular television show, Victorious, we had a song, All I Want is Everything that we wrote and she was 17 years old. Ever since, every few years, we would get together and write more songs. We did a song, Girl Up, to empower young females around the world for the United Nations. Love Song to the Earth, she was part of that. So over the years, we kept in touch and she’s such a precious soul and I love her. We actually, it wasn’t just the song, we spent days together just having fun climbing mountains, going surfing, and going through Downtown LA and we filmed a lot of that and put it on social media so we have 30 or 40 little clips on TikTok and Instagram of us talking, asking each other questions, and doing fun things together.
AM: You have your own record label, Kite Records, can you tell me about that?
TG: Well, about 10 years ago, I started Kite Records and we had several records out. But back in the day it meant that you had an imprint and that the record company takes over. But now, it’s such a new perspective that you can do so much on social media and on your own. I couldn’t wait to restart the label and to hire a few new amazing people. Now in the first 2 days we have almost 70,000 streams which I think is incredible that we can achieve that on our own! I’m so happy about this!
AM: That’s amazing!
Obviously you’re focused on Piano Diaries, but are there other projects that are coming up that you would like to share with our readers to know about?
TG: There is a Christmas single, LITTLE HOUSE IN THE SNOW, that came out on Nov 24th with Marisha Wallace, she is a musical star and I am working with her on an Etta James musical that is still going to be a year or two in the making. We decided to do a Christmas song. We’re promoting it in London, there will be shows in the Royal Festival Hall on Dec 15th and 17th and we’re performing with an orchestra. We get to do this song and there are a few TV and radio performances alongside that and that’s also on our label. So I’m very excited about this! Marisha is such a great singer!
AM: That’s fantastic and I can’t wait to hear more about the Etta James musical as I’m such a fan of her music.
When you’re not producing, writing, or doing other projects, how do you take time for yourself?
TG: That’s a learning process and I think that I am getting better with it after all of these years. I love surfing! Right now you can see where we are.
AM: Um that’s an amazing view! We just had Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece as our OCT ISSUE #94 cover!
TG: I saw that! Incredible! I’m such a fan of Laird Hamilton and I think that it’s remarkable that early on, he decided that he never wanted to compete, he just wants to have his own experience with the gigantic waves out there with the natural forces. I have a lot of respect for this man!
AM: Do you go to Nazaré and surf big waves?
TG: Ha! I think that the biggest wave that I surfed was maybe 6 – 8 ft! To me that is very big!
AM: We also had Kai Lenny for our MAY ISSUE #89 this year as well on our cover who is also known for surfing those really epic waves! Watching him on HBO's 100 Foot Wave was insane! There’s no way I could do that, but watching him do it is so impressive!
TG: Kai Lenny is such a trailblazer with all of the other things like Foiling, Wing Folling and what he does at Nazaré is unbelievable! He does back flips on those 100 foot waves!
PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY | Toby Gad
Read the NOV ISSUE #95 of Athleisure Mag and see MELODIES OF LIFE | Toby Gad in mag.
