Look Out!
Look Out! – Toby & The Whole Truth – New Album Background
A life in music has – in my 40th year of being in that position – presented me with a challenge. How do I continue to create honest, authentic music that feels relevant – to me at least – whilst being conscious of the audience and their expectations? I may not be the biggest, most well known singer/songwriter in the game, but I am aware of what I represent to my fans and to the wider music world. The thing is, making music is intensely personal, selfish even. As a creative person, I feel (and always have) that it would be dishonest in the extreme to simply make music for the sake of it. For me, it has always been imperative that I have a reason.
Back in 1995 I released my first solo effort after the demise of Little Angels; ‘Ignorance is Bliss.’ It was a record of hard truths and sadness, songs about betrayal and what I saw as failure really – failure to be strong enough, to stand up to the tyranny of the music industry and the heartbreaking certainty that the band I had helped form in Scarborough was no more, and that I had been powerless to stop its destruction. At the time I would never have admitted the pain I felt from losing my friends, friends that I had travelled the world with, made music with and genuinely loved as people. My big problem really was a lack of honesty and a weakness in my self esteem that drove me to make awkward choices and not speak my truth – if I’d have had more savvy, more street smarts, more sense, I wouldn’t have let it ever get to the point of impending disaster – specifically I would have revealed certain individuals who were at the heart of the problem for what and who they were. Spilt milk. Live and learn.
The years between then and now have been filled with family, kids, houses, jobs – the reality of surviving life as a husband, father and homemaker whilst still trying to keep going as a musician and songwriter. It hasn’t been easy – but what is? No point in moaning (I’ve done far too much of that over the years) best to look life in the face and try to remember WHY I made music in the first place. I don’t believe in God, fate, luck or any of the other flights of fancy we seem to smother ourselves with as a race – no, to me, life in real terms is exciting enough and has mystery written into its very nature, so I don’t need a magic being in the sky to believe in – it’s utterly ridiculous as far as I’m concerned. I have long believed that we are – in essence – alone in this world. Our very fabric, though created by our parents, is unique and it is by pure chance that we meet and find our partners – oddly this sense of individualism has always brought me immense comfort – I simply don’t need anything to make me feel alive or part of anything, because here I am! I didn’t ask for it, but yet here I am!
I don’t mean any of the above to sound selfish or arrogant, that isn’t my intention, I have tried to live my life (so far) with a sense of wonder and imagination, with a belief that we’re all important and everyone has something to offer. I may, on the surface come over as confident, a big mouth, but really I’m quite a private person, it’s one of the contradictions that makes me who I am – I cannot help the way I am wired. I have spent much of my life reeling from the trauma of school bullying that has affected my life in ways that are hard to describe – the depth of the damage was unknown to me until quite recently when I decided to get some help. Someone close to me recently commented on being bullied as ‘So that? That’s life isn’t it?’ My reaction was one of astonishment – Unless you have felt the deep sense of worthlessness and shame that experience forces upon you, then how could you know? To dismiss an individual’s struggles with a flippant comment like that is to diminish the true agony it brings. I guess this is part of the problem – at our core humans are selfish and lack real empathy – if it’s not happening to me, it’s not happening. Fear.
Since emerging from two years of therapy where I learned to confront and rationalise my experiences of school and then later being bullied and coerced at the hands of someone in my professional life, I began – for the first time in nearly 40 years – to see the world and life in different terms. What had spurred me on as a teenager – a general ‘I’ll show those fuckers’ attitude, began two fade and I was faced with the fact that I needed fresh impetus – where would my desire to demonstrate myself come from now? It was an odd feeling, and had mixed blessings – you cannot simply forget what has gone before, or indeed behave completely differently, after all those behaviours were deeply ingrained in my day to day life and had for years affected the way I reacted and interacted with others. It wasn’t going to be easy.
It was at this point that I felt an overwhelming need to make new music. It was so powerful that the urges drove me to fling myself wholehearted into the process. Rather frustratingly, the first wave of ideas – many of which were left over from previous projects – didn’t work. The songs were stilted and obvious, and I couldn’t get my head around why. It occurred to me that maybe I was trying too hard and also that the subject matter was – on the whole – unfocussed. With the benefit of hindsight I now know I was applying old rules to a new situation, my awakening (not the best phrase, but I think it does illustrate the way I was feeling) was presenting me with a new approach. Certainly my anger was diminished and my usual go-to mechanisms seemed out of date and somehow, irrelevant. So I dumped all the songs and went back to the drawing board.
What emerged was a tidal-wave of fresh ideas, all of which were prompted by my new found focus and energy. For a three week period I couldn’t stop writing. One of the key things was a decision to record simple demo’s of anything I felt held reasonable merit – something I don’t usually do – the most I tend to do is dribble the idea onto my phone, but this time I felt a real need to record the songs in a raw format with all the lyrics written and melodies fully investigated and locked in. It proved to be a great way of finding the heart of the album. For those three weeks I stayed up long into the early hours perfecting the words and feeling the energy that that time of the day brings (I’ve often felt the twilight hours to be the most creative time) and it was a mesmerising period of my life. The words flowed, I found the central narratives came easily and with a sharp focus on what it was I was saying. The subject matter felt honest and sparkling and allowed me to explore themes – many of which are pretty familiar such as love and loss – in greater depth and with a lightness of touch I hadn’t managed before.
I quickly realised that the central theme of the album was about recovery. With a blinding flash of realisation, it became apparent that my life as a musician before had been one of survival and searching for answers to why I felt the way I did. Much of that search centred on myself – may of the characters in my songs ‘Johnny’ from Kickin Up Dust or the main protagonist in Don’t Pray For Me was in fact me – something I didn’t spot for years – whereas now, the needs were to talk about others and the relationships that I’d formed and how they applied themselves to all of our lives. Connection is another theme here – how we view the world and find our place in it, how we navigate.
I’ve called the album collection Look Out! as it seemed to focus the idea of recovery in a very specific way – be aware, take care, be warned, but be open and always on the look out for the truth, the love and the light. It is an interesting phrase, it means many things. In its rawest and most direct definition it is inherently a WARNING, a shout, a declaration or a written announcement. Secondly you can BE the Look Out, the one seeking something, taking care to make sure your eyes are open and observant, and thirdly it’s a place, an actual physical structure or possibly an imagined vantage point from where we observe and watch. All of these definitions I feel sum up the record – it’s a collection of songs that hope to enlighten, inform and give you information that might help you to see from a different perspective.
It’s an album unlike any I have made before. The songs are – in part – gentler than before, and have more to say. It’s about as honest as I’m ever going to get, and the approach I’ve taken on each of the songs has been driven by the need of the song – I’ve let the atmospheres lead me rather than me imposing my will. The results are an eclectic bunch of songs that all exist in their own worlds – there’s some familiarity, but there are also some surprises, some of which I wasn’t expecting, but I went with because it couldn’t be any other way.
I hope you like it, I’m sure some of you will be scratching your heads, but I view that as a good thing – after all, life would be boring if everything you expected was always there, unchallenged and vanilla. To be challenged and to feel compelled to write music is a joy and a privilege and if I’ve learned one thing over the years that still stands it’s that you can’t plan anything, you must be brave enough to accept what is being presented even if it feel wrong sometimes because really there is no wrong or right when it comes to music, just different – the skill is to let it happen and hope for the best.
Tobe
August 2024, Somerset, England.
