Music

Nov. 20, 2008

Transforming the Toads

 

Reunited, the Toadies are Back with a Catchy New Album and a New Musical Outlook

 

By Alan Sculley

Vaden Todd Lewis, singer/guitarist of the Toadies, says he had a simple goal for No Deliverance, the new album by the recently reunited band.

“This is going to sound like a line, but it’s true,” Lewis said. “I seriously am happy people are digging the [new] record. But I did not care, really. I wanted to go in and do a record that was solid and good, and then go out and go on a tour. That was my objective with this record, and anything beyond that was cake.”

That statement says quite a bit about Lewis’ mindset about his career and his music these days.

During the Toadies’ first run together in the 1990s, Lewis definitely had an eye on how the band’s two albums were performing on the charts, and made no secret of his feelings that the group’s record company, Interscope, did not give the albums the level of promotion they deserved.

In fact, in a broader sense, Lewis appears more settled about his career and his life, and more able to deal with the hassles that inevitably come with working with a record company and navigating the business of rock ’n’ roll.

At one point he summed up the changes in his outlook.

“At the beginning, I was just angry,” Lewis said. “I was just angry and waiting to see who was going to dick me around and this, that and the other. It’s just not a productive way to be an adult. So I don’t do that anymore.”

Lewis had enough difficult experiences during the initial years of the Toadies’ career to be wary of anyone in the music business.

The Dallas-based group, which formed in 1989, enjoyed considerable success with its 1994 major-label debut album, Rubberneck. Even though the album produced two rock radio hits, “Possum Kingdom” (a song that still gets considerable airplay) and “I Come From The Water,” Lewis often expressed his feelings that Interscope was slow to promote the CD and only got behind the album after “Possum Kingdom” had caught on.

The success of Rubberneck would have seemed to position the Toadies for a far smoother run from that point forward. But that didn’t happen.

Instead, the group recorded a follow-up album, Feeler, only to see Interscope reject it and send the band back to the studio to start over. The band finally released the next album, Hell Below/Stars Above, in 2001.

But instead of building on the success of Rubberneck, things fell apart for the Toadies. Hell Below/Stars Above stiffed, and as frustrations mounted, bassist Lisa Umbarger abruptly quite the Toadies mid-tour in 2001. The group disbanded shortly afterward.

Lewis was so upset he was ready to quit music altogether.

But after a time, Lewis found he missed music, and he began writing with former Reverend Horton Heat drummer Taz Bentley. The duo went on to form the group the Burden Brothers, in 2002, and they went on to make two albums. By 2007, with no band project in the works, Lewis settled back into songwriting. As songs started to surface, he realized the music had some very Toadies-like qualities — although Lewis finds it hard to describe exactly what those qualities are.

“It’s just a feeling [Toadies songs] have, like an uneasiness or like a weirdness to it that is just, it’s just there’s something wrong going on, whether the lyrics are jacked up or the music is jacked up, there’s something that’s kind of amiss in a unique way,” Lewis said.

He contacted two other former members of the Toadies, guitarist Clark Vogeler and drummer Mark Reznicek, about doing an album, and the full-fledged reunion was on. Bassist Doni Blair, a musician Lewis had known from the group Hagfish, later completed the lineup.

In making No Deliverance, Lewis said he wanted to make a hard-rocking album. Fortunately, Lewis’ knack for building memorable pop hooks is intact as well, making songs like “So Long Lovey Eyes,” “Song I Hate” and “Hell In High Water” as catchy as they are bracing.

The Toadies plan to give fans a taste of the new material on tour, but Lewis said the band isn’t making No Deliverance the centerpiece of its set.

“You know, when I go see a band and they’ve got one album that I really like from way back and they come out and play a bunch of new stuff, nobody really wants to hear that,” he said. “So we generally come out and play a good chunk of Rubberneck, a good chunk of Hell Below and we throw in new songs intermittently throughout the set. We don’t do them in a block. I’m not into that.”

The Toadies perform at 8 p.m., on Saturday, Nov. 22 at Culture Room, 3045 N. Federal Highway, in Fort Lauderdale. Tickets are $15. Call 954-564-1074 for more information.   

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