In this interview I speak to Toby Gad, one of the world’s most successful songwriters & music producers whose songs have won GRAMMYs and a Diamond Award. Toby has been sought after by artists including Beyonce, Madonna, John Legend, Paul McCartney & Andrea Bocelli for his extraordinary musicianship, writing and producing ability – no surprise therefore that his top songs have been streamed over 18 billion times.
He is known for co-writing songs including John Legend’s biggest hit, “All of Me“, the fifth-highest certified single in RIAA history, and for co-writing and producing “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by Fergie and “If I Were a Boy” by Beyoncé. Toby’s latest project Piano Diaries transforms his biggest hits into emotive piano-vocal masterpieces, featuring today’s stars like Victoria Justice, Keke Palmer & Aloe Blacc, Johnny Orlando, Louisa Johnson, Angelina Jordan, Celina Sharma, and more. This project offers a fresh take on his timeless songs, captivating a new generation.
Q: How did music become your life?
[Toby Gad]: When I grew up, my parents had a jazz band. I think when I was in my mother’s womb I already listened to all those songs, because they had a limited repertoire of about 40 songs and performed twice a week. As kids, we thought this was the coolest thing. After my parents finished rehearsing in the living room, we would play with their instruments and pretend we were the cool musicians. Soon after, when I was maybe 5, 6 or 7 years old, we started doing our own songs and performed during the intermissions of our parents’ jazz band. That’s how we made our first pocket money, and it worked pretty well.
From there, we played in local bands. When I was 10 we were on some radio shows, and at 18 or 19 we had 3 songs land on the Milli Vanilli album. That was the first time we realized you can actually make real money with music. Until then it was always from gig to gig, making 100 Marks back in the day. But having those songs on Milli Vanilli showed us that you could have a B-side of a number one record and live off that for a while. It was incredible.
Q: What does music do for us?
[Toby Gad]: Music is definitely a form of communication, and it gives me a good feeling. If I’m hungry and sit at the piano to play, I’m not hungry anymore. I’ll forget everything when I make music. I think when we listen to music, it allows us to feel things. It allows people to cry when they have pent up emotions and hear a sad song. They cry and it feels good because now they have permission to. Or if they feel rebellious and listen to a rebellious song, it unlocks feelings that people sometimes hold back in normal life.
So I think music is a very strong conduit, almost like therapy for a lot of people, to feel more, be kids again, enjoy life and so on.
Q: What is the unique beauty of the piano?
[Toby Gad]: For me, the piano is an instrument I bonded with early on because of my mother. It covers a wide bandwidth. Drums are a cool instrument but you don’t have melodies. The guitar doesn’t cover the same bandwidth. But the piano is like an orchestra – it can give you all these frequencies, rhythm and soft notes.
One of my main takeaways with piano is that I grew up listening to Keith Jarrett. In the 70s, he did incredible concerts of piano improvisation where he would have no plan, go on stage and play the first note, feel whatever is in the room and turn that into music. For me, that’s the foundation of songwriting: improvisation. In improvisation on instruments, I feel creation is going a new path with every note, somewhere you haven’t been before. You discover things, you’re the adventurer in music. That leads to new songs and nice adventures. I improvise a lot on the piano. It makes me happy to just start somewhere, listen to the fingers playing and see what comes out.
Q: What is your writing process?
[Toby Gad]: I usually start at the end. When you listen to a song for the first time, if there’s something you remember from it the next day, that’s where I can start writing the song. Whatever the takeaway is, that’s the starting point for me.
Once I find a few words that feel very strong, or a melody, or just a little building block that really inspires me, I want to know the story of those words or that sentence. Like with “If I Were A Boy” – my co-writer BC Jean at the time was in love with a boy who was unkind to her, and she said “If I were a boy, I would be a much better man.” I was like, “Wait a minute, did you just say ‘If I were a boy’? Let’s go back to the studio – what else would you do if you were a boy?”
Finding those little marvels opens doors to a whole movie, a whole song. I want to know the story.
Q: How do you effectively collaborate when writing?
[Toby Gad]: To me, writing a song is like a ball game. You bounce the ball back and forth until someone doesn’t want to play anymore. When you make music, you want to make someone feel something. So if you write in collaboration, you can have a good reality check if you can make each other feel something with every new word, every new melody. As soon as someone doesn’t feel it anymore, maybe try a different word or idea, keep searching.
I haven’t written much by myself. It’s always been collaborative, and I feed off the other person I work with. I feel it’s much easier to write in collaboration.
Q: What are the characteristics of some of the greatest artists?
[Toby Gad]: Legendary artists are not one hit wonders. They have staying power, they’ve been there for years, decades, generations. Like Beyoncé. After we recorded “If I Were A Boy”, she sat down on the couch with me and was extremely loving, nice, and wanted to know about my family and how I feel about things. I showed her how to play the song on guitar. She was very humble, a great communicator, someone you really want to engage with. That humility when talking to people stuck with me.
Working with Madonna, we did 5 weeks in the studio, and she stayed until the very end. Diplo left before Madonna because his career was blowing up at the time. That was partly why she asked me back, because I was the finisher, I made sure things got finished. Madonna hated it if someone left the session before the song was done. She was a very, very hard worker, even after decades of being on top. For her it’s the whole cycle – write the songs, produce the record, rehearse them, go on stage, do a world tour, then repeat.
Q: How do performers make it personal for you, even in front of thousands?
[Toby Gad]: I think that comes with the performer being very comfortable on stage, feeling like it’s their comfort zone. Some people are comfortable in life but nervous when they perform in front of others. Then there are people who might be nervous in real life, but when they get on stage, they’re in their element. They start to shine, feel confident, and you want to be them. Those are the perfect performers – once they’re on stage with all eyes on them, they become confident and start to function. That’s a real skill to have.
Of course, the song also has to resonate with the artist so it feels authentic. When they perform it, they feel “This is my life, I’m sharing something out of my journal with the audience.”
Q: How do you stay humble in a world of star power?
[Toby Gad]: First of all, I hide all these things. They are not in my work room. You don’t have to look at your past accomplishments. Often a song becomes popular years after it’s been written, so the writing is very different from getting rewards for it.
Whenever I write a new song with somebody, it feels like the first time. I sometimes feel embarrassed, humiliated, like I don’t know what I’m doing until we find a spark. You have to dare to go to this place where, even though you’ve done it before, it feels like you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it. Then suddenly someone says something and I’m like “Oh my god yes, this is a song, let’s go for it!”
Q: Why did you decide to recreate great music, stripped back with a piano?
[Toby Gad]: A lot of these songs had their peak maybe 10-20 years ago. I felt it was time to pass the torch to young new talent, so I wanted to re-record them. I also wanted to put all my biggest songs on one record, take ownership of it and say “Wow, I wrote these. This is my collection.”
But I also wanted to reimagine them in the way they were written. Most songs were written on piano, and when you write on piano, you just have the piano, the voice, the composition. We get chills and go “Oh my god, this is incredible, we have to share this with the world.” That raw feeling can sometimes get lost when you start producing it, adding instrumentation and it becomes this big thing. With just piano and voice, there’s so much magic and more nuances and details you can hear in the lyric.
I wanted to share the sonics of what goes on in the room here. I just added a little bit of strings here and there with the help of my dear friend Lauren Conklin, who’s very good with string instrumentation. But it’s all based on just piano and voice. It was a challenge for me to see if I could do that.
Sometimes it took weeks. For instance, with “Untouched”, the song I had with The Veronicas that was double platinum in America, it took me a long time to figure out how to translate the punk rock/pop feel of the original to piano.
Q: What are the inputs to your creative process?
[Toby Gad]: That’s an interesting question. I love nature and being outside, but that’s more of a palette cleanser. If I’m in a beautiful place like the Pacific, I love kitesurfing, stand up paddle board surfing, or catching waves on a normal surfboard. After that I feel so accomplished, even though I haven’t done anything, and I’m ready to create again.
I guess there’s also the fact that I grew up with an older brother and was very competitive in the early years. He was always ahead of me with instruments, songwriting, everything. Girls, whatever. So maybe I was conditioned as a child to always overachieve and try to outdo my brother, to hopefully eventually get to his level. Because for the first twelve years, he was a little older and better at everything, until I felt I had caught up. Maybe that never left me.
There were crazy parts of my career where in 2015 I pulled the plug and said “I need to live again, I have 2 daughters now and I need to be a human being. I can’t do 180 songs every year.” But in those years, the more songs you write, the easier it comes. That’s one of the scary things – you can really get lost in songwriting. And the more successful songs you have, the more doors open and suddenly you can write with anyone you’ve ever dreamed of. But the question was, where does the inspiration come from?
Vikas: And is this where collaboration comes in?
[Toby Gad]: Some producers and writers have a lifetime collaborator. I’m the opposite. For me it’s maybe one or two songs with a person, but mostly it’s a one song encounter with an artist. I love meeting and talking to new people, finding out what moves them. Quite often that first encounter leads to a song. I learn something about them and there’s a feeling or something they say that sticks with me. I feel “Wow, I want to make something out of it and share it with the world.”
I’ve probably worked with 600-700 artists in my career, a lot of different artists, and everyone inspires in a different way.
Q: What do you hope your legacy will be?
[Toby Gad]: I think the Piano Diaries project, which is out now and I’m very happy about, is a labour of love that took a year for the first 8 song record. I’m about to finish the 16-song record which will add 8 more songs. That is legacy for me – putting these songs into one record, performing them.
I’ve done over a dozen shows this year, performing my songs with different artists. There was a very nice one at the Palladium in London, 2500 people in the audience. I got to perform some of my best songs with different artists, tell the stories of how the songs came about. It was so nice how the audience was appreciative of the stories. It was interactive, I asked them things, went back and forth, asked if they wanted to sing along with “All of Me”.
To me, that is legacy – bringing these songs that I have dispersed through the artists’ world, so many artists have these songs, but now putting them onto one record and seeing them as my legacy. It’s a good feeling. I’m very happy about that.