4 Toto Songs That Sound Like the Beatles

One of their biggest influences.

Toto came out with their first self-titled album in 1978. Their first 4 albums were with singer Bobby Kimball and bassist David Hungate. After the fourth album, Toto IV, these two original bandmates left Toto.

During these early years (1978–1984), Toto sounded more like the Beatles in some of their songs. They had a British feel to their music, especially, with their first two albums, Toto and Hydra.

Here are the four songs I think sound the most like the Beatles from these first 4 albums:

“Rockmaker” (Toto) singer/songwriter David Paich

2. “Manuela Run” (Toto) singer/songwriter David Paich

3. “Lorraine” (Hydra) singer/songwriter David Paich

4. “St. George and the Dragon” (Hydra), singer Bobby Kimball, songwriter David Paich

Summary

These are also four of my favorite Toto songs. Interestingly, none of these became big hits. They did make a music video for “St. George and the Dragon”.

You can also hear some of the influences of British singer/songwriter Elton John in these songs, one of Paich’s biggest influences.

David Paich is the songwriter of most of Toto’s songs, including the number one single “Africa” from Toto IV.

He wrote all four of these tunes and was the lead singer in three of the four. Lead vocalist Bobby Kimball, guitarist Steve Lukather, and keyboardist Steve Porcaro helped with backup vocals and probably all the members helped David write and compose the songs.

Not only do these songs sound British, but they also sound like the Beatles with their pop rhythms and melodic harmonies.

Toto is the most versatile band ever, even the best musical band of all time. Their ability to blend different styles, compose complex sounds, execute with studio recording precision, use different lead vocalists, and adapt to the changing times and bandmates is unparalleled in music history.

These four songs not only sound like the Beatles and Elton John, they’re also the most underrated songs of Toto’s early years.

Nearly every song on their first two albums should have been number-one hits, yet only “Hold the Line” made it to the top 10 on the American charts.

I included the live version and studio version for the first two. The second two are the studio versions with “St. George and the Dragon” having a music video.

Hope you enjoy these songs, let me know what you think, are there more songs that sound like the Beatles? Do you agree these sound like their musical heroes, the Beatles and Elton John?

If you’d like to support my writing, click here.

Comments

Opinion: Most communities in Oregon and the US are Republican, yet Democrats are in charge

2022 Oregon Governor Election Photo Assuming election results are valid in Oregon, which does take a lot of faith these days after the questions about the 2020 US Presidential election arose, Democrat Tina Kotek won the Governor’s race in 2022 by a slim margin over Republican Christine Drazan. The interesting aspect of this win is how many of Oregon’s 36 counties voted Republican vs. Democrat. Looking at the political map, almost the entire state is red with only a few small counties in the northwest having the blue color. Specifically, there were 7 counties that voted Democrat and 29 that voted Republican. The difference is the 7 counties voting blue are the most populous counties, also the counties with the most residents coming from other states – much like Tina Kotek herself, a transplant from Pennsylvania . Tina only won the campaign to be Oregon’s 39th Governor by 66,727 votes over Christine Drazan. Said in another way, the Democrats pulled off another close election with m...

Rocky (1976) Movie Review

Duncan Chen/ Flickr One of the best movies of all time. The Genuine Approach It’s hard to believe this iconic American movie was created 50 years ago in 1976, three years before I was even born. It is also hard to believe how well the movie has stood the test of time as one of the best American movies ever made. The entire Rocky series of movies, including 6 movies directly about Rocky Balboa (not counting the two Creed movies which have him as a secondary character), are amazing movies that inspire the viewer and represent the American dream of working our way up from the bottom to become a success. Although the subsequent Rocky movies are great in their own right, none of them compare to the original Rocky movie. What makes the original Rocky movie one of the best of all time isn’t one thing, rather it is a culmination of a myriad of factors that combined at the right time to give us a genuine, humble, and ever-relatable stor...

Attention Seeking in the Hive Mind Collective

Losing and finding motivation in a fake online world. The perception of reality is what rules the online world, yet reality is what we have to face in our flesh and bone lives. How does the perception change the reality of our lives? The spinning stimulus the online world creates in our minds, balloons the creative ideas and then sends them shooting out the sides of the tornado. Catching these fleeting ideas and taking the time to express them becomes too arduous in a world of changing themes in the translucent hive mind concept. Before the methodical writer chews on the idea and takes the time to process them into a clarifying expression, the winds of change blow in thousands more that distract and override the initial project. The bots and human hackers, plying for greatness and attention, clamoring for a slice of the fake bot pie, have already exhausted every avenue of thought the masses are cornered into considering from social engineering tactics. Attention is scarce, and more so ...

The Orchestrated Mess

A short story about an amazing mess and the inevitable clean-up, as the show must go on. The Uncivil Mess of the Masses The people in the land were afraid of the future and what it would bring to them and their civilization. Even calling it a civilization was a stretch, considering the uncivil way many people were behaving within it. What most of the citizens and strangers in the land didn’t know was how everything was being orchestrated; the purpose of the orchestration was to create a certain amount of chaos from which order would then be applied. Like sanding and scrapping the old paint off a building and applying primer and new coats upon it for revitalization, the trillionaire elitists were working their plans into the societies beneath their illustrious purview. Most people couldn’t imagine having millions of dollars, much less billions or trillions at their disposal. The type of perceptions this brings of the world are much different than they could reasonably perceive, even amo...

Business and Society Articles

Search This Blog