Toadies

The Charmer, Toadies' latest album (Spaceflight Records), was recorded at Electrical Audio in Chicago with the legendary producer and engineer before his death in May 2024. For bassist Doni Blair and his bandmates, it fulfilled a dream that dated back to their classic, Rubberneck.

Vaden Todd Lewis and company had wanted Albini for that record in 1994, but Interscope wouldn't have it. Thirty years later, they finally got their shot and left with far more than they bargained for. Blair sat down with us to recount the experiences with Albini and the well-founded confidence of the band's new album.

Analogue: I saw set lists where you were playing about 75 percent of The Charmer in the early dates. That's a bold call.

Doni Blair: Vaden really wants to present it, you know? We own this. We saved up, put money aside from tours and paid for all of it ourselves. It's kind of a different mindset when everything is riding on you. And the response from the crowd has been even better than we expected.

When we start playing "Damage" and "The Charmer", the crowd lights up. And then the other ones, you can tell they're like, 'All right, new song. Cool.' They're not going to go get a beer or anything. They're hanging in.

Analogue: Take me into the Albini sessions. How did that come together?

Doni: We went and met him while we were on tour in '22. We went to Electrical Audio, had maybe a 10-minute meeting with him, he was in between sessions. And we were a little nervous at first but he could not have been the nicer person. He was so welcoming and very warm.

Steve has a reputation for an acerbic wit, and that was totally justified. Man, we got way more than we bargained for. But I think most people that went to him were very sensitive or something. We love dark humor. We screw with each other constantly. So it worked perfectly for us. He made fun of us, we made fun of him right back. We said the worst, darkest shit to each other and just cracked up. He could say the worst thing to us and we were laughing our asses off.

We don't get off on people kissing our ass. If it wasn't good, it's going to be living on this record forever, so please tell me if it sucked, you know? And he was keeping us honest. If we wanted to redo things. he was fine with it, but if we wanted to do it 10 times. he would've gone, 'Okay, that's enough. You're not Steely Dan.' [Laughs]

Analogue: Any specifics?

Doni: One day we were doing some backing vocals—Clark [Vogeler] and I were—and he suggested doing it a different way than we'd ever done it before. Both of us singing both harmonies. And the only people watching us were Steve, Vaden, and Tim McElrath from Rise Against, who had stopped by to hang out. Clark said, 'I don't want to do this.' And I said, 'I don't either, but we have to.' Tim told me later, he goes, 'That guy tries to say he's not a producer. He is a producer.' He was doing producer shit.

Analogue: How did you hear the news of his passing?

Doni: We had just left three weeks beforehand. We went back and did some more recording with him, and it was just one of those, 'All right, we'll finish up some other stuff, one of us will come back out in a month.' And my brother, he's in the band Rise Against, he was having lunch with some friends and they were asking how I was doing. And he said, 'Well, he just made a record with Steve Albini.' Like, oh, okay, cool. Fifteen minutes later, the guy looks at his phone and goes, 'Steve just died!' And my brother called me and I could not.. literally three weeks later.

It was a heartbreak because we pretty much had decided that Steve was our guy. We're like, 'All right, we're just gonna come here from now on.' We loved the neighborhood that Electrical Audio was in. We loved all of the engineers. We loved Steve. We were comfortable. And seeing a lot of the footage that Clark has put together, hearing Steve talk... it's like, ah, crap. We only got close to two months with him, but I'm glad we got it, man.

Analogue: What's the moment on the record you're most proud of?

Doni: That's a good question. I'd say overall, because we're all just so happy with it. But there's a specific moment. There's a song, "Come to Life", which is the second track. Vaden had it as a demo, we'd been working on it, and I kept pushing to put it on the album. Then he went back and added all of this stuff, just at the end of it that none of us saw coming. There's backing vocals, guitar harmonies from Clark, Rez [Mark Reznicek] doing this great Keith Moon stuff, and I'm following him doing my horrible imitation of John Entwistle. All of this happened in maybe a day. There hasn't been that much focus put on 30 seconds of music, probably ever.

Rez was just doing the drums and Vaden was like, 'Hey, go out there and follow him on what he's doing.' I'm like, 'What do you mean?' He goes, 'Just do whatever shit you do on the bass, go do that.' I was like, 'That?' He goes, 'Yep, that's it.' One take. And then Clark had some guitar harmonies and Vaden did these vocal harmonies. Because we'd done so much homework going in, we had time to mess around a little. We had easy time to just come up with different ideas.

Analogue: Anything coming up beyond the tour?

Doni: There is, but I can't talk about it yet. We've all got stuff going on music-wise, and the band has some surprises coming up. We're not just putting out The Charmer and then that's it for another five or six years. We're going to be out there doing a lot more stuff. Vaden's completely invigorated, Rez is. Those guys are in their 60s now and it's just, 'Let's go!' As long as people keep coming to the shows, we're going to keep doing it. And once that stops, we'll keep going because we just like to annoy people.

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