The popular rock band Toto (led by Steve Lukather and Joseph Williams) will play Davenport's Capitol Theatre on February 19 (photo courtesy of Steven Karas).
Nearly 49 years after first forming, the pop-rock band Toto is still going strong, and brings its national tour to Davenport’s Capitol Theatre on February 19.
Veteran band members Steve Lukather and Joseph Williams have curated a new set list for this excursion featuring more than two hours of music nightly. In 2025, touring with Christopher Cross and Men at Work, Toto drew more than a half-million fans, and scored more than a billion streams last year alone.
Toto’s biggest hit “Africa” has hit the milestone of two billion total plays on Spotify, while “Hold the Line” exceeds one billion streams. On the sales side, “Africa” has been certified Diamond by the RIAA (10 million sold), with “Hold the Line” certified triple platinum for sales of 3 million copies, while “Rosanna” hit the milestone of double platinum for sales of 2 million. Cumulative Toto album sales are at 50 million copies.
One of the most exciting details worth celebrating is the continual youth of the band’s audience. Consistently, more than a half-billion annual streams are from those 34 years or younger, according to a Toto tour release. Night after night, the live audience has become a celebration of three generations coming together.
“It's great,” said Williams, the 65-year-old son of legendary film composer John Williams, in a recent interview. “Europe has always been a big, big deal for us. The U.S. is starting to sort of match that, which is really great. Back in the day, the band primarily focused their energies on territories like Europe.”
This February and March, the tour will focus on smaller, more intimate venues in which Toto can do longer shows. “Having just spent a year doing sort of the bigger cavernous kind of places, it's going to be a nice shift to come back to these places that sound great and look beautiful,” Williams said.
Despite “Africa” being Toto’s biggest hit, they have only performed on that continent once (in the '90s), in South Africa, and Williams hopes they will return for the band’s 50th anniversary.
He didn’t play on the original album (Toto IV) that debuted “Rosanna” and “Africa,” but joined soon after in 1986, with Toto’s sixth and seventh records. Williams took a break from the band and toured in 1998, then rejoined for the 2005 album Falling in Between, toured with the group, and has been back for good since 2010.
Williams was a fan of the band before he joined in the '80s, and has known members of Toto since before they were a band. He first met Lukather in 1974, when Williams was 14. Meanwhile, the father of co-founder and principal songwriter David Paich and Joseph's dad John Williams were friends and colleagues.
Paich’s father was also a film composer and very famous and successful arranger, Williams said. “He arranged for a lot of great singers back in the day – a wonderful conductor and just sort of an all-around wonderful guy.”
Joseph said that Toto, from the beginning, was always a multiple-lead-singer band. Bobby Kimball sang lead from 1977 to 1984 (including on the hit singles “Hold the Line,” “Rosanna,” and “Africa”), and again from 1998 to 2008.
“The big ballads that the band has had have mostly been Lukather's leads, and Dave has sung a lot of the rock-and-roll songs,” Williams said. “The high tenor, which is what I do and what Bobby did, just runs around with a microphone, for the most part, as opposed to playing an instrument. But everybody sings, and it's pretty much the same in this version of the band.
“The one thing to remember with Toto that people may not remember, or get, is that the personnel of the band's been changing from the very beginning,” he added. “The true concept of the band is outrageously great studio musicians and songwriting.”
Lukather has been in the group since the start, and Williams also represents the 'old days.' “But to everybody else in the group,” he said, “the prerequisite is you have to be a great player.”
Influence of a Famous Father
John Williams, whose staggering list of original scores includes the compositions for Jaws, the Star Wars series, the Indiana Jones series, Superman, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Schindler’s List, has earned 26 Grammy Awards and five Academy Awards (out of 54 Oscar noms), while Toto has six Grammys, including Record of the Year for “Rosanna” and Album of the Year for 1983's Toto IV. But Williams was also strongly influenced by his mother, who was a singer and Broadway performer before he was born.
“I always wanted to do that,” Joseph Williams said. “I wanted to be a performer more than anything. But have I been influenced by my dad? Of course. Absolutely. And when I did start working as a composer for TV for those years, he was great. A great resource and mentor. Absolutely.”
For 1983's Return of the Jedi, Joseph wrote some lyrics for his father, translated into an alien language, and recorded some voice parts for the Ewoks at the end of that film. He later wrote and recorded some rhythm tracks for the Star Wars prequels The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.
“He doesn't ever do, and has never done, anything just for the sake of trying to get a deal for your kid,” Williams said. “Also, I wanted to be a performer. I wanted to be in rock and roll. He doesn't rock and roll. He's a jazz guy.”
But in addition to rock, Joseph has had experience with show tunes, and he said that getting to sing the role of the adult Simba in Disney’s The Lion King was “a stroke of luck.
“There were a couple people who worked in the music department at Disney producers, who were acquainted with me,” he recalled. “They brought me in originally to do the singing on Aladdin, and I sang a bunch of things for the main character, but the composer just wanted the kid that they hired to do the speaking voice – to do the whole part.”
Williams was surprised that what he recorded for Lion King (with the part spoken by Matthew Broderick) was used in the final blockbuster.
“I'm just happy to be a part of it in any way,” he said. “And then when I went and saw it with my wife was the first time, I heard my voice, and realized that they had used what I had done for them. So I found out when the film came out that I actually made the film.
“They were looking for more of a pop kind of vibe, which is why they called me,” Williams said, noting that his vocals were included in the hit “Hakuna Matata.”
“They let me go in there and just sort of try a few things in the studio and see what stuck,” Williams said. “And they loved it. And that was what ended up on 'Hakuna Matata.' It's still just such an honor to be a part of something like a Disney animation.”
Old Is New
The last Toto studio album came out nearly eight years ago, with Old Is New released as part of the band's All In box set in 2018, and separately in 2020. The tracks “Devil's Tower,” “Spanish Sea,” and “Oh Why” feature deceased band members and brothers Jeff (who died in 1992) and Mike Porcaro (who died in 2015). And while, as Williams said, the job can get routine playing the same songs every night, every show comes with surprises.
“There are always little subtle sorts of differences. And of course, the energy is a little bit different for every show when we have these incredibly enthusiastic, great audiences,” he said. “The energy is obviously through the roof. [Although] touring is not as glamorous as people may think. There's a lot of travel, a lot of wear and tear. You really have to take care of yourself in order to do these gigs at 100 percent every day.”
Still, Williams said, “I love doing the songs that were hits in Europe, on the album that I was on, the seventh one, which was a big, big hit in Europe. A couple I co-wrote with David Paich. But to top them all, ‘Africa’ is a blast to do every day, because no matter where you are in the world, the audience participates like they're up on stage with you. I mean, the energy is incredible.”
An Evening with Toto comes to the Capitol Theatre (330 West Third Street, Davenport IA) on February 19, admission to the 7 p.m. concert event is $44-157, and more information and tickets are available by visiting FirstFleetConcerts.com/first-fleet-venues/capitol-theatre.
