TOEHIDER // All Organic Low Fat Meat Loaf

If you like music and you haven’t heard of Toehider, aka Melbourne’s multi-instrumental wunderkind Mike Mills, your ears ought to feel rather upset with you.

Mike’s special menu of sumptuous licks, wild riffs, and ideas beyond the realms of Earthly imagination course through every song on new album GOOD – as does everything Mike touches. Catching up with him just after the release of the excellent GOOD, we get deep. High school memory deep.

MORE: Check out this week’s Hysteria Radio Top 20 tracks here!

Hysteria: GOOD is out. Yeah, lets talk about that.

Mike: Sure, well it came out a couple of weeks ago and it’s been pretty well received. It’s about time somebody compared me to Jim Steinman, I think that was long over due.

Bah! Surely someone’s said it before.

I was pretty round and portly in high school, so my nickname was Meat Loaf, but that’s about as close as I’ve ever come. I’m sort of starting to be compared to the true genius behind Meat Loaf’s work, I don’t know.

To be fair, Meat Loaf is the puppet and Jim Steinman is the puppet master.

Yeah, absolutely. If you hear things That Jim has written for Celine Dion on whatever the hell on … Oh, he also wrote Bonnie Tyler, Total Eclipse of The Heart. I mean, these songs are clear master works. So it’s very obvious to see and hear who the real guy is.

This Corrosion by Sisters of Mercy, the soundtrack to Streets On Fire…

Oh right, I didn’t know that.

There you go. Enough about Steinman, let’s talk about Toehider.

Nah.

Fair enough. Steinman it is. But seriously now, how did you hook up with Andrew Saltmarsh, who does all your artwork?

Salty has basically done all of the artworks for Toehider since the beginning, and sort of continues to be the main collaborative thing. That’s how we work, I don’t really tend to write with other musicians or anything like that. It seems much more fun to do it this way, to bounce ideas back and forth with an illustrator. I don’t know, it’s just a fun way to do things.

As for this album, obviously you’ve done so many different things in the past. You did 12 EPs in 12 months thing, you put out singles, you put out all this stuff. This is the most conventional thing you’ve done in such a long time. Why decide, “I’m gonna do an album now?”

I don’t know, I don’t really think about things too much, I just go for whatever feels right at the time. I think the last full length album I did was in 2014, I’ve released a few EPs since then. It tends to be, just to break things up I suppose. Yeah, I guess well, as you said, I haven’t really released an album in the conventional way. I think that even What Kind of Creature Are You was one of those crowd-funding efforts, where I sort of wrote a bunch of other songs for people, a lot of custom songs. I did a few bits and pieces, so this one’s probably the first time I’ve done things, air quotes, “Right.” Like in the correct way that people release music, I just thought I’d give it a shot and see what kind of response I’d get from doing it this way. And I think musically, it doesn’t jump around as much as the last album, stylistically, which wasn’t really intentional, it’s just the way it came out.

I remember when I was in high school, this kid used to come back every weekend and just talk about a drug that he tried on the weekend. Like he would say, “Oh, I just tried mushrooms on the weekend and I got into a fight with a statue, and doing cocaine, or whatever.” And I was like, “Man, are you sure you wanna be doing this?” And he’s like, “Well, I just gotta try everything at least once.”
[MIKE]

Obviously, we talked about Jim Steinman and some of the prog stuff, but there’s acoustic stuff on there. Toehider to me is an anything goes project. Accurate?

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve never really been very good at writing in one kind of, I guess style, or one mood. I’ve always enjoyed explorations. I remember when I was in high school, this kid used to come back every weekend and just talk about a drug that he tried on the weekend. Like he would say, “Oh, I just tried mushrooms on the weekend and I got into a fight with a statue, and doing cocaine, or whatever.” And I was like, “Man, are you sure you wanna be doing this?” And he’s like, “Well, I just gotta try everything at least once.” That was his whole thing with all of that kind of stuff. And I feel like, I’ve never done any drugs in my life, but I think music is my drug man.

Please don’t print that.

Okay Mike, at least you didn’t say “music is my girlfriend”, that would just be awful.

“Music is like my children, man.” No, but I guess the reason I brought that up is, because I obviously have felt like that with music. I love country music, and I love classical music and I love metal, and rock, pop. I just get too curious, and I just wanna see if I can write something like that for myself. So, that’s the reason why I jump around so much. And not too much within the context of a single song either. It’s like, Twelve Foot Ninja can really nail that idea of going from a heavy chorus to a Latin feel for the verse, or whatever the case may be. I’m not very good at doing that so sort of, stick with the one thing more or less within the one song, and then jump ship for the next thing. I don’t know, it just seems to excite me, helps me keep going, to try things, and new moods, and new emotions.

It seems like every song could be its own mini album.

Yeah. I think, again, it comes from the folk music kind of story telling. I’m always about writing stupid stories about things. And I’ve often thought about writing the big concept album and just sticking with one story, but I don’t know if I can do that. Once again, like so many people, like the Ayreon thing, you know, Ayreon’s really nailing that kind of thing. But I think my strength is to, just write these mini short stories I guess.

Ayreon is George R.R. Martin, you’re more like a Harlan Ellison.

I don’t know who that is, but it sounds good.

He’s a short stories guy. Science fiction.

Yeah, that’s a perfect analogy. I suppose they’re not novels, they’re just collections of short stories.

While we’re on the Ayreon thing, you went overseas to do The Human Equation stage show. What was that like?

That was in 2015, and yeah, we did another bunch of live gigs this year as well. But The Human Equation show … It was just an incredible experience to be able to work with James LaBrie (Dream Theater) and Anneke van Giersbergen (ex-The Gathering, VUUR), and all these amazing singers. I was the least known person in the whole cast. And it was good, but it was pretty heavy stuff, first of all, because I was singing Mike Baker’s (Shadow Gallery) song Loser, when he only passed away a couple of years ago. And also, doing all of Devin Townsend’s parts, and Devin’s fans are pretty fricking hard core. So I kinda feel like no matter how well … There’s no way I could’ve done that well, in certain Devin Townsend fan’s eyes.

It was a great experience but it was also quite confronting, being criticised on that level, I really had to develop a bit of a thick skin, or else I would’ve just been a complete mess. It’s like, “Well, what am I gonna say, no? Oh, nah sorry, I’m not gonna do Devin Townsend’s parts because I’m scared that his fans aren’t going to like it,” you know, I had to do it. I just put my own spin on it.

How involved is the band in creating the album, or do you just make the album and then assemble the band for the shows?

Yeah, I guess it’s more of probably more of the latter concept. I tend to work the best when I’m working by myself. I guess a couple of different reasons. If I wanna record impulsively at 3 o’clock in the morning, I can just do that, without having to round up the musicians. I’ve been in bands before, where we’ve tried to write collaboratively, and that’s always been a massive struggle for me. When I write music, I tend to hear everything more or less completed in my head, all the way down to drum fills and, and all that kind of stuff. So, it just sort of makes sense to honour that vision in a way.

But for this new record, there’s this song called This Conversation Is Over, which I think is the first time, in the history of Toehider, where a full band is actually playing on the album, rather than just me doing everything. I’ve had previous band members play on tracks here and there, but never as a full group, so that’s a first. And it’s like you said before, it’s an experimental kind of project, so who knows what happens in the future. Maybe I’ll get over my control freak-isms and write an album with a bunch of other guys, who knows.

Well, that’s another thing. The thing that’s always struck me about Toehider is, it is unconventional, ’cause you put out songs, and then one day you decide “I’m gonna record Wuthering Heights in the original key, because I can.”

I’m a bit in two minds when it comes to doing covers on, you know, doing the YouTube cover artist thing. I think it’s kinda good, but it’s also a bit lazy to me, taking a song that’s already familiar to a lot of people and it’s a bit of a trap, really, because people start to expect you to do more of that stuff, and I only ever really do the covers if it’s something I think is really exciting, or really interesting to do. So I’ve never really wanted to go down the full … There’s guys out there, who just do metal covers of songs for example, and all that kind of thing. I mean, it’s okay, but I still got a lot of ideas in my head that I wanna do myself.

So yeah, I agree with you. It’s probably kind of confusing to some people, it’s like, “What is he doing? What is this?” Sometimes he’s writing these serious songs, and sometimes they’re these joke songs, and covers, and all the rest of it.

I wouldn’t say they’re joke songs. They are light-hearted. But, do you cop shit from finger-wagging metalheads saying “You can’t do this, it’s not metal enough?”

Yeah, it is kind of frustrating I suppose. I guess it is, what it is. Because there’s this part of me that enjoys seeing people getting wound up over it, which probably isn’t a very healthy trait, but anyway. I guess there is an element of wanting to challenge people though. And sometimes it is successful, people say they don’t normally listen to this kind of stuff, or it’s too intriguing not to check out. But then other times, people are like, “Yeah, I don’t get what the hell this guy’s trying to do,” which is fair enough.

At least you aren’t doing drum covers. Makes no sense.

Yep, or tambourine covers.

Do you have plans to take GOOD on the road?

Yeah, there’s preliminary plans, where we’re doing Progfest early next year. And yeah, we wanna go out and do a bunch of shows to further promote this record, but yeah, we’ll wait until then. We’ll probably wait until next year to get all that stuff kind of underway. I’ve been recording and whoring myself out with a bunch of other albums and releases and stuff so they will probably all start to come out next year as well. I think, maybe next year, at least the second half of next year might be more of a … I might spend more time collaborating, or just lending my voice out to other projects. Who knows? You could get some Toehider news very soon…

GOOD is out now on Bird’s Robe Records.