You can also find some of my earlier music under the name Cousin Isaac on Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
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I grew up in Berkeley, California in the seventies where I began writing and recording songs in kindergarten, goofing around with Radio Shack cassette decks. I got more serious about songwriting in the eighties, starting bands with high school friends and recording demos on 4-track tape recorders.
After graduation, my band mates in a new wave band called the Love Drops and I moved into a warehouse in West Oakland where we practiced, recorded, and threw parties that would get busted by the cops. With the band’s eventual breakup, I went on to form a hip hop act with Ryan Greene called Positive Free Radicals, playing and recording around the Bay Area with various musicians and groups backing us as frontmen.
Eventually going solo, I began recording and performing under the name Cousin Isaac, using looping phrase samplers to perform live remixes of myself beatboxing, playing guitar and keys, and singing– often with the help of DJ friends and random rappers from the audience.
Over the next couple of decades, I bounced around between California, Hawaii, Japan and Laos, performing and recording out of a wheely bag. It was on a trip to South Korea, where I played a show to a mostly empty room, that I was first called Isaac Toast by my host, actor Jessica Rau, in reference to the Korean sandwich chain.
I took on the new Isaac Toast name during the Covid crisis where I realized that music was most important to me and that I needed a fresh start after a ten year hiatus from music, Now I pretty much stay put in California with my noisy ass cats that I brought back from Laos, putting them to work in my music and social media posts.
Here is the final version (hopefully) of the music video for Horse’s Mouth. I have finally released the single for streaming everywhere except Spotify and Apple Music where it will drop August 5th – Pre-Save it! My plan is to try to build momentum for the track on TikTok and Instagram before it is available…...
It has been a while since I have made any announcements as I have been working on getting my mixes to sound better. (You can hear the work in progress on SoundCloud.) But one thing I finally got around to doing was creating an NFT, since they seem to be all the rage and a…...
Here is a new version of the music video for Horse’s Mouth. Still a work in progress, this one is in color and a bit better synced up, though it is still petty rough. I am trying to go for that old-school lo-fi Xerox’d flier look- like when we used to go to Kinko’s and…...
Hot off the presses, here is a music video for Just Can’t Take It No More that I am working on. Both the video and the song itself are still works in progress and, as always, I’d love to get your feedback. So, let me know what you think at [email protected] Thanks! ...
Isaac Toast · Works in Progress Here are mostl the tracks I have been working on in various states of completion. There are a few new additions I haven’t mentioned yet- a piano intro, a seventies tv show theme song inspired track called Melancholy Flower, and a dirty little groove called Dirty Pretty Tings (for…...
I’m starting to get excited about releasing all this new music I have been working on. And I’ve mentioned how I’ve gotten a bit hung up on getting the feel of the bass right on Horse’s Mouth which is to be my first single. I think it is to the point where I am almost…...
Here is a new version of Horse’s Mouth. I think this is pretty close to done. I am debating whether to send it off to be mixed and mastered elsewhere. More ears are better, but I am also on a pretty tight budget. The question is whether this sounds good enough or not. What do…...
I’ve had this song in my head for years and never recorded it or even played it out loud until now. This is a rough draft of the work in progress. It’s about a guy who’s cult leader, or perhaps the voice in his head or perhaps even his God tells him to go and…...
I’ve been listening to a bunch of podcasts to learn how to market my music while say, doing the dishes. Pretty much all of them say that running Facebook ads to send people to your website’s email list (and to some extent your Spotify as well) are the way to go. I experimented with ads a…...
So… I have been hearing the baseline to Horse’s Mouth in my head for years. And now I am working on recording it the way I hear it in my head. But, I haven’t played bass in years. I mean, I was never an actual bass player. Same with guitar. And piano. And drums. That…...
Here’s another work in progress track I’ve had in my head for years and am only now recording. The lyrics sound like a cry for help but, like a lot of my songs, they really just sounded good to me. I added the last verse recently, which turned the song into being about giving up…...
So… my life is basically all cats all the time. I am a full time kitty daddy ever since our little Peanut went missing around the beginning of the pandemic. I found her two days later all messed up. Its a long story but basically the doctors suggested euthanasia, saying she may never walk again…...
This is the track that got me back into doing music again after a years-long hiatus. I started recording it at the beginning of the Pandemic using Logic, to which I was new. So, it took me a while to get the hang of Logic and get back into the swing of making and writing…...
Hello, my name is Isaac Toast and I am a TV addict. Ever since I decided to make a last ditch effort to make music again, I’ve decided to completely give up TV. I’ve done this in the past a few times. When we lived in Japan we had no TV and thus I was…...
My new Ibanez TMB35 Talman 5-String short neck bass arrived today. I read the reviews so wasn’t expecting much, but wanted to try it for myself and there were very few 5 string short neck basses in my price range. Mainly, I wanted to replace the bass line in my new song “Horse’s Mouth” which…...
Here’s a preview of my work in progress: “Horse’s Mouth”. This will be my first single as Isaac Toast on my indie label idnote and will feature an intro by Jah Bonz. I wrote this song in my head decades ago- perhaps 3 of them. But as far as I recall I have never recorded…...
Welcome to my new musical life as Isaac Toast. Some of you may know me as Cousin Isaac. Well, like 3 of you anyway. But even though I have only a few monthly listeners on Spotify, you can Google Cousin Isaac and at least I come up first and have my own knowledge panel. That…...
