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.