Steve Lukather
Versatile musician, guitarist, vocalist, composer, producer and arranger Steve Lukather was born in Los Angeles on October 21 in 1957. Before his father bought him a guitar (a simple Kay acoustic) and a copy of Meet the Beatles at the age of seven, Luke started to play drums and keyboards. "I love keyboards, I write all my songs on keyboards except for the real obvious 'burn' tunes. I find it much easier, you have all these great synth sounds and you play a C chord and it's sounds like God, and you start thinking melodies as opposed to chops." (Lukather, 1986).

Lukather was Toto’s lead guitarist, but he also sang and composed a lot. When the band started out, Jeff Porcaro was the band leader, and he wrote most of the songs. Later Lukather’s role started looking more and more like Porcaro’s. When Porcaro died, Lukather stepped up and made sure the band kept going.

After firing their vocalist Jean-Michel Byron in 1990, Toto had no lead singer from 1990to 1997. Lukather did most of the vocal parts for the band in that time. He provided lead vocals in every track on 1992’s Kingdom of Desire and 1995’s Tambu except for two instrumental tracks. The Tabu single I will Remember reached the 64th place on the UK charts. Despite the success of the song, reviewers noted that he struggled with the vocals. Toto had to bring their former lead singers Joseph Williams and Bobby Kimball for the collaboration Toto XX in 1988, that’s when Lukather could stop doing the lead vocals.

Lukather’s song writing contributions have grown along the way, and it’s noticeable that only one of the earlier Toto songs was written by him, namely I Won’t Hold You Back. He also admits that lyric writing isn’t his strong point, so he collaborated with other band members to get his musical ideas into hits.

In June 2008, Lukather decided to leave Toto. This also lead to the break up of the band. Steve was already 50 years old and he really felt like his Toto time was over. ‘ "I just cant do it anymore and at 50 years old I wanted to start over and give it one last try on my own." ‘ and:’ "Honestly I have just had enough. This is NOT a break. It is over. I really can't go out and play Hold the Line with a straight face anymore." ‘