Is Toto calling it quits after four decades? Founding member Steve Lukather seems to think so.
In an interview with The Morning Call, Lukather said "we're calling it a day."
"We’ve had some horrendous litigation. Horrendous, horrendous, awful, mean, you-gotta-be-kidding-me kind of lawsuits, and we lost the suit. So it beat us down," he said, without going into specifics. (There have been well publicized battles with original lead singer Bobby Kimball and former record label executives.)
"So we gotta get away from this. We gotta get away from the whole thing."
Lukather said the band’s current line-up “is dead” once it wraps up the 40 Trips Around The Sun tour on Sunday night in Philadelphia.
“That's going to be … the end of this configuration of Toto,” he said.
Lukather said he's got a solo project coming out and plans to continue playing with Billy Gibbon's Supersonic Blues Machine and Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band.
So, is Toto dead?
"I don’t know, man. I can’t predict the future,” said Lukather. "I can tell you that this version is dead October 20 ... I know that we just gotta take a break from all this. We were beat up really badly and we gotta heal and figure out what’s going on.
"I mean, the music’s still there. I’m not saying I’m never gonna play this music again — that would be stupid to say; that would be a lie."
A rep for Toto told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Toto will merely be taking a hiatus. “Future plans will be announced in 2020 as they unfold and become formal,” said Steve Karas.