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Aug 10, 2018 Toto By Christopher Roberts

Back in May a teenaged Weezer fan named Mary convinced the band to cover Toto’s 1982 hit “Africa” via a jokey Twitter account fittingly named “weezer cover africa by toto.” At first Weezer covered Toto’s “Rosanna” instead, a song also featured on their Toto IV album (it’s the opening track, “Africa” is the closing track). But then a week later they actually covered “Africa” and it ended up becoming Weezer’s biggest hit in years. Toto had previously announced their intentions to cover Weezer’s “Hash Pipe” and now that cover is also out. Stream it below.

Toto’s guitarist Steve Lukather had this to say about the cover in a press release: “We were blown away at the response Weezer got doing our old songs. They did a good job too, but we never saw hit records coming from it. It was all started by a sweet 15-year-old girl named Mary. Then the ball started rolling. They did two of ours and ‘Africa’ took OFF. It seemed only right that WE - Toto did a version of one of their songs so we started digging around, listening to a bunch of their music, which I have grown to like a lot. My 30 something kids were flipped over Weezer recording two of our songs as they are fans and we picked ‘Hash Pipe.” The irony that we were smoking hash before these guys were alive was not lost on us, and the other is it has a killer melody and a great groove. We wanted to do something that rocked. We give you our version - with a little of our thing on it like they did their ‘thing’ to ours. It is an unlikely collaboration, but some of the best ones are unexpected. Thanks to Weezer, their manager Jonathan, and their fans as they have been really nice to us…and they didn’t have to be. Now I guess we have to do some crazy mash up live someday. In the meantime, continued success. Thanks to all and hope to meet someday. Gratitude to the fans for embracing this fun little accident. Ours drops Aug 10th, and I hear KROQ is getting thousands of requests from the teaser we recorded the other day - who knew? Kudos to Steve Porcaro for running with this as the Producer.”

Keyboardist Steve Porcaro had this to say: “Covering Hash Pipe was an absolute blast. When I asked my neighbor, a huge Weezer fan, which record we should cover, he rattled off about five of their biggest hits, but then he smiled and said ‘but there’s nothing like driving down the freeway at 80 miles an hour with ‘Hash Pipe’ cranked.’ That stuck with me when it came time to decide.”

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