In June 2024, Texas singer-songwriter Rich O’Toole (Epsilon Delta–Texas A&M ’03) released his latest album, Ghost.
“I have put my blood, sweat & tears into this album over the last year and a half. So many ups and downs but that helps make a great album. I hope you enjoy it. “
In addition to playing for his chapter while in school, Rich has been hired by chapters across the country to play dozens of shows. In 2017, he also played at the Order’s 78th Convention & Brotherhood Weekend in St. Louis, Missouri.
For a Texan with a long career (15 million streams) and a catalogue of muscular electric country, the type that veers, for me, too close to rock. I can see how it must be galling. He’s enjoyed some Texas chart success but not succeeded in acceding to the national or international mainstream. I expect that he can still pay the rent as you can probably make a decent living gigging around the Lonestar state. The first of the 12 tracks on his own imprint lumbers into view in the form of That Hill Country Sound, a thumping homage to the part of Texas that divides the American south east from the south west. Rock with tinges of country or Southern Rock is the best description as electric guitars flail and a mandolin picks in the foreground. Staying with the Texas theme, if it needed it, he next belts out Texas Is My Home, lyrically you can deduce where this is going. He plays chords on an acoustic while the band dial it down. They get unleashed on Roll To G-Town, it’s straight Southern Rock; some B3 organ fills the background and the guitars get let off the leash, I like it!
So far, it’s an energetic selection that may have the audience up on their feet but they’re not leaving remembering the tunes. Fortunately, there are varying paces that make the record more interesting. Ghost is about unrequited love that without his ‘country’ voice would sound like a track from Bon Jovi or another stadium rock band in their quieter moments. The ballad Love On A Sunday floats along on a back beat and acoustic guitar before giving way to some fluid electric guitar, it’s quite beautiful.
Rueful about the necessary striving to get recognition in Nashville on Low Hanging Fruit O’Toole tells a wistful tale about the dispiriting experience. The gist being that you’ll fail, be used up and spat out. Clearly you wonder if he wrote this from a personal experience. Frustratingly, there’s a quality of wordsmithery here that he doesn’t demonstrate elsewhere.
Overall, it’s a worthy outing with an attractive sound that may be enough to maintain him as a mainstay in Texas if not further north. Somehow, I think he’s past worrying about that.
