With Just A Hint Of Mayhem

Towards the end of last year, I had the honour and pleasure of interviewing a great musical talent from California, AP Tobler. Regular readers will have spotted her on With Just A Hint Of Mayhem before. She gets better with every release and I believe she has a great future in music. If my tech skills had been a little more tech you would have been reading this some weeks ago. But a failure to record properly and then a corrupted audio file for what I did record put a hefty spanner in the works, but I got it sorted and you can now read that interview below.

AP states that her biggest influence is without any doubt or hesitation Dave Grohl! She loves the Foo Fighters and Nirvana. Multi-instrumentalist AP started off playing drums and I can spot the influence at times. She plays a few instruments (drums obviously, guitar, a little piano, some ukulele, bass guitar) and next on her list to master is the banjo. She has also dabbled successfully with Harp. She has always wanted to play saxophone although she doesn’t believe she would be very good at it, but I think time will tell. On top of all that, just like Mr Grohl, AP seems like a really decent human being. Some years ago, AP attended a Jazz Camp at which one of the featured artists was Donny McCaslin the saxophonist who featured on David Bowie’s final album ‘Blackstar’. AP got to play with him, she took the congas and played off against him in a true jazz style. She believes that if she wasn’t trying to make a name for herself as a musician, she would probably be involved somehow in music production. I reckon music must be in her blood. Given how confident AP sounds when I listen to her music, she told me that one thing she is most proud of in her music career to date is having the courage to start singing. I am sure that I am not the only one who feels glad that she did pluck up the courage! While all her releases so far have been singles, she hopes to put an EP together sometime, I am looking forward to that already. Especially if there is going to be a physical release. Her local music scene, certainly before Covid was quite vibrant with a lot of singer songwriters, a lot of alt.acoustic troubadours with a pop sensibility. She would like to see a bigger metal scene develop but says that the musicians and fans are a great community.

An Arnold Palmer, which is iced tea with lemonade is AP’s drink of choice and her favourite confectionery item is a Mounds bar, which is a chocolate covered coconut bar, which sounds like what we call a Bounty Bar in the UK. She is not a big fan of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. If there was ever an AP Tobler chat show and AP could choose any guests at all, alive or dead, her first show would have Dave Grohl, John Bonham, Prince, and her Mom. Sounds like a great choice to me, I would certainly watch it. The three top things that AP could not live without are music, Mexican food, and forests. Music would definitely be in my list. I asked her to describe herself in three words and she chose hilarious, stubborn and creative. When I asked her one of my throwaway questions, who is the richest Tony Stark (a.k.a. Ironman) or Bruce Wayne (a.k.a. Batman) her first response was that it was difficult. She eventually plumped for Tony Stark as she like him better and hoped that he was richer than Batman.

AP has written some great songs, “Post Mortem” was her last single of 2020 and her new track “Mercury Twin” has just hit the streets. We spoke about what drives her to write songs and she said sometimes it her anxiety and depression. That is a classic case of turning the lows into highs and the bad into good, right? What does AP think are the best and worst things about the music industry today? The best is how easy it is to find music, especially new music. The worst thing is that the industry is still very dominated by white men. Sadly, I think the latter will take years to change. When I interviewed her AP had Soa Dreams, Weezer and Thundercat on heavy rotation. In fact, thanks to her I discovered and started listening to Soa Dreams. Like many of us during this dreadful time AP is really looking forward to the return of live music in a post COVID-19 world. That includes both playing shows and going to shows. How about ending on AP’s favourite joke? OK then let’s do it. There is a Spanish speaking Magician, and he is on to his final trick, he says “uno dos” and then POOF! He disappeared without a tres! Say it loud, you’ll love it.

COMING SOON! Watch out for a review of AP’s new single “Mercury Twin” on WJAHOM!

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