Africa (Toto song)
| "Africa" | ||||||||||||||||
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U.S. 7-inch (180 mm) shaped picture disc edition
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| Single by Toto | ||||||||||||||||
| from the album Toto IV | ||||||||||||||||
| B-side | "Good for You" (The Americas) "We Made It" (international) |
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| Released | May 10, 1982 (Europe) October 30, 1982 (U.S.) |
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| Format | 7", 12", CD single | |||||||||||||||
| Recorded | October 18, 1981 | |||||||||||||||
| Genre | Soft rock | |||||||||||||||
| Length | 4:55 (album version) 4:21 (radio edit) 7:05 (extended) |
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| Label | Columbia | |||||||||||||||
| Writer(s) | David Paich, Jeff Porcaro | |||||||||||||||
| Producer(s) | Toto | |||||||||||||||
| Toto singles chronology | ||||||||||||||||
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"Africa" is a 1982 song by the American rock band Toto. It was included on their 1982 album Toto IV, and released as a single on September 30, 1982. It reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart on February 5, 1983 and number three on the UK Singles Chart the same month. The song was written by the band's keyboardist/vocalist David Paich and drummer Jeff Porcaro.
The initial idea and words for the song came from David Paich. Jeff Porcaro explains the idea behind the song: "a white boy is trying to write a song on Africa, but since he's never been there, he can only tell what he's seen on TV or remembers in the past."
Songwriter David Paich said:
In 2015 Paich explained the song is about a man's love of a continent: Africa, rather than just a personal romance.
Musically, the song took quite some time to assemble, as Paich and Porcaro explain:
On "Africa" you hear a combination of marimba with GS 1. The kalimba is all done with the GS 1; it's six tracks of GS 1 playing different rhythms. I wrote the song on CS-80, so that plays the main part of the entire tune.
So when we were doing "Africa" I set up a bass drum, snare drum and a hi-hat, and Lenny Castro set up right in front of me with a conga. We looked at each other and just started playing the basic groove. ... The backbeat is on 3, so it's a half-time feel, and it's 16th notes on the hi-hat. Lenny started playing a conga pattern. We played for five minutes on tape, no click, no nothing. We just played. And I was singing the bass line for 'Africa' in my mind, so we had a relative tempo. Lenny and I went into the booth and listened back to the five minutes of that same boring pattern. We picked out the best two bars that we thought were grooving, and we marked those two bars on tape...Maybe it would have taken two minutes to program that in the Linn, and it took about half an hour to do this. But a Linn machine doesn't feel like that!
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Wikipedia