Artists You Should Know: In Trish Toledo A Bygone Era Of Classic 60s Soul Finds Rebirth

Los Angeles Ecuadorian-Guatemalan artist Trish Toledo finds herself at a crossroads of old school and classic soul that’s been revamped for a new era. She’ll also be playing at the House of Blues in Anaheim on July 21. The first thing that hits you when listening to Toledo is the way her music drifts as if carried on the airwaves of a vintage transistor radio. Growing up in Carson, she started singing at the early age of four years old and quickly became enamored with the soul of 60s pop ballads.

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It didn’t take long for Toledo to start performing either: from her father’s cumbia band to becoming the frontperson of a ska/reggae band, her foray into music has been zealous and versatile. Since 2017 though she’s made a paced return that’s honed in on the music of her parents and grandparents’ generation. Her debut EP Dedicated to the Ones I Love, Vol. 1 echoes all the gushing and radiant lovelorn emotion of classic Motown hits. Standouts on that first sublime release include “Tell Him” and “Somebody Please,” although within the next year, Toledo had added to the stack of somberly groovy tracks with the release of Vol. 2 and Vol. 3.

By 2020 though Toledo had begun to find new ways to fuse her Motown and soul influences to her ever-evolving sound and identity. Singles like “Oldie Kinda Lovin'” and “Thee Only One” (feat. Thee Sinseers) bring a vision of 60’s sound to the modern era and revel in their timelessness. While releases such as the woozily meandering “Coco Lalala” and the recently released “Sin Control” (feat. Molly Lewis) — one of her first to be sung entirely in Spanish — highlight the ways in which Toledo is both reviving and redefining this generational music. And just like those artists she even records her music in much the same way: her studio recordings reflect the one-take nature of her songs, capturing all the raw emotion permeating therein.