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From pop to punk
By GUY D’ASTOLFO
Matt Toka is back.
The Youngstown native who once fronted Cherry Monroe has been signed to Warner Bros. Records. He will release a pop-punk album this spring and will join the influential Vans Warped Tour this summer. Before that, he will embark on a 25-city national tour this spring with his backing band.
The career resurgence was a long time coming.
But for a while, Toka thought it would never arrive.
Toka first tasted stardom in 2005 as lead singer for Cherry Monroe, the Youngstown-based pop-rock band that had built a following in several states.
The Ursuline High graduate was 21 at the time. His band, which had released an album on Universal Records, played to throngs of adoring fans that routinely topped 1,000.
With everything coming his way, Toka couldn’t have imagined that Cherry Monroe would fizzle out a year later. But it did. The band got dropped by its label and fell into disarray. In 2006, a disillusioned Toka decided he had had enough and quit, and Cherry Monroe soon was no more.
Toka set out alone for Los Angeles to start over as a solo artist. His hopes were high, but after five humbling years of open-mic nights and barely scraping by, he was ready to throw in the towel.
These days, Toka is riding high again — older and wiser, but with the same sense of enthusiasm.
In a phone interview from Los Angeles, Toka described his quick rise, his descent into musical obscurity and the storybook fashion in which he was rediscovered.
“I thought Cherry Monroe was one big party,” said Toka. “I thought everything would come real easy, and they’d give me bags of money, and I took it for granted. When it ended, it was humbling. The American dream became an American nightmare.”
For the next few years, Toka would wander in the proverbial wilderness, nearly hitting rock bottom.
“It was brutal,” he said. “After Cherry Monroe, I packed up my belongings and drove cross-country to LA. I only knew a few people there. I started playing on street corners on Hollywood Boulevard. It was hard because I was used to playing to sizable crowds. I didn’t know where to begin. I started doing open mic nights and struggled for years. It was sort of depressing, hard to get out of bed sometimes. I couldn’t even get a job at Starbucks.”
The sudden turnaround came after Toka posted a video on YouTube of himself playing an acoustic cover of Asher Roth’s slacker hip-hop anthem “I Love College.”
“[Roth’s] manager heard it and called me and said, ‘I’ll give you a contract,’” said Toka. “He gave me a record deal. I got a second chance, and I will never take it for granted.”
Toka said the hard knocks he lived through after Cherry Monroe’s demise made him a better songwriter and musician. “I was on the road; I lost everything; I gained life experience,” he said. “The new songs are not like those I wrote [for Cherry Monroe] when I was 17.”
Toka has returned to his punk roots, the music that sustained him while growing up. It was partially a way of summoning his inner strength, and partially a way to just start having fun again.
“Music has always been my therapy,” said Toka, whose teen years were marred by family dysfunction: anger, divorce and, later, run-ins with the law by family members.
He even embraces that troubled upbringing in his song “Ode to My Family,” which will be on his upcoming album, “Straight to Hell.”
“It’s autobiographical,” said Toka. “It’s saying life is a living hell, but have some fun, make the most of it.”
While the album’s musical foundation is pop-punk, there are reggae and acoustic cuts on it. “I’m really proud of it,” said Toka.
Getting picked for the Warped Tour — a showcase of younger-skewing bands with a punk and hard-core edge — was “a dream come true,” said Toka. The tour comes to Cleveland on July 11 and Pittsburgh the next day.
He is also on the bill of another major rock event: the Bamboozle Festival, May 18-20 in Asbury Park, N.J., with headliners Foo Fighters, Bon Jovi, Incubus, Blink-182, Skrillex, Brand New and Mac Miller.