The morning light filters through the windows of the Gecko Cafe in Shoreditch, catching the lights from Toby Gad’s presence. Less than twelve hours ago, the Grammy-winning songwriter was performing 1,000 feet above London on the 72nd floor of the Shard, backed by a string quartet as the sun set over the Thames. Now, in the relative quiet of this East London cafe, the 56-year-old producer who crafted some of the biggest pop hits of the 21st century is contemplating a career pivot that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago.
This performance was the culmination of Gad’s latest project, Piano Diaries, which strips down two decades of chart-toppers to their essence: voice, piano, and raw emotion. Released in March 2025, the album reimagines his most iconic tracks as minimalist piano and string arrangements, featuring a new generation of rising talent including Victoria Justice, Keke Palmer, and Johnny Orlando.
The man sitting across from me with an Acai bowl has written songs that have soundtracked millions of lives. John Legend’s “All of Me”, that wedding staple that’s been streamed over two billion times. Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry”, the anthem of resilience that dominated 2007. Beyoncé’s “If I Were a Boy,” Demi Lovato’s “Skyscraper,” tracks for Madonna and dozens more.
The transformation began two years ago on the set of German Idol, where Gad served as a judge. Night after night, young hopefuls would step onto the stage and perform his songs, often asking for the stories behind them. “A lot of the contestants auditioned with my songs and wanted to hear the stories of how these songs were written,”
Sitting in that judge’s chair, watching a new generation interpret his work, something shifted. The songs he’d given away to superstars were taking on new lives in the voices of unknowns. Each performance was a reminder that while the original artists had moved on to new material, these songs remained frozen in time for their audiences, as fresh and relevant as the day they were released.
“‘If I Were a Boy’ is 2009, ‘All of Me’ 2014, or the Madonna album, 2015,” he continues, ticking off the years on his fingers. “And I felt it was time to reinterpret those songs and pass the torch on to new talent.”
This realisation sparked The Piano Diaries, an ambitious project that would strip his catalogue down to its essence. No Auto-Tune, no wall of production, just piano and voice with occasional orchestral touches. It’s a radical deconstruction for songs that were originally crafted with every studio trick available, but Gad saw it as returning to the source.
“My musical backbone is the piano. I love piano improvisation. I love playing on the piano,” he explains. “And I felt when we write songs, very often it’s just piano and voice, and if we’re excited about what this is, then we record more instruments onto the song. So I wanted to give the listeners the opportunity to just hear these songs that have defined my career with just vocal and piano.”
The Piano Diaries isn’t simply an acoustic greatest hits collection. Gad approached each reinterpretation with a specific vision: create opposites. Where John Legend’s “All of Me” showcased his powerful male voice declaring devotion, Gad commissioned a female version that transformed the song’s emotional landscape. Demi Lovato’s soaring “Skyscraper,” originally a female empowerment anthem, becomes something entirely different through a male lens.
His choice of collaborators was both strategic and personal. Victoria Justice, who has a massive Instagram following from her Nickelodeon days, brought built-in promotional power to “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” But the collaboration went deeper than social media metrics. “I’ve worked with Victoria for decades, big fan,” Gad says warmly. “We’ve done several things over the years, so she was a natural fit for ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry.’ And it’s a great process. And then she also just… we really enjoyed doing social media together.”
He laughs, remembering their content creation spree. “If you look at her TikTok or Instagram, there’s maybe 30 pieces of content that we created together. We went hiking together, all kinds of fun things we did around ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry.'”
Not every collaboration allowed for such extensive interaction. Keke Palmer, the actress Gad has known since she was 13 and starred in “Akeelah and the Bee,” could only spare a few hours from her packed schedule. “I’m still happy that she made time for this project, but she’s very busy these days,” he says with understanding.
Fresh off the plane from Germany, he arrived in New York with ambition and little else. No contacts, no reputation in the American music scene, no clear path forward.
“I put flyers on the traffic signs: ‘I’m a young producer. Do you want to write with me?” he remembers, shaking his head at his younger self’s audacity. “And found my first talent that way. I had some hard, hard months there.”
It’s a far cry from the Toby Gad who now gets calls from the United Nations to write climate change anthems, but that scrappy determination never left. “One thing always led to another, and I wrote something with somebody, and someone liked it, and then I got the next session, and my whole life’s been like that. I’ve never worked a job. Always been from song to song, my whole life.”
His first record in Germany was released on vinyl, “just the end of the era of the vinyl,” he notes with the perspective of someone who’s witnessed every major shift in music distribution. He and his brother were teenagers, holding that physical record in their hands. Then came CDs, then Napster sent the industry into panic mode, then iTunes downloads, and now streaming.
“I have no idea what’s next,” he admits, “but streaming has allowed people to very cheaply, globally, distribute their own music, which was unthinkable before. Imagine you would have to have physical copies that you would have to deliver to stores, and then you make the radio promotion, hope that people find that store and hope that store still has your record. The logistics of it is crazy. But now anyone can upload a song and it’s everywhere in the world.”
This democratisation has fundamentally altered who gets to make music and how. “Back in the day, you would have to convince a record label that they would invest a lot of money into your record and get it on the radio. There were so many gatekeepers you had to get through.” He lists the old requirements: “She looks like a star. She sings like a star. She’s young, like someone we can invest in and have a career with. She performs well.”
“And nowadays, anyone can upload a song, and that song can have a chance of life.”
When I ask Gad what makes a song successful, what separates the hits from the thousands of tracks that disappear into the streaming void, he doesn’t mention hooks or production techniques. Instead, he talks about emotional transmission.
“Well, in a song, you try to capture a feeling, and then you play it to somebody, and if they feel something, maybe that same feeling. If they do something with the song, if it’s joy, happiness, or you want to work it out, they want to run to it, or they want to punch somebody, whatever it is, I think then the song resonates.”
The real test comes next: “And if that person then wants to hear it again and maybe even play it to their friend, that’s success, because then you reach virality, they want to show it to someone else, that person might react to it and want to show it to someone else. And that makes a good song if you really feel something.”
This philosophy of emotional authenticity extends beyond his music. For the past seven years, Gad has been documenting the life of primatologist Biruté Galdikas in the rainforests of Borneo. The project, now in partnership with the BBC, chronicles a woman who’s spent 52 years studying orangutans, the forgotten third member of the trinity that includes Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey.
“She was an icon in the 80s. She was in all the magazine covers and all the radio shows, TV shows, but she’s been forgotten over the years,” Gad explains, his voice taking on the passion of a true believer. “So I’ve been chronicling her life, and I think I’ve been on it for seven years, but on and off, like every now and then, I go to Borneo in Indonesia, and film a whole lot, and then we edit away.”
When I ask how his environmental activism connects to his music, he returns to that core principle: “I always thought there should be an honesty to the art, and whether it’s painting or making movies or making music videos or writing songs, it’s all about having something to tell, a story to tell, or a melody or something that is relevant to other people.”
Unlike some songwriters who retreat into solitude to create, Gad’s process has always been communal. “When I was in Germany, my process was always collaborative. I don’t write songs by myself,” he states matter-of-factly, serving as a creative necessity.
“The access to talent when I moved to America was vastly different, and that was always my dream, to work with authentic talent that I look up to, that I think is incredible.” He references the previous night’s performers at the Shard with evident admiration. “Like you saw the performers that we had yesterday on stage. I mean, each of them were so incredible, and that’s the driving force for me to create and now also perform with talent like that. It just gives me such emotional satisfaction, and that’s what I live for.”
In Germany, reaching this level would have meant a different path entirely. “I would have had to start making German music if I would have wanted to reach this level of authenticity,” he reflects. America offered him the canvas he needed, even if the early days meant posting those flyers and hoping for responses.
One of The Piano Diaries’ most personal moments comes from an unexpected collaboration with his daughter Mae Mae, who performed at the Shard show. “My daughter had a phase where she wanted to be called ‘they/them,’ and it felt like a lot of kids in her inner circle or in her class went through that phase,” Gad explains carefully. “For some of them, it was a phase. For some of them, it’s very serious and very real and needs to be respected. But for quite a few kids, it was a phase, and she went through that and identified with a song.”
It was during this time that Gad discovered his daughter’s hidden talent. “And that’s around the time when I actually realised she could sing, because she would not share with me that she would sing. She told my wife, but she said, ‘Don’t tell daddy.'”
The generational divide extends to their musical approaches. Playing these songs in stripped-down form has revealed something Gad hadn’t noticed before: “It’s funny that a lot of my songs have the same chords, which I’ve realised now by playing on the piano.” He sees this simplicity as perhaps key to their broad appeal. “My daughter, when she makes music, it’s always very complicated chords. And you heard her open up, right? Her musical choices are so different from what I’ve done.”
He characterises his approach as “very much pop music, trying to boil it down to something that’s really accessible to everybody,” while his daughter’s work is “like a journey to places where no one else has been. Complex.”
The Piano Diaries also revisits “Love Song to the Earth,” a track with a remarkable origin story. In 2015, the United Nations approached Gad to write a song for the Paris Climate Accord. He brought in Natasha Bedingfield and John Shanks, and they crafted the foundation. Then came the challenge of assembling an all-star roster.
“One by one, we went through our friends and John Shanks asked Bon Jovi if he would sing, Sheryl Crow, and I asked Fergie. And we ended up having 16 very famous artists there, including Paul McCartney.”
The song became more than a recording project. “We performed it quite a bit before the Pope’s speech. We performed it on the Mall in Washington, DC, it was massive.” But nearly a decade later, Gad feels the urgency has only intensified. “The message is more urgent than ever. I mean, globally, we’ve made a little progress, but we’ve also got a long, long, long way to go with climate change awareness, and it’s starting to hit home, and feeling it more and more.”
For the new version, he turned to Antoinette Smith, a connection that spans his entire American journey. “When I moved to New York in 2000, she was one of my first friends. At the time, she was in the original cast of ‘Rent,’ that musical.” He smiles at the memory. “Every yellow taxi cab in New York had her face on it, because ‘Rent’ was advertised with her face. And still is… kind of her face is still the face of ‘Rent,’ of the musical. If you see that yellowish picture of a girl, that’s Antoinette.”
Last night’s performance at the Shard represents a new model for Gad, a friend connected him to the venue team through a production company and a podcast called “Songs You Know.” The Shard team, eager to establish their space as a performance venue, embraced the concept immediately.
“This is a group of amazing people that all have ideas like, now they’re floating in ideas to do a whole skyscraper tour around the world,” Gad reveals. “This is also a new venue that they want to establish, so it felt like a first for all of us. We were all excited to make this happen, and the stage was just there for this evening and everything just for that evening.”
The logistics were considerable. “They had to carry up the grand piano because the elevator only goes to the 68th floor,” he explains, still seeming amazed by the effort. “So on the last three floors, they had to carry the grand piano up, and that’s a heavy piano. That was quite challenging.”
The performers included Paloma Faith, Megan McKenna, Victoria Canal, Ruth-Anne Cunningham, and Elvin Brimfield, each chosen through Gad’s extensive network built over decades. “I’ve worked with so many different artists in my career. The ones that have great voices stick with me, and I stay in touch sometimes. For this show, I just reached out to anyone I thought I could imagine myself performing for this type of concert.”
Summer touring schedules meant some regular collaborators were unavailable. “Louisa Johnson has performed with quite a bit, and she is on a show right now for the rest of the week out of town. And Zach Abel… Those are all friends I love to work with, but they’re at the moment, all with DJs somewhere.”
The string quartet that provided the classical foundation came through surprisingly modern means. “I went on the internet and typed ‘London String Quartet.’ And you Google that, and you come up with like 50 strings,” he laughs. “I emailed all of them, and not all of them, but some of them. And listen to that, you can check their YouTube videos.”
The Morasi String Quartet responded first and proved perfect for the project. “They did all the scoring, which is quite a lot of work for the songs, and did a great job. I’m really happy with them. And now that it’s scored, we can do this again, easier, so we don’t have to practice so much.”
What do the strings add to pop songs originally produced with drum machines and synthesisers? “It adds some timelessness to it. I feel.”
Looking forward, Gad envisions a touring model inspired by his friend David Foster, the legendary producer who’s successfully transitioned to live performance. “David Foster is really successful with that, and he’s a friend. He’s an inspiration. Really. Last year he did the Hollywood Bowl, with 17,000 people in the audience for his birthday. That’s an inspiration. I want to do more of that.”
The plan is both ambitious and practical: “Travel around the world with my songs and perform with local talent. Like, if I would perform in the Philippines, I would see who is… what are the great singers that are available, that I could work with. And or in China. I’ve had a few songs in China with Jane Zhang, for instance.”
He envisions bringing three core singers on tour, then supplementing with local talent in each market. “There are some incredible singers in each of these countries that I could perform with. And I would probably, just like David Foster, I would probably bring three singers that I work with already with me, and then the rest I would do local talent and rehearse the songs with them, and maybe again, with a quartet or orchestra.”
The vaults are also yielding new treasures. Gad recently released an original song written with Donna Summer before her death in 2007. “There’s a first that we performed yesterday with her voice and her visuals on the screen,” he says, his voice softening. The song is getting the full remix treatment, techno trance, EDM, sped-up club house, and a ’70s disco version “She was such a wonderful, warm… so I do miss her a lot.”
Perhaps the most profound discovery of this new phase has been recognising what Gad calls the “timeless currency” of his catalog. After the German Idol experience and his first tentative steps into live performance at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s son’s event at the Palladium (“2500 people, and that kind of was the motivation to perform live more”), he’s realised something fundamental.
“I went to Harvard University and did a master class, and I got some talent from Berklee School of Music, and did a 90-minute master class deconstructing some of my songs. And wherever I go, people know the songs. It’s so funny, and so I’m discovering the value of the songs.”
Songs he wrote two decades ago still resonate with new generations, each finding their own meaning in the words and melodies. The collaborative nature of songwriting means these pieces were never fully his anyway. “If you write something with someone, it’s both your song,” he insists. Now he’s claiming his share of that ownership, not through legal mechanisms but through performance and reinterpretation.
When I ask what advice he’d give to young producers who see his success and want to follow that path, Gad returns to the philosophy that’s sustained him through decades of uncertainty.
“You have to find happiness in the process of creating music. Don’t say, ‘I’m going to be happy once it’s a hit,’ because that can be years and years and years after the fact that you write it. So if you have a great time creating music, then you’ve already won, because then you already had a great day.”
The mathematics of songwriting success are sobering. “I’ve done thousands of songs, and some of them resonate, some don’t, but it’s rare that you write a song and within a few months it’s a hit. It usually takes years and years, and there’s so many other factors out of your control involved.”
His final advice echoes the persistence that led him to post those flyers on New York traffic signs 25 years ago: “Every day, do your best and don’t expect anything.”
As our conversation winds down and Gad finishes his coffee, I’m struck by the circular nature of his journey. The young German producer who arrived in New York with nothing but ambition has become one of pop music’s most successful songwriters. The behind-the-scenes craftsman is stepping into the spotlight. The songs given away to superstars are being reclaimed and reimagined.
But at the core, it’s still about that fundamental transaction he described at the beginning of our talk: capturing a feeling and transmitting it to another person. Whether it’s a teenager in Germany auditioning with “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” a couple dancing to “All of Me” at their wedding, or an audience 1,000 feet above London watching the sun set to familiar melodies played in new ways, the songs remain conduits for human connection.
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