The Making of a Musician: An Article about Toad's Front Runner Annie Pagel and Her Impressive Solo Career

Before Annie Pagel was commanding crowds at Shabang as the lead singer of Toad she was 5 years old standing on stage at her elementary school. 

Pagel was wearing Blues Clues slippers and green silk pajamas. She was in Kindergarten. As her sister played a melody on the piano, Pagel sang a rendition of “Moon, Moon, Moon” by Laurie Berkner. 

Most artists have a moment like this they can look back to. A space in time where the path of their musical life suddenly was lit up by a spotlight. This was Pagel’s. 

After that moment, music never left Pagel’s life. Her rap sheet is impressive, and lengthy. She sang for her church's worship band, performed in musical theater, joined jazz band in school where she learned trombone and later, taught herself the guitar. 

In her senior year of high school, Pagel joined a band as  part of one of her classes. Groups of people were formed where each person played an instrument and practiced covers. Since she was a singer, Pagel got the chance to work with many of these bands. 

“[collaborating with so many different musicians] was how I learned to work through issues and challenges, and it's where I got to play around with the kind of music that I wanted to play and perform,” she said. 

Performing music is when Pagel feels the most happy, the most herself. Getting to create an atmosphere for people to experience through her singing is something Pagel finds deep fulfillment in. 

“I think it's where I feel the most creative and proud honestly,” Pagel said. “And I just love getting to bring people into that as well.”

Pagel’s love of performance is consistently on display as the lead singer of Toad. 

If you’ve been a part of the music scene in SLO for the past 5 years, there's a good chance you know the 5 piece band. They have played everywhere from Libertine to the Fremont Theatre, bringing a crowd with them wherever they go. 

The group met their freshman year in the dorms where they’d crowd into a room to jam and bond over their shared love of music. 

For Pagel, the formation of this band was a fulfillment of a dream she had her first week of college. 

During WOW, Pagel attended a seminar where the speaker asked the audience to write down the things they wanted to accomplish in their time at Cal Poly. Pagel pulled out her notes app and wrote about how she wanted to be in a band. 

Pagel knew she wanted to surround herself with other musicians in her time at Cal Poly so meeting the friends that would become Toad was exciting. Playing music together was like speaking a universal language, a way to connect with people without words she said.

“When I met the boys of Toad, I was really excited about how we could learn a song and already have a dynamic with ideas, and they were excited about it,” Pagel said. “We just clicked right away.” 

Toad’s first performance was at the experimental garden on Cal Poly’s campus. The first song they performed together in front of an audience was “I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor. 

Pagel was wearing cutoffs and a blue tank top. She recalls getting sunburnt from all the time the group spent in the sun that day. It was carefree, whimsical. She couldn’t stop smiling. 

Pagel looks back on this day proud — not only did she perform with Toad but also played a solo set of Norah Jones and Phoebe Bridgers as the sun dipped below the mountains. 

“It was one of my most favorite days of college,” Pagel said. “We had our friends there. It wasn't a huge crowd, but people were dancing. People were happy. That was really exciting.” 

Toad went on to play shows in Santa Barbara and various houses around SLO. Pagel recalls often getting kicked out of the parking garage, the only place with outlets the band could set up to practice freshman year. 

Through her musical career, Pagel has had the guiding voices of her musical influences to turn to for inspiration. Joni Mitchell is one of these inspirations. 

Pagel credits Mitchell for giving her the guts to be more experimental in her songs, trying weird chords and not being afraid to deviate from theory and structure. 

“She was so foundational. I think her songs are just beautiful, and they take you on a journey,” Pagel said. 

Other inspirations, like Phoebe Bridgers, Pagel turns to for their story telling chops. Winehouse and Joplin help Pagel with her grit and stage presence when she sings.

 If you’ve ever had the honor to see Toad live, you are familiar with that presence. Pagel, with her wild curly hair and sparkly outfits has no trouble keeping the crowd in the palm of her hand. It’s electric because she's electric. 

To curate this energy on stage, Pagel has a pre-performance ritual that’s almost a week long. Pagel says she spends an equal amount of time studying the music as picking outfits and planning the mannerisms — like hair flips and foot stomps to place at the perfect moment in a song. 

And of course, she always has to reapply her signature lipstick — her self- proclaimed signature move to pull in the middle of a performance. 

“And it immediately gets smeared on my microphone every single time,” Pagel said. 

Pagel’s preparation always pays off. Pagel, and Toad's command of a room, made them a crowd favorite in the SLO music scene. Community members would pack out venues like Libertine even to get a glance of the band’s passion, and dance the night away with their friends. 

The crowds at Toad shows were as formative as the music was to Pagel. To her, finding that one person in the crowd to connect with for a moment and sing to or dance with — whether that be a friend or stranger — can make all the difference in how a show feels. 

“I wanted it to be like I was there with the crowd, not in front of the crowd,” Pagel said. 

Toad informally disbanded last year, senior year for the majority of the band’s members. The band, which had been together for four years, said goodbye to the fan base they had built on stage at Shabang, a full circle moment — especially since they closed out the chapter ending with the first song they ever played as a band,  “I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor.

Now, Pagel is focusing on her solo career, taking with her the energy of Toad and the lessons she learned. 

Like many artists, songwriting is how Pagel processes her emotions and heals internal wounds. Her favorite song she’s written is also one of her most recent, she calls it “Old Roads.”

“It was kind of different than the other songs I've written. Usually I'll just word vomit throughout the day in my notes app, and then come make something of it with a melody and guitar part after,” Pagel said. “And I'll usually find a common theme with all the word vomit and kind of stick with that and a message and a feeling I want to convey in a song.”

For Pagel, “Old Roads” was different because she knew from the song's inception exactly what she wanted to write and what she wanted the piece to sound like. 

Driving around her home town during winter break, Pagel began to consider the dynamics of her hometown and family and how rapidly the structures around her are changing as she grows. Pagel wanted to show people all the weird and small parts of her hometown she loves through this song. 

“I only ever want someone to be able to experience it like I experience it because it's so meaningful to me, and I want it to be meaningful to them, too,” Pagel said. “I was just like, oh, I want to share this with someone before everything's changed, and it's not what I'm used to. And that just came out perfectly for me, and I'm really proud of that song.” 

Throughout both her solo career and her time as front woman of Toad, Pagel has had to reckon with the reality of being a woman in the music industry. 

“I felt like I had to work extra hard to be heard and respected,” Pagel said. “And not just as a musician but also basic kindness. I felt like I really had to prove that I belonged there and I belonged in those spaces.” 

Sometimes these interactions make Pagel feel like she doesn’t know as much about music as others. However, she knows how to feel it and knows what she wants the music to sound like. Most importantly, she knows how she wants to feel and how she wants to make others in return feel through her music. 

Being the only woman in Toad, Pagel quickly saw the disparity in which she was treated by audience members. Men would tell her she did a “good job” then go to her male bandmates to talk music and inspiration, leaving Pagel on the sidelines even though she was a big part of the music creation and curation. 

“The guys in the music scene don't know how to talk to women in the music scene respectfully or at all,” Pagel said. “And if they do talk to you, they don't see you as impressive as if a man were going to do it, especially as a singer songwriter, because you're just a girl on stage with the guitar.” 

Pagel believes this attitude diminishes the effort, passion, and experience it takes for female musicians to not only perform but to write their music. 

Overall, she has found SLO to be a pretty accepting place, filled with people who are genuinely passionate about music and love to watch people perform. This acceptance is mostly felt when encountering other women musicians. 

“When there was another woman in the band that we were playing with, we would talk about being women in music for a very short period of time or something, and you could tell it's just like it felt like we understood each other,” Pagel said. 

---

Grace Gillio is one of our editorial directors. She conducted the interview, wrote the article, and took the photos. Loretta Philp is a member of our Art Team. She made the graphic.