Toni Childs

I think of Toni Childs as being the female Peter Gabriel. It’s an odd comparison, I’ll grant you, but there’s something in her style – both style of singing and style of song – that reminds me of him. They both seem to build their songs out of rhythmic elements, using many layers of guitars and keyboards and vaguely ethnic sounds working in consort to build up a rich tapestry of sound over which their distinctive vocals can float. And neither of them is a particularly polished singer. That’s not an insult. It’s not that they’re bad singers, it’s that their voices haven’t had all the humanness trained out of them. One of the reasons (okay, the reason) I can’t listen to opera is that I hate the sound of a classically-trained voice. Yes, it’s in tune, and all the technical elements are there – the vibrato, the phrasing – but it sounds like an instrument and not like a person singing. Most classical voices have had all the character, all the quirkiness, all the human life stripped from them in the quest for technical perfection and they just sound awful to me. There are exceptions (Slava comes to mind), and I certainly don’t love every quirky voice (there are plenty of bad singers out there – Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed – whom I hate), but I’d usually rather hear a human being singing than a disembodied, technically perfect vocal instrument.

And Toni Childs is a human being singing.

My wife, G, is particularly drawn to alto singing – almost any woman that sings in a lower register will perk her ears up, none more so than kd lang. But it’s thanks to her love of this style of singing that I was forced to give Toni Childs a second listening (and a third and a fourth…), and I’m glad I had that opportunity, or I might have missed her entirely, and that would be a shame.

Her first album, Union, is probably the best, but this track is from the second, House of Hope. After this she produced one more album, called The Women’s Boat, which is a wild and electrifying ride through the life cycle, and features many of my champions of interesting and unusual music, such as Trey Gunn, Robert Fripp, and, curiously enough, Peter Gabriel. It is perhaps her most impressive effort and runs the gamut of emotions, effectively capturing the terror of being born and the joy of living, but which is a little too much for me to take.

I like this track because of its easy, loping beat, gentle textures, and sweet lyrics. Like the Beatles begging to hold you hand, Toni just wants someone to walk with, and after the fire of desire is sated, that’s what you’ll spend more of your time doing together anyway.

I first became really familiar with this album on our great cross country trek. G and I had been living together in Brooklyn for a couple of years after our graduation from Hampshire College and she was finding herself a community and a life there and I was just getting more and more depressed, unable to find work in my chosen field and relegated to working increasingly alienating and miserable jobs. I decided I needed to go west while I was still a (relatively) young man and see if I didn’t have better luck breaking into the film and television business out in LA. Where it was actually located.

It was a difficult time. G was happy in NYC and leaving it would be hard, while I couldn’t wait to get out. Neither of us wanted to break up, but she wanted more of a commitment from me than I was willing to give. Still, she agreed to come with me, and we put all of our energies into achieving escape velocity from the black hole that is NYC.

One night, I was watching TV alone and saw a tease for an upcoming talk show. They were discussing marriages that had gone sour and why. One guy said, “she was in love with the idea of marriage, but she wasn’t in love with me.” I started thinking about that, and it occurred to me that the exact opposite was true for me. I loved G, I knew I loved her, I could easily imagine spending the rest of my life with her, but I hated the idea of marriage. Marriage is what my parents went through on their way to divorce, which was ugly and bitter and painful forever. I did not want to get divorced, and it seemed the easiest way to avoid that was to not get married in the first place. It was the word that scared me, not the concept.

Two weeks later, we packed up the car and started the long drive from NYC to LA. We brought along a box of tapes to listen to and, as House of Hope had just come out, we spent a lot of time listening to that. I found it encouraging, especially the gentle wish for someone to walk with. That’s what I really wanted, and I knew who I wanted to walk with. So, on her 25th birthday, in a motel room in Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska, I asked G to marry me. And we’ve been happily strolling ever since.