After losing both her father and her brother recently, timeless vocalist Toni Childs is exploring honesty, truth and vulnerability.
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With the entire entertainment industry is disarray due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Childs' retrospective tour of her classic back catalogue has been postponed. Her ongoing project surrounding her attraction to singing underwater will also have to wait, however, the 62-year-old vows to be back on stage later this year.
The world is working hard to make us afraid of each other.
- Toni Childs
Choosing emotion over perfection has been her creative path for over three decades, after she exploded onto the scene in 1988 with her song Don't Walk Away.
"If I am going to sing something over and over again I need it to be true," she said over the phone from the departure lounge of a Canadian airport.
"We live in a world where lots is sold to us, but none of it is true. Honesty is timeless."
After marrying sound designer, composer and filmmaker Mik Lavage, the American now calls the Byron Bay region home.
Her new home has allowed her the space and pristine environment for the backdrop to her health conscious existence, born from a diagnosis of Graves' disease, which she links to an immune response to mercury in her Californian and Hawaiian drinking water. A lifestyle change influenced her to even make her own shampoo, and after a year the disease was gone.
"As a planet we have a pollution problem and there's beautiful solutions people have come up with we are just not using," she said.
"I feel like we meed to invest in humanity, and inspirational music.
"We need to go out of our way for everyone. It is really important.
"We need to love each other."
Childs said in a time of increased information, and a need for facts, it is difficult to know who to trust. She still keeps an eye on American politics, and said in a "new age" she is supportive of a Bernie Sanders victory in the upcoming election.
"The world is working hard to make us afraid of each other," she said.
"When you're busy you are just surviving. I am really learning to drill down. I want to see where the information is coming from. I don't just regurgitate things because I've been caught out so many times. Not any more.
"It is sharpening us in a different way. I do think we are more savvy and hip to the beat on multiple, different levels.
"We have to remember our ancestors and how much trauma they went through for us to be born. We have to remember to celebrate being here.
"It really dips into our memory banks," she said.