TONI CHILDS

Keep The Faith

Twenty years after exploding into our pop-rock consciousness with her critically acclaimed, gold selling debut Union, two Grammy nominations (including one for Best New Artist) and a national tour with childhood idol Bob Dylan, singer-songwriter Toni Childs emerges from a much too long musical exile to deliver a crucial, heartfelt message for these trying times: Keep The Faith.

Beyond affirming her role as an important voice of inspiration for an entirely new generation, the emotionally hard-hitting 11-track collection—her first since a full self-healing induced recovery from Graves disease--marks a long-awaited creative resurgence with producers David Tickle and David Ricketts. Tickle was the main producer of Union. Ricketts co-wrote and associate produced many of the tracks on Union and was Child’s co-producer and co-writer on her 1991 follow-up House of Hope, which featured one of her signature tunes “I’ve Got To Go Now.”

In addition to a batch of songs written in the late 90s before the onset of her illness and others composed in recent years after her recovery, Keep The Faith features Childs’ powerful, life affirming “Because You’re Beautiful,” which earned the singer a 2004 Emmy Award for Best Music & Lyrics; the anthemic track was originally featured in Until The Violence Stops, a documentary by Eve Ensler, playwright and creator of The Vagina Monologues who is also the founder of V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls.

Thousands of Childs’ fans worldwide who had been wondering when she’d do a fourth studio album (her last, 1994’s The Woman’s Boat, earned her another Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Performance) can credit Ensler with inspiring the singer to dig deep again and let out the emotions that had been brewing for so many years. Childs, who had been involved in numerous charitable activities since moving to Kauai soon after her diagnosis—including Dream A Dolphin and GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) Free Kauai—was acting in a local production of The Vagina Monologues to raise money for the island’s YWCA Sexual Assault Treatment Center. Ensler, a longtime fan of Childs’ who saw her music as a personal lifeline, showed up one night to check out the show and the two became fast friends. By night’s end, Ensler asked Toni to write an anthem for Until The Violence Stops.

“She really put it to me, asking me why I was no longer doing music, and told me I really needed to work on this project with her,” says Childs, a native of Southern California who sang with the band Berlin before they took off and signed her first publishing deal with Island Music in London in 1981. “When I moved to the island, I had basically stopped my life. I wasn’t doing music anymore and spent years trying to redefine myself outside of being this singer/songwriter. But Eve hit a chord in me by giving me this lofty goal, a song that would inspire women and children to stand up in the face of violence and stop it for all time. I had been contemplating working again with David Tickle, who happens to own a studio here, for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. In contemplating the story that led to the song, I thought if we’re going to end violence against women and children, then women would need to stop inflicting violence upon themselves through low self esteem. This goes back to a concept I call ‘the beauty wound.’ We truly need to nurture and take care of ourselves.”

In the years between being diagnosed with Graves disease—a serious thyroid disorder characterized by goiter, exophthalmos, and hyperthyroidism caused by an antibody-mediated auto-immune reaction—and getting her music career back off the ground, Childs learned the value and emotional and physical healing power of self-love. Learning that certain environmental factors could have played a part in her illness led her to become an activist with such organizations as GMO. Committing to a simpler lifestyle, she bought a 4.5 acre property and became an organic farmer; her Prosperity Farm now has over 40 laying hens, more than 50 ducks, a horse named Sunny and two ewes. She will soon get a ram and a milk cow. While working on her farm, Childs began seeing a lady therapist on Kauai who told her that all disease stems from a lack of self-love and invited Childs to touch every part of her body with love every time she showered, thanking it for sustaining her this far.

“I realized that I had a lot of resistance to loving myself,” she says, “and everything just opened up from there. I started truly loving my body and over a period of time, the disease started turning itself around. I had been told I would be on meds for the rest of my life, but by treating my skin with salt rubs, herbs and essential oils like organic sunflower oil that I created, and loving my skin, doing physical affirmation and water meditation, I was finally able to wean off them. This process was gradual over two years, but the end result is that I have not had to take meds since 2001.”

 “The title track was inspired by a friend who was going through a difficult custody battle and he had to look at the world differently,” she says, “and his trials made me think of my own thoughts when the world seems to be coming apart. I know I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but sometimes even the people who love you the most don’t know what you need to go through to actually fly again. What started as a song written for someone I care about became a really important song for myself.”

Childs wrote five of the tracks on Keep The Faith in the fertile creative period before her diagnosis, when she began discovering the joy of writing songs on the acoustic guitar after many years of working with drum loops, sequencing patterns and texturing African and Indian percussion. This simplified organic approach lends a rich emotional subtlety to the standout track “Heart That Matters.” Other pieces from this era include the wistful and witty “I Saw God In The Super Market,” the bluesy, hard grooving “I’m Standing Here” and the torchy rock ballad “Blind.” The hard rocking, 60’s flavored rave-up “Revolution” reminds longtime fans of Childs of the long, exhausting but ultimately triumphant journey she’s been on; it’s a vintage recording with her band from 1997, the year her world suddenly changed.