We’ve just finished up with the supper dishes when Tony Ronalds stumbles out of bed to start breakfast. The Cape Breton native who makes his home in Sydney, Australia is on a totally different schedule than you and I. In some ways, he always has been.
He hasn’t always gotten his mail Down Under, though. Back in the mid-nineties, he was a mainstay on the Halifax indie scene; fronting his band Kilt and watching their star rise steadily.
The pace at which the band grew was matched only by the pace at which Ronalds found himself increasingly unable to deal with things.
When he casts his mind back to those years Ronalds could tell you stories of drug abuse that would break your heart. It was a time where he dare not open the curtains for fear that it would tell him if it was day or night.
“I was thirty years old and just waiting to die,” says Ronalds, who is on breakfast duty on this particular morning. Steel-cut oats are on the menu, and Ronalds, the father of a brand new baby boy, takes his role quite seriously. “That day there was a knock at the door and a stranger handed me my divorce papers.” It cut him in half, but it might as well have been someone handing him a lyric sheet. He sat and began to write a song.
Pressing play on Ronalds’ new single, “Gone,” ushers you into an echoing, unsteady, lo-fi soundscape. It feels like a memory; one that saw Ronalds lose everything and have to come to grips with where he was on the day he was served. “She’s gone with the paper”, sings Ronalds, the confusion, and pain palpable in his voice. “She was ultimately showing me that no one should have to live how I was showing up, not even myself.”
Ronalds has come a long way. Eight years sober and with a new lease on life, it seems he has found himself a soft place to land.
It’s been a challenge to carve new ground but he’s embraced it. He keeps learning his craft and playing to his audience online. He plays live when he can, and he continues to foster relationships; one of which is with producer Eric Eggleston.
Eggleston pulls the most he can out of Ronalds; latching on to the singer’s ideas and then asking the right questions to see those ideas flesh themselves out. Ronalds’ latest single, ”Gone,” is a great example of such a collaboration.
The verses of this song are muddy. An eerie harmonica riff underlies Ronalds’ lyrics and the whole thing leaves you with an uneasy, unresolved feeling. In fact, you’re still wrestling with that when something magical happens…
Ronalds has always liked to flex his voice; twisting melodies, modulating, and putting its full power on display. He’s made countless cover songs his own by employing these devices but, boy oh boy, this is a chorus for the ages.
Roy Orbison has given Ronalds the green light to emulate him here, and Ronalds blows the roof off of it. Every bit of his strife, shame, and longing erupt into this one moment and the result, for him, must have been cathartic. The chaos, turmoil, fear, and uncertainty of those years all laid bare before the audience, and more importantly, before Ronalds himself.
Ronalds’ upcoming album, Tsunami, is set for release in 2022.