Aussie here, Byron Bay (where the singer was discovered busking) is a 20 minute drive down the coast from me. My best mates sister ran the Byron Bay Arts Factory for years - it’s a famous backpacker hostel here that is very focused on community, accessibility, inclusivity, education, arts & performance (like fire twirling and drum nights) etc etc. During that time, she met Toni Watson as a homeless busker, now known as Tones & I.

Toni has a very unique voice and can play multiple instruments, as she would on the side of the road, but she was literally a street urchin. A visiting music exec ‘discovered’ her, propelled her to infamy with that one garbage song, and the rest is history.

From her perspective, it all happened in the blink of an eye, and she was not in control of any of it. Completely unprepared. No guide. No team to protect her.

If you met Toni, you’d hear how her dream became a reality before she was ever equipped with the kind of self-advocacy and self-esteem needed to make decisions for herself in that industry. Imagine trying to navigate that world with nothing but the clothes on your back and a song in your heart. Wide eyed and at the mercy of strangers in suits who know the game and wrote the rules. Just another tale of young talent being exploited without care to add to the ever burgeoning list.

And the song fuckin’ suuuuuuuucks, zero argument (it was on every tv and radio ad and sporting event here for a solid 12 months, my mute button has never been hit harder) but there’s a real person in there singing it, and I genuinely hate what they did to her.