Toni Collette & The Finish

Look Up Jonnys Lips Beautiful Awkward Pictures This Moment Is Golden

Toni has always sung. She realised she could sing well when she was a 14 year old teenager at school. She performed in school musicals & was encouraged to audition for an australian theatre for a young people bicentennial musical production along with thousands of other kids from NSW.

She got the lead & got attention for her performance. She sang jingles for triple j & on several television shows as a 16 year old. She has performed in musicals from Sydney to Broadway, receiving a Tony nomination for her performance in “The Wild Party’ & a grammy nomination for the cast recording.Toni started writing songs worth recording about ten years ago. She has a day job which had kept her quite busy.

In 2004 she & her husband/drummer (Dave Galafassi) finished building their recording studio. Time opened up & the perfect band fell into place.

On January 2nd, 2005 toni collette & the finish made their lazy way down the coast in a convoy where they would live together & record music for a few weeks.

The band: toni collette & the finish
The album: beautiful awkward pictures
All songs written by: toni collette
All songs arranged by: Toni Collette & the finish
Engineered & mixed by: Paul McKercher (Augie March/The Cruel Sea/You Am I)
Mastered by: Joe Gastwirt: (Jimi Hendrix/The Beach Boys/Daniel Lanois/Emmylou Harris/Neil Young/The Grateful Dead/Talking Heads)
Produced by: Willy Zygier & Toni Collette

The finish consists of:

• Electric & acoustic guitar: Glenn Richards (Augie March)
• Bass guitar: Peter Farley
• Piano/keyboard: David Lane
• Drums & percussion: Dave Galafassi
• Multi Instruments: Amanda Brown (The Go-Betweens)
• and of course on vocals & a variety of instruments: Toni Collette

Toni Collette delivers a velvet gloved punch with her much anticipated debut album, which contains eleven self-penned tracks written over the last ten years. ‘Beautiful Awkward Pictures’ charts Collette’s fluctuating emotions as she’s worked her way round the globe and reflects her growth as a person and an artist.  Laying herself open in her usual honest and unaffected way, Collette’s lyrics are often poetic, intimate observations of life and the world around her and this makes for a heady, soul-stirring mix.  

‘Beautiful Awkward Pictures’, a modest collection of musical gems, at times raw, at times rich, is unapologetically eclectic in style from the inspirational and tender ‘This Moment is Golden’ which fills the listener with hope, while the lush string arrangements of the debut single ‘Beautiful Awkward Pictures’ support Toni’s powerful but vulnerable vocal skills. Piano strains permeate the entire recording but particularly within ‘Vitamin Pills’, an ode to modern excess, balanced by the simple and evocative picture etched when ‘jonny left his lips on my window last night’ (‘Jonny’s Lips’). ‘Look Up’ allows Collette’s vocals to really fly and her band “The Finish” to rise with her to heart pounding heights.

“The Finish”, all successful musicians in their own right, include Collette’s husband Dave Galafassi with his instinctive drumming and percussion, singer/songwriter Glenn Richards (Augie March) and his unique and evocative guitar sound, multitalented Pete Farley solid as a rock on bass guitar and Sydney singer/songwriter David Lane providing an emotional underscore to the album with his sublime piano prowess.

Self-funded and independently recorded in a wooden studio built by Collette and her husband, the musicians lived and worked together for three weeks. The agreed ethos was that performance would hold sway over studio trickery, feeling over formula. And under the helm of Collette and her co-producer and friend, musician Willy Zygier, they jammed in a studio surrounded by tall eucalypts combining their knowledge and talents in a vigorous week-long rehearsal before award-winning engineer and producer Paul McKercher (Augie March/ You Am I/ The Cruel Sea/ Eskimo Joe) arrived, and with his usual graceful aplomb, brought the whole thing together.

Weeks later they reconvened at Melbourne’s Sing Sing studios to record vocals and backing vocals, organ, mandolin and banjo. A sultry string quartet (arranged by Naomi Radom from CODA fame) was added for that extra dimension. Paul McKercher immediately began mixing and the whole album was mastered at Stirling Studios in New York.

Of her first album, ‘Beautiful Awkward Pictures’, Collette says: “ I never wanted this record to be a big loud statement. I just wanted it to be quiet, organic and very old school, cruisey in a lo-fi kind of way. It’s like in life there are the people who talk a lot and need a lot of attention and then there is someone who is really quiet – I want my record to be like that quiet person. The more you get to know it, the more you like it” Toni Collette And The Finish have toured Australia twice including performance at major events such Live Earth (Sydney leg); Homebake & Gone South festivals.

With words in this bio beautifully expressed direct from the band, we here at IMC have had a such an amazing and awesome time representing the the live career of toni collette & the finish. As Toni continues with the many duties of her extraordinary ‘day job’, there’s action behind the scenes to place the creation of album number two in motion.  We wait in anticipation (as do many around the world)!

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