Tones and I - "Beautifully Ordinary"
Starting to meet her potential
It’s been five years now since Toni Watson, better known as Tones And I, broke into the spotlight with “Dance Monkey” and “The Kids Are Coming”. Her debut album, Welcome to the Madhouse, which inevitably surfaced in 2021, was good, but had a few missteps and consistency issues.
Watson seems determined to step it up for her sophomore effort, Beautifully Ordinary. At least, that is the immediate message I get from the album opener “To Be Loved”. It’s a very personal track, directed at the siblings she left behind when she struck out on her own. Watson has made it well known that the home situation she grew up in was toxic, and that was the focal point of several songs on Madhouse. “To Be Loved”, as the intro, makes clear at the outset of the album that she’s still dealing with that trauma and working through it all.
Musically, it also illustrates an incredible amount of growth since Madhouse, and showcases an impressive level of stylistic polish. The song starts low, but builds into an emotional climax which allows Watson to use her already-impressive vocal ability to its full extent. You can feel her pouring herself into those notes. Personally, I’m strongly reminded of Tyler Childers; no other vocalist really attacks those emotional sections in songs the way he does, but Watson is on his level here — just more polished, less raw.
But, above all else, powerful.
Her voice is in that rare tier reserved for the likes of Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, and Adele. And she showcases it throughout the entirety of Beautifully Ordinary — which makes the album’s title somewhat ironic.
This isn’t to say that she didn’t showcase it on Madhouse, but she certainly didn’t utilize it as effectively on her debut album. The songwriting also wasn’t as consistently solid, on any front, as what Beautifully Ordinary presents. Writing for Broadway World, Josh Sharpe phrased it like so:
“Co-produced by Tones And I and featuring her as the sole writer on nearly every song, this album captures her artistic evolution and personal growth, blending her distinctive vocal style with vulnerable storytelling.”
The album’s collection of songs are all over the map in terms of tempo, but there are very few that don’t feel like a window into Watson’s head,1 with common motifs of self-esteem, insecurities, vulnerability, and loneliness.
The album does, briefly, begin to get stale around the halfway point, particularly at about tracks 9 & 10 (“Dreaming” and “You Don’t Know Me Like That”). But it brightens back up again with “John Doe”, which is immediately followed with one of the best songs on the album, “Sorrento”.
Another stark contrast, which makes a huge difference, between Madhouse and Beautifully Ordinary, is how much more complete the compositions sound. Watson’s debut album was nearly a cappella much of the time, relying on pretty basic programming and drum machines to flesh out the tracks. By comparison, the new album is lush with instrumentation. There are still plenty of electronic and synthesized elements, but there are also legit instruments on most tracks.
Beautifully Ordinary is far from being a run-of-the-mill pop album. It represents a huge step forward for Tones as a musician on multiple levels — songwriting, composition, vocal technique… There are so many improvements here, and the songs are all good; most are great, to be honest.
I’m hecking impressed. This is very likely one of the top five Pop albums of the year.
Rating: Blue
The one that immediately stands out as the exception here is “We’ll See Stars”, which is the track that has the most producers involved, but also wasn’t a single, which is a notable oddity in the world of popular music and the notorious process of crafting radio-ready hits. More than anything, “We’ll See Stars” is a vibe with a lot of repetition, but it doesn’t trigger my very sensitive gag reflex on that front. It should. But it doesn’t.