New Zealand’s talent songwriter and musician Anthonie Tonnon recently released his stunning LP titled Successor earlier this month. After supporting Australia’s folk hero Darren Hanlon on his annual Christmas tour last year, Hanlon signed Tonnon to his label Flippin’ Yeah Industries – and after listening to Successor it’s pretty clear why.

Having previously released music under the moniker Tono and the Finance Company, this record is a new creative chapter in Tonnon’s life. Produced with Jonathan Pearce (Tiny Ruins, Fazerdaze), using Mt Eden’s Lab Studios and a personal collection of analogue equipment, Successor combines adventurous guitar sounds and tight drumming with Tonnon’s unique and elegant melodies, reminiscent of Jens Lekman, and charming lyrical ideas.

To celebrate the release of this killer LP, Tonnon has given us a track by track run down of Successor, check it out be lore and if you like what you hear new sure to visit his Facebook page.

Railway Lines

The character in this song came to me at a train station near where I was teaching in the West of Auckland. In the 1950s, New Zealand cities had the choice to either grow on European models – keeping their light rail systems and developing in centralised ways, or on the LA model, along motorways. In Auckland we chose the latter. The old man in the story is someone who had been on the losing side of the argument, and has belatedly started to experience society agreeing with him. Unfortunately it doesn’t last long for him.

Bird Brains

From the time when I was 12 or 13 I don’t have many memories of talking or thinking a lot. I just remember skateboarding, every day, for hours at a time, and then after I had finished growing one day, I stopped. It was like the sport became a kind of kinetic cocoon I could protect myself in while I got through growing. So the language had to tell the dangers of that cocoon in a very simple and matter of fact way.

Sugar in The Petrol Tank

This started as a funny line about a Land Rover, and small-town pranks my Dad told me from his youth as a boy racer, but it grew into a meditation on immigration and large cities. The line ‘in the gilded portraits that hang / in the restaurants of your countrymen’ came to me in a Thai restaurant. The protagonist is self-absorbed and is living out his own messianic drama over a break-up, and it’s interesting to me that in a large city there could be many of these dramas playing out against the backdrop of oblivious commuters.

The Songs Of Your Youth

I think smokestacks are strikingly malignant structures that exist in cities – there’s a particularly scary looking one by the hospital in Auckland. I was thinking about this when a story about an unlikeable and nihilistic surgeon, who is also a Kinks and Beach Boys fan, came to me.

Water Underground

This is about a recent political masterstroke involving land use in the Canterbury plains of New Zealand. I don’t agree with what happened, but I could only watch in awe at how it did, and how it never became a major story here. It reminded me of some of the land battles over water fought by stealth in California at the beginning of the 20th Century, which one of my favourite films, Chinatown, is about.

A Friend From Argentina

This is a song I wrote after reading an article about the cocaine trade in Auckland, which, while perhaps seeming small and kind of quaint to people who might be used to London or Sydney, still proves a dangerous business to those in the wrong place in the chain.

Mt. Cargill

I was re-reading Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegurt when I wrote this story about an alien abduction in my hometown. I like the idea of not quite knowing whether you’re making something up or whether it’s actually happening. When I first drank alcohol as a teenager I pretended I was drunk until I actually was – but it was hard to tell where the two separated.

The Capital

This is a little about the sibling rivalry between cities like Wellington and Auckland – Melbourne and Sydney could substitute pretty well. I’m often trying to figure out what it means to live in a chaotic, poorly planned city, and what it says about me that I choose Auckland over the cities I profess to admire more.

Dumpster Diving

This was a one take track that stood out when it came time to mix the record, so made the cut. I think the would-be ‘Successors’ in this album are reasonably inept in trying to take over the world, and this character is a particularly good example. But yes, I am also a terrible dumpster diver.