NZ Music Month: Anna Coddington recommends...

"I've got a real thing for kooky, descriptive lyrics about real life and that's exactly what he does," Anna Coddington says of - you guessed it - Tono and the Finance Company.

Coddington had asked Haunted Love to support her at a Dunedin show. They couldn't but recommended Tono (Anthonie Tonnan).

She liked him straight off the bat. He even supplemented the performance with spoken word poetry. "It was good, you know. It wasn't awkward."

Another thing she liked about those kooky, descriptive lyrics are the way they're sung - in a broad New Zealand accent. To say Coddington is interested in singing accents is an understatement. She wrote her master's thesis on it.

"What I decided is that it's not that he over-emphasizes it. But in the context of pop music that's what it sounds like, because you're so not used to hearing anyone sing the same as they speak.

"People always alter it for whatever reason. Some people think it's easier to sing the vowels if you modify them slightly, or they just think it sounds ugly to sing with your normal spoken accent."

Clearly Tono doesn't think that way either.

His recently-released debut album Up Here For Dancing basks in it. Full of tales about the difficulty of taking off skinny jeans and a sweetly sung dressing down of property managers.

Or as Coddington says: "Really cool stories about regular people."

-nzherald.co.nz