Naarm-based singer-songwriter, activist, and mother Claire Tonti is breaking down barriers, using her music to normalise the complexities of motherhood. Her debut album, Matrescence, released in 2023, is nothing short of powerful. Tonti dives deep, sharing her experiences of motherhood, loss, and yearning with raw emotion. It’s a beautiful body of work that captures immense passion and vulnerability. Now, Tonti is preparing for the release of her brand new single, “The Beast”, on October 15th, Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. I had the pleasure of sitting down with her for an open, honest conversation about motherhood and music.
As a mother myself, I can relate to the incredible challenges that come with parenthood. While it’s often described as the greatest joy one can experience, it also brings with it a unique form of grief and can be relentless to say the least. The transformation women undergo as they step into motherhood leaves a profound impact, and there’s a term that captures this: matrescence. Claire Tonti is deeply passionate about this concept.
So, what is matrescence? Tonti explains, “Matrescence is the biggest endocrine event that someone can go through. It’s the biggest transition—bigger than adolescence. It’s defined as the transition to motherhood, but it’s also pregnancy as well. Pregnancy and birth change someone entirely, and we now know from brain scans alone that the shape of your brain changes. Just like adolescence, your whole world shifts—your view of yourself, your place in culture, your relationships, and your understanding of your body.”
For anyone who has gone through this transformation, Tonti’s words resonate deeply. Having a term for such a monumental change is liberating, especially since it can be such a personal, often hard-to-describe experience.
Tonti’s music is a reflection of her journey through motherhood, something that she feels there is a significant lack of in current media. “With adolescence, we have so many songs, so much art and culture around that intense period because everything is so heightened. But we don’t talk about motherhood in the same way, even though it’s just as fragile—if not more so, because we’re also often caring for a little person.”
Nine years ago, Tonti gave birth to her son in what she describes as a traumatic experience. Seven years later, in the midst of the pandemic, she gave birth to her daughter. The isolation of lockdowns, juggling homeschooling, work, and parenting, along with a bout of long COVID, left her bedridden for weeks. It was during this challenging period that music began to return to her. Though she had always loved music, this new chapter in her life reawakened her creativity.
Tonti uses beautiful analogies to describe the transformation into motherhood, sharing, “A moth goes into a cocoon and totally disintegrates, except for the liminal discs that are left. It then transitions into this incredible creature. Moths spend a lot of time in the dark looking for light, which to me symbolises motherhood and the trauma we go through. They never go back, though they retain something from before. The dragonfly is the same. It starts as a water grub and drills a hole in its own head when it can no longer stay in its shell. It’s painful, but that alchemy allows it to take flight.”
Listening to her music and speaking with her, it’s clear that mothers are at the heart of her work- they’re her people. She not only honours mothers through her songs but also in the way she approaches her career. “I’m creating gigs that I can attend…You have to create your own opportunities because if you’re going to do a headline show that expects you to be on at 9:30 pm, I just can’t do that with kids. Physically, I’m up at 6 am with them, and I’m exhausted by then. Hormonally, it’s not good for me either. I’m heading into perimenopause, and we need rest during this stage. You have to create your own opportunities because no one is going to change it for us. It’s so male-dominated and feels like a young person’s game in many ways. If you want gigs you can actually attend, you need to make them happen.”
Tonti’s new single, “The Beast”, was released today in honour of Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. “The Beast” deals with her own experience with a miscarriage. Tonti explains, “I experienced a miscarriage between my two kids, and I was so underprepared for what that was actually like. I essentially went into labour, which is something I want women to know because we’re not often told that—it’s described as being like a bad period. I wrote this song to convey the emotional weight of that experience. Sonically, we used a sound from an ultrasound machine to capture the feeling of birth and loss. It’s not just about my miscarriage; it’s also about the lack of autonomy women often feel in the medical system and the sense of dismissal.”
To celebrate the launch, Claire will be having a single launch on October 20 at The Brunswick Ballroom, get your tickets HERE. You can stream “Matrescence” as well as “The Beast” on Apple Music or Spotify, and keep up to date with Claire’s work and life HERE.
