What can you say about an enigma like Sheila K Cameron? Quite a lot actually but little of it would make sense of her place in the music scene of today. Her new album “Those They Chose” is a compilation of - if not quite a “best of” – her songs that might nonetheless serve as a suitable introduction to her convoluted ways for those who seek more than the mundane.
In the fifty minutes or so of your life that this album will consume, you won’t hear anything that makes particular sense. Her lyrical style is more akin to oblique poetry than conventional song writing yet the expressed emotions remain as clear as the day. I regard that as the mark of an original and, perhaps as a consequence of so determinedly following her own path, these sixteen songs often seem more spiritual than personal or commercial.
Listening to these songs again reinforces the fact that Sheila K Cameron has, by some magic, given them a life of their own that transcends the boundaries of any medium of recorded sound and, whilst my choices for a compilation would have been different, your heart would indeed have to be refrigerated to avoid the intoxication found in “Drink To Me Only” and “The Water is Deep”. Not many people can haunt you with a song but she can.
An enigma. An original. There is only one Sheila K Cameron.