What are words if not weapons of love and what are songs if not the bullets to carry them through the air to our ears? Questions worth pondering and ones that seem strangely relevant to Sheila K Cameron’s album “With You in My Life”.
As if drawing from a fountain of eternal inspiration, these 17 songs – I shall shortly return to that description – exude a literacy that allows Sheila K Cameron to take us for a wander in the misty meadows of both the heart and the mind. The album is a quirky, if sometimes inconsistent, thing to listen to as, more often than not, the music and the words seem to run in parallel with each other as if each were fighting to get past the finishing line first. This is, however, clearly a stylistic choice and, to revisit my comment at the start of this very paragraph, the effect is to make these less songs in the conventional sense than soundtracks to the purer poetic form that is the spoken word. Like I said, it’s a deliberate decision and one that could have made this album into something of a square peg in a round hole were it not for Sheila K Cameron’s talent for straight arrow targeting.
"With You In My Life" therefore represents more of what the poet inside of all of us would want to listen to. It’s not a radio friendly album and it’s not an album that would be restricted the arthouse crowd either. It’s a Sheila K Cameron album and her finger is, as always, on the trigger.
Best song: “All The Words of Love” for its Lynchian swagger.