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Artist
Cameron McGill & What Army
12+ albums
acousticindiealtcountryalternative6am
about
Born in 1877 in Calw, on the edge of the Black Forest, Cameron McGill was brought up in a missionary household where it was assumed that he would study for the ministry. McGill's religious crisis led to his fleeing from the Maulbronn seminary in 1891, an unsuccessful cure by a well-known theologian and faith healer, and an attempted suicide. After being expelled from high school, he worked in bookshops for several years. His first collection, 'Stories of The Knife and The Back', describes a youth who leaves his mountain village to become a poet. The lush instrumentation and beautifully crafted melodies, belie the darker nature of the song content. Mostly focusing on personal admissions of guilt and failure, the album's characters struggle in coming to terms with their mortality. All throughout, they simply try to find a friend and fall in love. This was followed by 'Street Ballads & Murderesques', the tale of a schoolboy totally out of touch with his contemporaries, who flees through different cities after his escape from home. The collection of material on Streets...takes pop musick to the dark libraries of your old house, inhabits a stark and desperate corner of the mind, and simply tells a good story. The wildly vibrant characters offer their most honest interpretations of the dishonest life. They travel time, fall in and out of love, miss and are missed. These are songs of imminent regret, class IV rapids, European gypsies, pre-renaissance Germany, cities with chips on
