Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
We spend so long, so many hundreds of hours daydreaming, hoping, fantasizing, that we could be someone else, or at least be someone that someone would want to be like, that we forget for the vast majority of times those same people cast their stare in our direction and hold their tongue, not sure on how to inform us, to openly declare, I’m Just Like You.
Such a phrase spoken confidently might actually do some good in the world, it would install a kind of equality; never mind the sense that wealth offers a kind of difference, we all breathe the same air, we suffer from ailments and complaints, money is not the answer for we all must eventually pass, but what does matter is how we treat life, the music we enjoy and the art that gives our soul meaning.
To play homage and tribute to someone though is the point of exercising a realm of agreement, to say to a hero that you have inspired me to a level where I am happy with my performance, and if not seen as an equal, then I can hold my head up high in honour of your brilliance.
Sunjay’s latest album. I’m Just Like You, is such a recording of intent and almost rightful worship in honour of the legendary folk/blues player Chris Smither that the music presented is of the highest quality and one that insists that acknowledging inspiration is the finest of tributes to the past.
Stourbridge may be a million miles away from the conditions of the America that Chris Smither was born into, but the sense of time that prevails, the union into which art separates itself from the world of political damage, is forever entwined; and for the West Midland’s hero himself, the appreciation for the insight of the song through a different background is enormous, and as tracks such as No Love Today, Love You Like A Man, Father’s Day, Small Revelations, What It Might Have Been, and Leave A Light On tangle with emotions of modern day renaissance, so we can see the beauty, even the pain and damage, of another’s point of view.
To find inspiration during a period of madness and agony that accompanied the pandemic is perhaps one we are used to now, but the stimulus and creative completeness is one that sets itself apart from those that find it hard to believe in identifying with the possibility of equal worth, of practicing to the point where vision of who you want to be is actually yourself…just better.
A fine and assured album, one that reaches out in difficult times and smiles at its success.
Sunjay releases I’m Just Like You on 11th November.
Ian D. Hall