:: Erica Baxter - Through My Eyes

Erica Baxter

It's been a while in the making, but the lovely looking Erica Baxter finally releases her debut album “Through My Eyes”. The album has been a burning ambition for Erica for a long time and it's a good result for her. The tracks are generally melodic and soulful with evocative lyrics which Erica admits are quite personal. Amidst these are well produced pop songs about self-discovery and inner strength, with some catchy choruses. The single “I Spy” would be familiar to most. It is a Natasha Bedingfield composition. The album indicates the sound of an artist finally realising her musical ambition and she achieves it well with the assistance of well remowned producer and songwriter Audius. He co-wrote a few songs with Erica and displays his craft in the arrangements and gets the best out of each song. There is even a raw acoustic feel to some songs and carries the emotion which Erica wanted to bring to this set. Writing lyrics has probably been a godsend for her in her high-profile status. She even feels the need to write about perceived misconceptions about her. Well, Erica, you've been very honest in these tracks and deserve credit for this debut album.

The first single, “I Spy”, is as poppy as you’d expect and undeniably catchy, but quite unlike the rest of the album, which ventures into more raw, acoustic territory. It’s not what I’d anticipated at all – and neither is Baxter.

As such, writing lyrics has become something of a therapeutic process for Baxter. It’s forced her, she says, to confront issues within her own life – stuff she’d been “going through” over the past year. Stuff the majority of us probably read about in our daily newspapers, like her break-up with Packer.

So the lyrics on the album are mostly introspective, concerned with inner strength and, yep, you guessed it, other people’s misconceptions about her. Listen to “I Spy” and you can hear what Baxter seems desperate to let us all know – “I am what I am, not that someone you want me to be”, she sings. There’s also a thinly veiled barb at the media scrutiny she’s had to endure: “You like to think you know me, but my smile is all you see.”

“I really tried to be as honest as I could. They’re all songs that are related to me – they were all things that were happening to me,” she admits.