Cam’s a perpetually sunny individual, and it turns out there’s a secret: coffee, and lots of it. “I have a Keurig on my bus and those Tully’s K-Cups are pretty much how I get through most days, caffeine straight to the bloodstream,” she shares on an early September morning. She’s characteristically ebullient, sharing with candor her creative processes, struggles, and, lately, enthusiasm about her partnership with Tully’s.
“It was really cool they reached out,” she continues. The partnership focuses on artists (visual artists, musicians, even an artist who makes neon) from the Pacific Northwest, including Cam, who’s from the San Francisco Bay Area. “It’s really cool what they did because they care a lot about the process and making sure every step is done really well to make sure the coffee is just amazing.” For the record, Cam takes hers black – “that’s because I have been poor for a long time,” she laughs – but adds that it allows her to appreciate the flavors more.
Cam is into process and appreciation of craft, something she talks at length about, from the work of others to her own music. “The way that I was introduced to doing music in Los Angeles was like, starting out in an apartment,” she says. “We did all of it in a room, together.” Though she brings in live players to eventually play on the demos – in fact, it’s how she met her band – the songs and the production are built side-by-side, at the same time. “I’m trying not to sound like a control freak, but it’s impossible to get your fingerprints all over everything when you have a disjointed process,” she laughs. Though it’s not necessarily a Nashville norm – many writers prefer to write start-to-finish on guitar before addressing the production of a song – it’s something that’s earned her Nashville success, with a debut project that sounds distinctly Cam.
“With this next album I tried really hard just to be the better version of me,” she continues. “I have these high ideas of what I want to accomplish. When you are starting out … you’re still getting better at the procedure and getting better at your craft, the execution of it. The better I get at that, the more tools I have to actually accomplish the high ideal that I have. I feel like it’s more involved in that I’m just a better me.”