Cam Finds Artistic Freedom In New Era [Interview]
Cam.
When Cam accepted her Grammy award for her work on Cowboy Carter earlier this year, it wasn’t just a career milestone, it was a full-circle moment. Behind the scenes, as she contributed to Beyoncé’s genre-busting project, Cam was simultaneously crafting her own most personal body of work to date: All Things Light.
“I mean it was incredible,” Cam tells MusicRow of the Grammy win. “It just feels so gratifying on so many levels. It feels like art was made, that is a history lesson that is pushing boundaries and it still got recognized in a kind of commercial way.”
That same spirit of boundary-pushing fuels All Things Light. The album is at once genre-fluid, deeply vulnerable, and spiritually exploratory, far from anything resembling a calculated industry move. But according to Cam, that’s exactly the point.
Released as her first solo single in four years, “Alchemy” marked the beginning of this new era for Cam. “There’s really this whole album with me taking a fear of death and looking uncertainty in the eye with COVID and new motherhood and not letting those heavy feelings just lie,” she explains. “This is ‘Alchemy.’ I was trying to make it an uptempo happy song and I still inserted a Buddhist death meditation.”
The contrast between light and dark is central to Cam’s new work. From facing the mortality of loved ones to reckoning with what legacy means for a mother and an artist, All Things Light emerged from some of the most disorienting years of her life.
“Having my daughter and the postpartum or whatever that period is of darkness and COVID, it’s just like, my life has changed and I do not know what’s coming next,” she says.
In the middle of all this, a simple question from her daughter, “Mom, what happens when we die?,” served as a spark.
“What came out of me in that moment was that our bodies get really still and our light goes back up to the stars,” Cam recalls. That spontaneous, gut-level answer became a guiding philosophy for the album. “I really used my feelings and what felt right in my tummy and my body. This is what I need to help me deal with difficult moments.”
Musically, All Things Light refuses to be boxed in. It blends country, Americana, pop and more. “To me, the most natural stuff comes out of me in a way that’s just a mix of all those things because I listened to all those things,” she says. “I should be able to paint with all the colors that I want to tell the story how it needs to be told.”
Though she didn’t set out to break rules, the genre-blurring nature of the record became a quiet act of rebellion, especially in a shifting industry. “At the beginning of all this, I was like, I don’t know if there will be an industry to return to. I should be doing this for art’s sake,” Cam says. “There’s no way you can abandon how important art and music is for humanity.”
Songs like “Slow Down” and “Everblue” give listeners space to feel everything. “‘Everblue’ is just such a night drive or a calm sadness that is for some reason one of my favorite feelings. I recognize it,” she says. “Maybe just all of us sad girl Tumblr post by it. It feels so good.”
One of the album’s most spiritually charged and potentially controversial songs is “Turns Out That I Am God,” a track Cam says she approached with great care. “I worked really hard to make sure I said it in a way that felt humble,” she explains. “I wasn’t raised with religion, so the word God, some people feel belongs to them. That’s not where I’m coming from.”
Instead, she explores spirituality as a universal human experience, something deeply personal and yet inherently shared. With input from a rabbi and a pastor, Cam found confidence in her message. “It turned out that ‘I’m God’ was something that I needed to say.”
Sharing it was scary, she admits. But that fear, for her, is a sign she’s doing it right. “It’s not art if you aren’t a tiny bit nervous to say something.”
Cam recently performed at The Bluebird Cafe with longtime trusted collaborator Tyler Johnson, another moment that felt full circle.
“I remember watching from the outside of that circle going to shows early on being like, I want to be in the middle of that circle, having written those songs. And Now being in the middle of the circle and between Ty and I having we’re singing, he’s got Harry Styles cuts, and we both have a Miley Cyrus and Beyonce cuts. It makes me so proud of how he has worked so hard.”
Cam’s set for her “The Slow Down Tour” will bring these themes into full view. A giant white crane, built like a parade puppet, will be on stage as a spiritual symbol. Its origin? Her sister kept seeing cranes during a difficult period in her life. Then, one showed up unexpectedly in her parents’ driveway on a day of good news. Cam knew it had to become part of the tour.
“This bird is coming with me,” she says. “This is the whole point of art. You turn the darkness into something else, and you make it a symbol of how you can make it through or how you did make it through, or music to hold your hand while you make it through.”
The show design, she says, is just as intentional as every lyric. “I’m hoping to make people cry and then make them dance.”
Looking back, Cam sees this moment as the fulfillment of what her younger self always hoped for. “I think younger me would’ve wanted me to be exactly like this,” she reflects. “I know younger me is just like, yes, look at you having your body and your own experiences and living your life.”
Cam’s “The Slow Down Tour” will visit the Ryman Auditorium this Sunday (Oct. 26).
