Cam is like a country music god to the UK country music fans and it turns out, she is god. Cam’s second single from her new album All Things Light is titled Turns Out I’m God and whilst one may assume it’s a song about arrogance, it couldn’t be further from the truth. The song, is more of accepting who we are and being proud of our achievements and being open about that! As women, we tend to feel we shouldn’t be openly proud as we need to be seen as more humble but the song teaches us that we can be both!

The entire album, as any Cam fan would agree, is a an exceptional collection of hidden delights that makes you appreciate the beauty of music. Cam has this wonderful ability to create the most stunning melodies and with her vocal being a melody in itself, each song is breathtakingly beautiful. Cam creates the kind of music you just want to sit back and relax to and deeply listen with your eyes closed, appreciating every note.

Before Cam released All Things Light, we spoke to her about the creation behind the album and her adoration for the UK.

Enjoy!

Let’s talk about ‘Turns out, I’m God’. I know you’ve obviously said a lot about about it online, but if you could just elaborate on that, because the title is so intriguing as could easily be mistaken as being a song about arrogance and ego.

I was on autopilot, and then I sort of got shook out of it, I think, by the pandemic and by motherhood and then I had to sort of find something deeper to sort of have my foundation on and I remember, like my first time I ever learned how to meditate, and I turned my brain off. I realized there was this light and like a hum and a happiness inside me, and it was such a relief, like, Oh my gosh. You get taught your whole life – What are you? What will you become? because you’re incomplete now, and what can you be? And who can you surround yourself with to make yourself feel happy, and then to realize, when you meditate, you’re like, Oh my gosh, there’s always like a happy hum in me all the time, no matter what’s going on.

So now being a mom and surviving a pandemic, I’m like, I need a framework, I need something to hold on to and actually, this quilt behind me (she shows me) is like my little thing that I had made, like a little patchwork of beliefs. So it’s like for me, my little security blanket, and for my daughter, like there’s lyrics from the album, and it’s kind of like misshapen because that’s sort of how my belief system looks right now. It’s sort of like all my experiences and ideas that helped me get through and to me, I can’t get enough of saying I really do believe that, like, whether it’s God or the universe or magic, I really think all of us have that in ourselves, and even the people I dislike, there’s God in them, and there’s in the trees and everything. I think it’s all just one big cosmic soup we’re all experiencing, you know, together.

And I realized, because there’s an Alan Watts talk that sort of poses this question like, maybe, we’re all God and we’ve just forgotten and how would I be living my life if I honored that in myself, if I saw God in myself, and I recognize God and you like, how would I be living my life? And it, it sounds really heavy, but it’s also so freeing. I think most people I play it for in my life cry a little bit when they hear it, because I feel like it’s this, permission to see how divine you are, how holy you are, and you belong here. And that’s something I need to hear and I’ve needed to hear my whole life, and I know a lot of people need to hear that song, I’m just so, so so proud of it, and just so happy to keep saying that over and over.

Yes, especially for us women. Actually, I’m really bad at putting myself down. I have insane imposter syndrome. As Mum’s we also criticise ourselves. So yes, I think that you need to have that in you, and you need to say you know what? I’m actually doing well and I am awesome!

It’s really true, honestly, like with a lot of women, that’s when I see, like, the biggest response, because I think it’s like, we never get told that, you know. So I absolutely love getting to put that out into the world.

What can I know about the album?

Okay, so this is the vinyl. (shows me) I am so excited for you to see all the pictures on the inside too, but I have this on the inside. This is the description for my daughter. So it’s like all of it is probably stemming from the existential crisis that is motherhood. I said, “here are my songs for the world to hear, but really, every word is for you. Maybe one day when you’re feeling lost, the lyrics will suddenly sound new, and you’ll know how lost I felt, too, and you’ll be brave when you don’t want to be and stare into the abyss and discover that you are as holy as the chaos you are swimming through. And you’ll remember that you are God too, baby girl”

Oh, that’s beautiful.

So it’s, it’s all meant, I think my purpose is for her, but then my art just is something that is public. It ends up being for everybody too. You know?

Do you have songs that you’ve written for her, but you’ll never release because they’re too sacred?

You know, there’s one that I was thinking about putting on here, and I actually tried recording it, but it’s like, I can’t capture it, because I don’t know if you have this when you sing to your kids, and it’s so sweet as you’re singing it to your kids, but it’s almost like, too sacred or too ephemeral and when you try and put it onto a recording, it doesn’t feel the same as it does when I sing to her, and it’s, it’s actually a really dark song, but it’s like, “I will meet you by the river if I go before you do. I’m not gone, just gone ahead, waiting there for you, and I will meet you by the river and when your time is through, we’ll cross over hand in hand, because it’s not heaven till I’m with you.” And, like, she knows it, and I don’t know if she knows quite what it means, but she sings it with me while she’s falling asleep, and, you know, rubbing her back so that one didn’t make it.

That is beautiful!

Let’s talk ‘alchemy’, and how you decide to put out what song first? It can’t be easy?

Oh my gosh. It’s the hardest thing and I was probably debating back and forth up until the very last second, because I think the record, it doesn’t all sound like the same song over and over again. So when you put out something first, people might be like, Oh, I’m about to hear a record of all this. And so that’s why I was really excited to put out some stuff before the album came out. But ‘alchemy’ just is, I don’t know, like free and like catchy and fun melodies, but then it also It has this “dust to flesh, to bones to dust”, which is like an another acknowledgement of this. We start, you know, as dust and we end as dust and but we’re golden, like, isn’t it just magnificent that we get to be here for the time we’re here? I just love how poetic and deep it is, but it’s still like a little bump, you know, you’re just like, oh, I want to play that again. So it kind of just came forward as a song that seemed like such a “Hi, nice to meet you. I’m all things light. I’m happy to be at this party.” And then you come in with my like, thesis statement heavy, turns out that I’m God. And then yeah, keep moving, keep rolling from there.

How do you decide the book ends?

It’s incredibly hard to figure out because everyone goes, “they won’t listen in the order anyways”. And I’m like, “well, somebody might” This one starts with ‘turns out that I’m god’, and the first lyric is, “I was busy waiting for someone to live my life”. And that’s how I felt coming into this, I needed to take ownership of everything, of my spirituality, of my day to day life, of how this “What am I doing? What is life?” You know, I turned 40 in November, this is time for those questions. Like, let’s hit it head on in the last after I go through kind of like the things I’ve learned in my life, and maybe not trying to answer it for people. There’s even a song called “Kill the Guru”, which is like, “I fell in love with this guy who was a guru at one point because I just loved somebody being so sure.” He was so sure of all the answers. And those are the people you got to watch out for- They’re not, you know, they’re not, not the right thing. And then you get to the end of it, and it’s we always do, and it’s We’ll think of something we always do. And it’s like in a relationship, but also, like, I think, as human beings, like we’re gonna, we’re so brilliant, we’re so creative, and we’re gonna, we’re gonna find something. There will be a next chapter, and we’ll think, we’ll think of something. And the last lyric that I say in that song is “try” and so I feel like it is this journey of like I was on autopilot. I sort of deconstructed, tried to build myself a strong foundation that I could, I could really lean on, and that my daughter might be able to lean on, and I can be her guide through this life, because I have this to lean on. And at the end of this whole album, it’s like this radical optimism of just like, just, just try. That’s all you could be asked to do. You know, and expect of yourself is just give it a shot.

I like the fact that you do take your time between albums, because that’s how it always was. And I always, I’ve always found it incredibly difficult to keep up when someone has an album out every year.

I think it is because you’re a mother too, or, like, Time moves differently for us, and it’s so funny people are like, Why did you wait? And it’s like, oh, I didn’t wait. I did what I could every day around raising my kid and trying to find something that was meaningful and felt right. Instead of saying like, Oh, well, this is a numbers game, and you better show up, you know, every month with a new thing. And that’s, that’s not how I’m wired. I don’t know if anyone’s really wired that way. I think it’s the whole point of making music. There’s plenty of music out there, so you should make it if you really give a shit and want to make it. And there’s, there’s even a song on this one called ‘Slow down’, because I think as uncomfortable as the pandemic was for me, it was like a big lesson, and like, reevaluating the pace that I was living my life at. And yeah, I love taking my time and cooking it all up intentionally.

It was hard as well. Lucy must have only been about one, right?

She was three months old when it happened, it shut us down, you know. My husband reminds me all the time, he’s like, You got so much time with her that you wouldn’t have had. So that’s a wild blessing, a heavy, heavy package with a blessing inside. But it, I mean, yeah, we’re so close now, the two of us because of all that.

So what song on the album are you most excited for people to hear?

I mean, they’re all My children, I feel like I might say today, I’ll say ‘hallelujah’. There’s a song that’s the tagline is, “it don’t sound like hallelujah anymore”, and I felt like post pandemic but also like a lot of times in life, things get like, put back together, and everyone’s like, Okay, go on, go on your way. Whatever that heartbreak was it’s time to get back to normal life. And you’re like, oh, at least for me, I’m like, Oh my God, it does not feel the same. I don’t feel totally right, and I’m just supposed to keep doing the motions, and that just throws me off. So it’s like, this really kind of a simple, haunting thing, and then it goes off on the back end of the track into this like psychedelic moment, which is so fun to just surprise people with. So I’m excited to see how they respond to it.

Do any of the songs sound completely different from the writers room to full production where you’re like, Oh my God, I didn’t know it could sound like that?

Yeah, oh, it’s the best. We always start on the piano and then Ty came in and did these crazy drums in the interim. It’s like, What is even happening? And he also did the crazy outro on ‘hallelujah’, like it’s just all these moments where I am just so in awe, like of him, you know, and I’ve known him forever, and we just still keep surprising each other with stuff.

Where are you keeping your Grammy?

It is upstairs on the mantle, which I am so proud of myself because for the longest time I would keep platinum records or whatever, all those kinds of plaques – I would keep them downstairs, because I always felt like, talk about imposter syndrome – I was always like, oh, it’s not humble to have that, you know, super visible. And then when I got the Grammy, I was like, You know what? I did this, and I need this to be front center, so I have it just on top of the mantle in the main living room. So it’s right there.

Stand in front of it and go, “turns out I’m god”

yeah, exactly.

What song of yours is Lucy’s favourite?

She goes back and forth about her favourite, but she loves singing ‘alchemy’. But she told me the other day, maybe because it’s like the main thing I’m doing right now, but she says, ‘turns out that I’m God’ is her favourite. It will probably be a different story in like a month, but it means a lot. I did Austin City Limits recently, and it was like a 50th anniversary. So it was me and the Indigo Girls, and Lucy sat on my lap for the sound check rehearsal, and I was singing the song, and she knows it so well. She sings it too. She’s like, turns out that I am God. And like, I’m obsessed with Amy and Emily from Indigo Girls, I can’t overstate how important they are for me. And they were just in awe of watching this little girl. Like, how we’re talking about as women, you would never dare say that about yourself, you know. And here she is, like at five, just belting it like no questions asked. You know, I am divine and I am holy too, you know. And it just made me so happy.

That’s such a beautiful lesson. I know we said it earlier on, but it is a beautiful lesson, you can be like that and not be too arrogant. You can say, Do you know what? I am brilliant! I really do hope that it inspires a lot of people and little girls and little boys too because I want to teach my kids to say, You know what, I’m great!