After Working With Beyoncé, Cam Finds Her Compass on ‘All Things Light’: ‘I Can’t Leave Any Stone Unturned’

When singer-songwriter Cam began drawing together the concepts that would anchor her new album All Things Light, out Friday (July 18) via RCA Records, she took inspiration from the emotionally heavy, isolating early days of the COVID pandemic, but also from the questions of a curious toddler—her daughter Lucy, now 5.

“We have backyard chickens, and one of them died, and she would ask, ‘What happens when they die?’ And I was like, ‘We don’t know, but I guess your body gets still and our light goes back to the stars,’ because to me, on a science level [and] a spiritual level, I don’t think anything is lost,” Cam tells Billboard. “This album is trying to find little stories, metaphors, guideposts in a way, so that at least if my daughter knows she’s not alone in feeling what she’s feeling, she can test herself as she’s trying to figure things out.”

In 2021, Cam found herself with time alone in a studio. That duality of welcoming in a new life during a season of pronounced global grief, anxiety and death caused Cam to deeply consider the motive behind the new music.

“I didn’t set out like, ‘Hey, I want to write a spiritual album or a transformational album,’” she recalls. “This stuff just started pouring out. When you’re alone — and this sounds cheesy — then I get to be a vessel for whatever is coming through, and it’s not getting augmented by anyone else.”

The beginning threads of some of the earliest songs for the album, such as “Hallelujah” and “Turns Out That I Am God,” came from those solo moments. “Hallelujah” was born from a deep look at how the world seemed to shift into high gear following the pandemic, without taking the time to grieve the brokenness.

“I’m a very face-the-abyss type of person,” she says. “I don’t think there is any other way for me to exist. If I sense an existential dread coming on, I have to sit down and look at it.”

Cam’s own childhood in California included time in a children’s choir, where she soaked in universal truths from singing requiems and folk songs in more than a dozen languages.

“I was not raised with religion. I got to learn from practices and a lot of experiences. I wasn’t given the words, which I think was a really thoughtful choice on my parents’ part. But having a child during [the pandemic] even though it’s creating life, it was also really an awareness of death. I think being a mom and facing all that heaviness and beauty, I realized I’m responsible for building that for her and for myself. I can’t leave any stone unturned at this point. I need to commit myself to building a spiritual framework for myself.”

She took those concepts to longtime collaborators including her “Burning House” co-writers Tyler Johnson and Jeff Bhasker, but also collaborators including Michael Uzowuru (Frank Ocean, SZA) and Ethan Gruska (boygenius, Phoebe Bridgers, Remi Wolf). In the process, Cam wove together a tapestry of sounds including folk, country and ethereal pop.

Then, Cam and her longtime producer Johnson went to Los Angeles’ EastWest Studios, where The Beach Boys’ 1966 masterpiece Pet Sounds and The Mamas and The Papas’ “Monday, Monday” were recorded.

“I feel so lucky to have found him,” she says of Johnson. “He was actually an old boyfriend’s roommate, and we started working together. We sort of shaped each other. I love his musical instinct, the tone, the way he writes. What he comes up with just feels perfect with my ideas.”

Lessons she’s learned as a woman and musician over the years are threaded through the new album. In her 20s, Cam traveled through Nepal and Egypt, at one point falling for an Eastern European guru, a relationship that spurred the album’s cautionary tale “Kill the Guru.”

“The reason I broke up with the ‘Burning House’ guy was that I fell in love with a guru and it was… I don’t recommend it,” she says, calling her ex a “very narcissistic person. But I was just so enamored at the time with someone who seemed to know everything. Isn’t that so attractive? I want to be near that…But sometimes, it’s just overconfidence. If you feel like the trust you have in yourself starts shifting out of your body towards somebody else, that’s the biggest red flag. Move away from that person; you need space. You have to be able to trust yourself more than anyone else.”

After studying psychology at the UC Davis, Cam faced a turning point at age 24, when she was rejected from Georgetown’s graduate psychology program. Encouraged by her sister to follow her passion for music, she moved to Los Angeles and eventually to Nashville.

She released her EP, Welcome to Cam Country, in 2015, and soon followed it with the full-length album Untamed. She broke through with the heartbreaking, gorgeous “Burning House,” which reached No. 2 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart and was certified 3x platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

A decade after that breakthrough success, the legacy of “Burning House” continues, from performances by American Idol contestants to country singer-songwriter Kameron Marlowe releasing his version last year (“I think it’s beautiful, it’s cool. He has a great voice,” Cam says of Marlowe’s version).

The album’s follow-up, The Otherside, came in October 2020, just months before Cam found herself alone in the studio, capturing ideas for All Things Light.

One of the new album’s key lyrics comes from the single, “Turns Out I Am God”: “I was busy waiting for someone to live my life/ When I fell asleep for a hundred years one night/ Dreamt myself to the center of all things light.” The track was inspired by the works of author Alan Watts and Cam’s own experience with meditation, which she first took up in college.

“I turned my mind off and then realized there was this whole peace inside of me, and then it was like, ‘Oh, I’m not separate. I’m part of everything.’ We had been torn on whether ‘God’ should be [recorded] on piano. Ethan, who feels kind of country to be honest, came in, and he and [Tyler] crafted this guitar tone that was just perfect.”

Elsewhere, she took influence from the life-to-death cycle described in a Buddhist chant in “Alchemy,” while the tender country-leaning “Slow Down” pushes back against the instinct to be endlessly productive.

“Everybody is obviously on the content train — rush, rush, rush,” she says of the grind most artists today face. “I just want [the music] to be really good and I want to be able to take care of my kid. I read [Tricia Hersey’s 2022 book] Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. I think anything that helps you deprogram is good. Your worth is not your productivity. I want to make sure the music I’m making, that I’m putting it out there for the right reasons and that it’s going to affect people the right way.”

Accompanying the album is the project’s equally striking artwork, from Milan-based photographer Szilveszter Mako. The vivid album cover features a closeup of Cam, adorned in a suit and her blonde hair swept into waves, with a blaze of light partially obscuring her face from view. Cam, who also has an honors degree in Italian, calls the photo a “reference to that light I was talking about. Underneath is that light that I think is in everybody, so there’s light coming from my face.”

As she was working on the music that would become All Things Light, she was also creating music that would become part of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album. In 2021, Cam received a call from her publisher about a sudden opening in a writing session, which would turn out to be part of the Grammy album of hte year-winning project Cowboy Carter. Cam co-wrote five songs on the project, including “Protector” and “Daughter,” and also served as a producer, engineer and background vocalist on the album.

“It all came from the same space,” she recalls. “It was really reassuring for [Beyoncé’s] music to come out first. It was wonderful to watch, and from an artistic standpoint, it’s incredibly inspiring and it was nice to see someone at that level committing to those ideas of what art can be. And what a story, too, for her to finally get [the Grammys’ album of the year honor] on that album. To get to be part of something that got to be celebrated but also mean something to me and be culture-changing, it’s a dream.”

For Cam, that celebration and themes of fulfillment and strength carry over onto her album, specifically in the string-filled closer, “We Always Do,” which serves as an assurance-filled testament to human resilience.

“The last song on the record is radically positive, just saying ‘We’re going to find a way,’” she says. “I believe that for humans and I believe that in my marriage and relationships. It’s a commitment and we’ll find a way.”

Cam reveals that she has more songs in the works, but says she’s found a new sense of priority and daily rhythm since the release of her previous album and is in no rush to put out more music.

“My husband always said we were so fortunate in a way that during the pandemic we got all this time with Lucy. Trying to find the silver lining when it felt like the bottom fell out of the whole [music] industry,” she says. “Now, getting back to it, I had to slow down to realize how much I was participating in my own hamster wheel and how much I didn’t get out of it. I had to learn to manage my schedule in a way that makes sense for me and my family. If you ask me what’s the most important thing in my life is, it’s that time and space with my family and people that I love. So that’s gonna come first.”