Camille Trail I Don't Like You

There was one word off the table when Camille Trail went into the studio with producer Shane Nicholson to record her debut album: pretty.

She didn't want it anywhere near her rootsy country folk. Didn't want it said, or even thought.

"I don't like pretty things. He'd play a guitar and say is that too pretty and I'd say yep, too pretty," says Camille. "I don't like shiny things, I like it to be raw and vulnerable and I wanted to make my debut album a bit more of a statement."

And that statement was in line with songs that might haunt you, that will certainly leave a mark on you from what she calls "a sit down with a whiskey kind of album", full of hurt and sins.

"You hear some albums and they are pretty: they're nice songs, they're nice to listen to, you sing along and blah blah blah," says the 22-year-old. "But I wanted to make my entrance as an artist a bit more like 'she is serious and she is a songwriter and has more to say than just he broke my heart'."

To be fair, Nicholson wasn't surprised to get those riding instructions from the singer and songwriter from Central Queensland. He'd already produced three singles for Camille, and, along with another fellow Queenslander singer/songwriter Brad Butcher, duets with her on the album.

Nonetheless Nicholson's support gave her more than room, it gave her the confidence to try.

"The biggest thing I've taken away is to believe in yourself as a songwriter," she says. "Everybody is trying to find their way, no person knows exactly what they're doing, so it's about believing in your own writing because no one can write like you."

If keeping the pretty away was key, so was busting up a few other expectations. While she's a country singer who actually grew up in the country, on her family's cattle farm a couple hours out of Rockhampton, if you're expecting songs about utes, boots and tractor chutes, you're on the wrong beast.

"It never really occurred to me to write about [utes and boots] because it was my everyday life," says Camille. Instead, the music she grew up with was Chuck Berry ("I was obsessed with him and that era"), Creedence and Fleetwood Mac; the music she fell in love with was Shane Nicholson, a whole lot of blues, and then gospel.

The blues comes through in the way Camille is comfortable playing slow - not just ballads, not just teary, but smouldering and slow burning songs, like the eerie a cappella 'Mary', that bring a listener along rather than smacking them in the face. The gospel you can hear in the organ and sad elegance of 'Oh Darling' or the lyrics of songs like 'Devil's Drink' and 'Deal With The Devil'.

"I think I've always loved vulnerable music. There's something really beautiful about just a piano and lyrics and space," says Camille, who plays and writes on piano and guitar. "I've always loved those darker themes and I'm a big believer in what goes around comes around."

She didn't learn that at her "uni", the JMC Academy in Brisbane, where she studied songwriting, or at least studied the rules so she could learn how to break them. This album was her final year project, mostly written after hours when the formal lessons could be put aside.
"I would write songs at uni that would be very structured, then I would go home and I would be back in my own little area - with candles going and incense and tapestries - and I would escape the three-minute songs and it would just pour out," Camille remembers of those months of heartache and renewal.

"In I Know I'm Hard To Love, I like the line 'I know I'm hard to love but I want you to try'. The reason I wrote that is I had just been dumped and I was hung over and feeling sorry for myself, but a part of me was like, 'hey, no, I'm actually cooler than you and I don't want to be with you anymore, you suck'."

That's not pretty is it? Good.