Camille Trail

Hey, if you are going to have a quarter-life crisis, make sure you get some songs out of them. Good ones too. That would be Camille Trail’s advice.

After this year’s first single, Gotta Get To Know You, bared some post-breakup scars along with a new indie-folk direction, Camille has pulled the curtains right back with twenties, where she confesses in a song that builds and builds, “Everybody said it’d be easy, when you’ve got no responsibilities …[but] all I’ve got is anxiety”.

“I was really good when I wrote Got To Get To Know You but with twenties I was so tired, working the day job to pay the bills and writing straight afterward, and I was burning the candle at both ends,” Camille says. “It was this moment where I was going back and forth of being okay and not being okay and wondering how long am I going to be like this? And everything came crashing down at once. I felt like I had my quarter life crisis.”

She laughs at the sound of this, almost apologising for being 25 and uncertain – as if anyone at 35 or 55 really has everything sorted; as if they didn’t have their own meltdowns once – but you can feel that crisis in every beat of the song she made with producer Garrett Kato.

“I wanted it to build up quickly and have this chaotic energy about it, so you didn’t really know what was happening, like it came out of nowhere. Because that’s what was going on in my head,” says Camille of twenties, which she only finished writing on the day she went into the studio.

“There’s the panicky heartbeat drums and that racing feeling, hot flushes, thoughts going crazy, and then you have that breaking point where everything stops and it’s like, okay, this is what it is, so how am I going to deal with this.”

In case you’re worried, Camille insists “I hadn’t completely lost my mind. It’s just that all these things hit me at once and I was a little bit sad for a moment. And it’s ok that I felt sad.”

Yep, as well as the songs – the third part of the “crisis package deal”, Carry Me Home, will be seen soon enough – she did learn a pretty valuable lesson: it is ok to be sad or unsure, because not everyone has the answers all the time, and that’s fine. “I am comfortable now with having no idea what I’m doing, because I know I’ll figure it out,” she says.

The proof of that is in the songs as much as the living, and soon enough, in the touring. Having made her first connections in this new folk world when she played at Folk Alliance festival in Kansas City earlier this year, Camille’s taking up an invitation to showcase at Ireland’s Your Roots Are Showing folk conference, early in 2024.

“It’s like-minded people and so broad too, so you can really have your artistic freedom,” says an eager-to-travel Camille. “You are almost applauded the more different you are in a weird way with folk. It’s nice that you can feel you can be absolutely anything you want to be.”

Which is just how you want to be in your twenties, right?