Camie Drops “Genesis 3,” New Single Off the New Horror-Fantasy Album Poems In The Ashes
Anxiety spirals triggering apocalypses. Queer cannibals devouring each other. Hysterical heartbroken women turning into dogs. Satan on a really bad date.
Camie is taking listeners on a techno-symphonic journey through the gritty underbelly of her heart, mind, body, and fantasies on her latest album Poems In The Ashes. Coming as the Toronto alternative singer/songwriter’s sophomore release, Poems In The Ashes is a bold showcase of Camie’s transformative musical prowess. The artist’s fascinating, singular juxtaposition of wildly open and vulnerable lyrics with her ultra-modern, yet unabashedly rock & roll style, is bound to send shock waves through the Toronto music scene and beyond. The third single, “Genesis 3,” is out now.
“I wrote and recorded this album in a two-year period, following multiple pandemic-time lockdowns, when I felt ugly, lost, and disoriented by the new world that I was easing into,” Camie recalls. “I had just moved to a new city (Toronto) at twenty-four years old and I didn’t know who I was. I was horribly depressed and anxious. I was working through the most formative heartbreak of my early twenties. I was grappling with my queerness and going on a lot of terrible dates.”
“I had just released my first critically acclaimed, award-winning record, entitled “troubadour” (2021), which was a cinematic, romantic, and dreamy ambient folk record. Releasing that album was strange because I felt like those sonics, and poetics no longer suited my volatile mental and emotional states. I knew that, for my next record, I wanted to do a complete genre shift to account for everything that I was feeling and experiencing. Thus, Poems In The Ashes was born.”
Charting a personal journey from anxiety and self-destruction to catharsis and power, the resulting record is a celebration of the strange, surreal, and serpentine motions of queer womanhood. Blending high fantasy with moments of personal epiphany, transformation, and revelation, each song takes a new, queer, and feminist spin on a different psycho-sexy horror trope. Poems In The Ashes is an album for and about queer women stepping into their desires no matter how taboo, and reclaiming their full identities from outmoded belief systems that warn desire and sexuality are not “for” you.
“I decided to process all of these ugly emotions and experiences in the best way I knew how: by telling stories,” Camie says. “Blending the fantastical and the speculative with my real-world experiences, creating this album felt like a lifeline for me. In writing these songs, I thought a lot about the poetics of excess—hysteria, horror, pleasure, madness, ecstasy, and rapture—and how these things manifest at the limits of human bodies and emotions.”
“These are emotions that everyone experiences in various capacities, but they’re things often seen as “too much” (especially when expressed by queer women), taboo, or shameful. This record allowed me to reclaim my body, my emotions, and my physical and spiritual lives. Now, with this release, all that catharsis can be yours.”
Care to introduce yourself?
Hey everyone! My name is Camie and I’m a Toronto-based alternative folk rock singer-songwriter. I’m largely known for my colourful queer-feminist folk tunes, which garnered me a Folk Music Ontario/Colleen Peterson Songwriting Award and Canadian Folk Music Award nomination (for 2021’s “Winter” and troubadour EP, respectively). I’m really interested in creating imagistic story-songs that unexpectedly blend acoustic and electronic sonics—centring queer and feminist poetics, politics, and desires. Some of my recent performances include the 2023 Canadian Folk Music Awards gala evening, Home County Music and Art Festival, Winterfolk Blues and Roots Festival, the Jack Richardson London Music Awards, and the Hamilton Music Awards. I just released my new alternative rock album, entitled POEMS IN THE ASHES, on March 29th, which locates moments of radical queerness and transcendence in dark soundscapes of psycho-sexy horror. Beyond my work as a solo musician, I’m also an award-winning performance artist and researcher. I’ve been teaching queer theory at the University of Toronto for the past few months, so I’ve got a bit of a Hannah Montana-esque thing going. If you’re interested in learning more about me and my work, you can find me everywhere at @thecamiliad or at camilleintson.com!
Tell us about the process of recording “Genesis 3.”
GENESIS 3 was one of the few songs on POEMS IN THE ASHES that I wrote outside of a studio session and then brought in to record. This is typically how I make my records—I like to write every melody line, every lyric, before bringing a demo to my team—but I challenged myself to write more of POEMS in-studio, which is to say more collaboratively. GENESIS 3 was the big exception. As for its inspiration: after a particularly difficult breakup, I was going on all these terrible rebound dates, not really liking anyone, and feeling guilty because I was clearly emotionally unavailable. And yet something in me wanted to keep trying—for love, maybe for lust, I don’t know—it was compulsive repetition. So I, uh, imagined myself as Satan in the Bible, extending temptation to my various objects of desire. “Take my proverbial apple, be with me, even if it’ll cause the fall of man” kind of thing. So much has been written about the relationship between sex and religion. So much has been mythologized and adapted and re-inscribed into a new medium, a new narrative. But women are typically posited as Eve, not Satan. And that’s boring. In this story, in my story, I was Satan—perverting the world (and perverting innocent people) with my tainted desire. I knew that I wanted the first verse to be airy and light before transitioning into a full rock ‘n roll 2nd verse-into-chorus with a killer guitar solo. My producer, Mike Tompa, knew exactly what to do. I brought the demo into the room and we hammered it out in a couple of sessions. It was a pretty easy production process, and I think it’s because Mike and I speak the same language when it comes to our collaborations. He understands what I want, I understand more or less what he needs. He understood what I was getting at with the song right away. We both wore dollar store devil horns during the recording process. It was great.
Who was the first and most recent Canadian artist to blow you away?
I grew up nonstop listening to Joni Mitchell, who to this day is one of my biggest musical inspirations. She’s one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time. It’s impossible to be a singer-songwriter today and to not have been influenced by her in some capacity. Her entire discography lives rent-free in my brain—I have a particular fondness for 1994’s Turbulent Indigo, 1991’s Night Ride Home, and, of course, 1971’s Blue. But each of her albums contains a unique and visceral sonic-poetic world. It’s so easy to lose yourself in them. As for a recent Canadian artist, I mean, Allison Russell. I think she’s exceptional. I’ve been visiting and re-visiting The Returner since it came out last fall. I also love Digging Roots, Angelique Francis, Jeremy Dutcher, and Julian Taylor.
What’s an album that you have in your collection that would surprise people?
I went through my entire vinyl collection to answer this question. The unfortunate truth is that I’m a predictable creature. Everything in my collection is par for the course: lots of folk, jazz, and some classic rock. I think the coolest thing I have in my collection is an extremely limited edition of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love which contains vintage memorabilia from the late 80s. But I wouldn’t say that’s particularly surprising. Just really cool. Hounds of Love is one of my favourite albums of all time. I think you can really hear that on POEMS.
You’ve been making music for a bit of time now, what’s one piece of advice you can offer to those starting out?
Write from impulse and intuition. Follow your own curiosities and idiosyncrasies. The best and most interesting artists are always those who stay unabashedly true to their raw creative visions and instincts. Take care of yourself as a person before you take care of yourself as an artist. Know when to show your cards and when to keep them close to your chest; this is a difficult balance to strike, but sometimes young artists will let their ideas be bulldozed by critics before they’ve really materialized. Listen to anything and everything you can. You can learn from anyone. Be radically present and open to yourself and to the world. And also, like, don’t be a dick.
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