Watch this interview on YouTube
If you’d prefer to listen to this interview on the podcast, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Camille Trail released her debut album River of Sins in 2021 and the EP Magic Trick in 2024. She is known for her thoughtful, articulate and often unflinching lyrics, delivered in a warm, distinctive voice. Her new single ‘Postcard’ marks a deliberate shift in direction while still being distinctively her.
After a big 2024 that included a UK tour and appearances at Folk Alliance in the United States, Trail spent last year recharging and writing. Personal changes fed into creative ones, and she found herself drawn toward something different – brighter, more energetic, more fun.
‘I love writing my vulnerable, sad songs,’ she says in this new interview, ‘but most of my songs are sad and vulnerable, and it was exhausting. Every night I just wanted to have fun, dance on stage.’
Her latest single, ‘Postcard’, was written and recorded with producer Garrett Kato across three days in the studio, emerging on the final day when Trail arrived with a verse idea she’d developed the night before. It’s not a country tune – but I’m never that strict about such things, especially when I’ve covered an artist before for their country music and I’m interested in whatever they do next.
Instead of being country, ‘Postcard’ is an upbeat, indie-pop flavoured track with the characteristic Camille Trail sleight of hand: there’s a melody that makes you want to move, then you notice that the lyrics are doing something more searching. ‘I’m scared to be alone’ sits in the middle of what sounds, on first listen, like a carefree summer song.
‘I’m such a sucker for juxtaposition,’ says Trail. ‘That’s the whole metaphor of life.’
Trail grew up on a farm in Queensland and still keeps cattle – an arrangement that has, on more than one occasion, served as emergency music funding (as she says: ‘I’ll sell a cow’). That grounding in the physical world informs how she writes: melodies come first, words follow in something close to stream of consciousness, often arriving most freely in the car.
Two further songs recorded with Kato are due for release later this year, both in the same fresh, forward-facing direction as ‘Postcard’.
‘Postcard’ is out now.
Listen to Camille Trail on Apple Music
Listen to Camille Trail on YouTube
