In June 2021, Cam got a call from her publisher who told her that a different songwriter couldn’t make a session and asked if she could go instead. Details were scarce — she didn’t even know whose session it was — and off she went to the studio on a whim. Little did she know she’d be walking into sessions for Beyoncé’s new chart-topping album, “Cowboy Carter,” which inevitably would feature writing, production, engineering and background singing from Cam on five of its songs.
“[Beyoncé‘s] just such a creative genius,” Cam tells Variety. “I literally just got to show up as myself. So purely myself, and give the pieces that I felt were so correct from my point of view, then she wove it all into this masterpiece. And I’m just like, honestly I think it’s one of the moments in my life where I feel like I can see so clearly how I only want to do this here on out. I only want to be 100 percent myself, and the collaborators and people that are working with me, I want to do what they have done for me where I felt like I can just contribute what I was put on this earth to contribute… So it’s just comforting, it’s a release, it’s so much joy.”
Since debuting in 2010, the 39-year-old has etched a name for herself as an artist and songwriter, releasing a pop album in 2010 before a heel-turn to country with 2015’s “Untamed.” That record spawned her highest-charting hit to date, the confessional “Burning House,” which landed her a Grammy nomination. But she hit a different stride with 2020’s “The Otherside,” working with longtime collaborator Tyler Johnson and Jack Antonoff for a collection of songs that conveyed a deeper sophistication in her writing and performance.
She carries that to “Cowboy Carter,” a sprawling compendium of country, Americana and folk signifiers. The album was an instant hit, becoming Beyoncé’s eighth solo album to bow at No. 1 and the biggest debut of 2024 so far. Like many artists who have spoken on their work for the album, Cam is coy when it comes to details about recording with Beyoncé out of respect to her approach to her craft, explaining that the album is entirely Beyoncé’s vision. But you can hear traces of Cam all over the records where she has credits: the wall-of-sound harmonies that set off “Ameriican Requiem” and “Amen” mirror the starting moments of her 2017 single “Diane”; the stripped-down vulnerability of “Protector” and “Daughter” reflect back to “Burning House”; the intro chants set against handclaps on “Tyrant” has echoes of “The Otherside.”
Cam recalls that she worked on the album for the latter half of 2021, encouraged to share her ideas to be threaded into the bigger picture. “I could show up with these pieces that were purely myself,” she says. For instance, she channeled her love of requiems, which she sang in choir as a kid, for some of her contributions. “There’s no way you could even guess where she’s going. That’s one of my favorite things about Beyoncé and about this album, is that even though there are so many ties to the past and you hear everything woven through, it’s so forward-facing. She’s singing to us about the future and where we’re going, and I want to go there. So I think spiritually, I definitely felt aligned once I heard it all together. I couldn’t even realize that that’s where this was going back then. I was just contributing these pieces and building blocks that came from me that obviously were on the same journey.”
Right as “Cowboy Carter” released, Beyoncé revealed that she initially intended to put it out before 2022’s “Renaissance,” the first of a planned trilogy that centered on house and dance music. Cam states that she was surprised when “Renaissance” dropped instead, unsure of when the music she worked on would see the light of day.
“I was like, no!” she says with a laugh. “But I absolutely love ‘Renaissance’ so it was a no with a smile and a dance at the same time. The difference between me as an artist and writing for myself and getting to control the timeline and how it all goes and then deciding you’re going to collaborate and be in service as a writer, it’s a whole different ride. I’d like to say I have more understanding and patience for it, because I know how hard it is on the other side of things when you’re trying to direct the flow of traffic, but I definitely was like, this album is so important… So yeah, it was a big sigh of relief when it was finally released.”
She beams as she talks about “Cowboy Carter,” and recalls listening to “Protector” as a finished product for the first time. Cam is mother to her five-year-old daughter Lucy, and identified with the nurturing message of the song. “I just remember I was flying on a plane with [Lucy] and she was probably two and I was so overwhelmed,” she says. “I just remember thinking, all our parents have done this for us. They did it for us and now I’m doing it for her, and I just bawled my eyes out when I first heard that.”
An accomplished songwriter for others with credits on tracks from Miley Cyrus and Sam Smith, Cam is drawing from the collaborative approach she experienced while working on “Cowboy Carter” for her next solo album, which is currently without a release date. “I have just been so incredibly inspired by this process,” she says. “I really took it and have tried to make as much time for myself alone and in very intentional collaborative spaces to be working on the music for my next album. So it’s been so fun because it’s coming from such a good place and it feels so purely me and what I want to do and what I want to express. I’m just so excited to be in it and making it.”
