Band Interview: Oceans of Slumber (Cammie Beverly – Vocals)
Texas-based ‘New Southern Gothic’ outfit Oceans of Slumber are back with their brand-new album, Starlight and Ash. The follow-up to 2020’s adored self-titled album, Starlight and Ash was released on July 22nd, 2022 via Century Media Records.
An album we reviewed and summed up as follows:
The thing that is most important here is how Starlight of Ash echoes through the mind, body, and soul. Everyone benefits from Oceans of Slumber finding themselves and their strength in their music suggests it’s only a matter of time before an even wider and varied audience discovers them too. That there, is worth celebrating.
Just before the album released, we spoke to vocalist Cammie Beverly and you can read a select transcript of that interview below. If you want to listen to the full thing, check it out via Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
Hi Cammie. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. It is an absolute pleasure, particularly the day before the release of Starlight and Ash. How are you feeling?
Anxious, I guess.
Anxious? Is that still a strong feeling several albums in?
Yeah, especially for this album and how different it is and how different we feel about it.
Okay, I understand that. But what about the reactions to the single so far, the stuff that’s been released and what has been predominantly a positive response from fans and critics alike? Does that go some way to easing your mindset?
No. It’s such a mix of emotions and it’s a draw between, I guess, all the reviews and fan feedback and then it like feeling real. Once we get on the road, once we tour, maybe then I’ll feel a little bit more, like, received or settled.
Yeah. There is a long process, isn’t there? From a release to letting the dust actually settle on it. Initial reactions are great and all but a couple of months down the line, when people have sat with it a lot longer is often very different.
Yeah. It takes a while for me to feel not as anxious about it.
Take me back to the journey from the self-titled in 2020 and to this release, and in particular the original vision that existed. Did everything go to plan as you had hoped and expected?
I would say that, yeah. For this album. More than any of the other ones. It went really smoothly. We got to work on it almost immediately after the self-titled album was released and the songs were done relatively quickly. We had a lot more space and time to work on them because it was the pandemic time. Things actually did go really smoothly as far as getting all the songs together, working on the songs and then getting to the studio. It felt so much more streamlined and calm versus, I guess, trying to write when there was so much more going on, or trying to complete an album when there’s so much more going on. We just were kind of capable of focusing on it.
So you’ve been able to take some positives out of the incredibly negative period of the last few years. That forced downtime effectively helped you?
I think so, as far as how I feel and how I go into working on albums. We had a lot of time to feel out ourselves and to feel out what we wanted to do, to take in a lot of different influences/ Obviously we had our geographies, everybody is sharing things, they’re still the internet and Spotify. But it was something about, I think, like, the lack of live shows and the lack of touring and travelling that made us kind of hone in on this sound that was uniquely us. And that’s Starlight and Ash now.
It is indeed. What about the adjustment at first? Of course everything came to a grinding halt and no one, at least in the music industry, really knew quite what to do before everybody jumped online. How did Oceans of Slumber handle that aspect of it?
Well, we decided that we wanted to stick to the schedule of releasing the self-titled album, because even after the albums are done, it takes quite a long time before they come out. We had the option to push it back but we decided to stick to the same timeline. People are still out there. There wouldn’t be a whole lot of new music necessarily coming out and we just had to accept the idea that we wouldn’t tour that album. We already had kind of a mindset, like, we treat every album like it’s our last. So if we were to sit on that and wait, where does that put us and what could we do? And if touring didn’t come back, then what?
So we just stuck to the same timeline. We put it out and then definitely went into like a pretty big depression during that time. We didn’t want to sit in that and have everybody not doing anything. So we just immediately got to work on a new album, so that we would have something to do and have something to look forward to.
It helped keep you focused, right?
Yeah, because the band members moved back home, they moved out of Houston and we were just scattered and then we needed focus and we needed something to be hopeful about.
It is an incredibly striking piece of work with so many different things to take from it. I want to pick your brains about certain aspects of it. In particular, this is about who Oceans of Slumber are today in 2022. Now, you’ve spoken about finding your identity on this album, finding out just what you guys wanted Oceans of Slumber to be as of now. Is this a natural evolution of the band? It certainly feels as such and at what point do you think that started to properly take shape?
The evolution of the band has been happening since Winter. I mean, since I joined the band, we’ve been trying to or have been transitioning to making my voice, like, more of a focal point on every album. With the new lineup… it’s like there have always been different variables at play of why we, let’s say, haven’t made a Starlight and Ash sooner. I think there were a lot of egos and a lot of ideas about the music that we’re going to make and the music that would go behind me singing and there is a lot more weight to the contributions of other members and so it’s like what they wanted to do didn’t always help make my voice the most prominent thing.
I worked with what we were doing and we put out the albums and then we switched. There’s a new lineup. The self-titled album was right at that transition and I feel like that shift and that kind of the new lineup gave permission that it’s like, okay, we’re going to make the songs that we need to. That are going to work best with making my voice the most prominent and that’s what we did.
But there’s always been that. We’ve always at least tried to have a few songs that did that across all albums. Ones were we just focused heavily on that singer/songwriter type with more emotional heaviness versus just instrumental heaviness. This is where we’ve come to. It’s like a wine ageing, let’s say. It’s like you can pop the cork a lot sooner, it’s still going to taste good, but if you give it time…
There’s just things that needed to change and I feel like that’s how we kind of got to where we are now.
It’s certainly added a new struggle because the struggle to define Oceans of Slumber has always been there and now it’s entered a brand new phase with this release. It almost a new genre, so to speak, this new Southern gothic term that is out and about. Now, who came up with that description for what you do, but also, are you aware that it still makes you very indefinable until you listen to the record?
We’ve been kind of using that term for a while and it really came up around The Banished Heart. The term Southern Gothic describes what someone can expect to feel and experience when they hear the music but it’s not telling them exactly what they’ll hear. Look at genre labels right now. Okay, it’s going to be death metal, it’s is going to be progressive metal, or it’s going to be folk, it tells you the instrumental elements that you’re going to hear. It doesn’t necessarily leave a lot of room for variation or expression outside of those boundaries. What I like about the term Southern Gothic is how ambiguous I guess it kind of is, that it’s like, okay, it’s going to be Southern, so it’s going to have Southern elements, which could be folk, blues, jazz, it could be all sorts of things. And then Gothic, I know it’s going to be heavy, it might be kind of doomy, and it gives the person a much broader spectrum of what they can expect approaching us.
Your voice is incredible, and I want to know, what did it take, from your perspective, to draw the absolute best out of yourself for this album?
I think it took a lot of kind of soul searching. I take a long time and I wait till the last minute when it comes to writing my parts of the songs and working on the songs. I’ll be listening to them and I’m listening and I’m listening, and I’m listening and I’m coming up with a story in my head or I’m coming up with, like, what the song make me envision before I ever, like, put any words to them.
However, I’ll be really reluctant to tie anything down just because then I’m picking this thing that me is kind of unreal and mystical and then I’m, like, tying it down and making it tangible. That process for me is really hard and really mental and I struggle with, I guess, that transition between the two. It’s just an emotional stressful process for me. I have to be alone and sit with those songs for a long time.
I had that time up until a certain point. I mean, I finished one of the songs on the plane on the way to New York to record in the studio!
Part of it is just me not trusting my abilities or being hard on myself about what I am capable of doing and never quite being ready to share what I’ve done. I’m just a ball of nerves sometimes. So we get there and it’s like, yeah, that’s great. That’s going to work. That’s fine. It’s amazing. Why are you so reluctant? I don’t know.
What I really liked about this album and how we approached writing it was the contributions of the members of the band. Sharing their experiences and talking, all to be a part of the storyline that I was going to use for the songs that I came up with. That was really neat. To be able to intertwine their experiences into the expressions of the lyrics and kind of the hidden stories that are in all these songs. I practise by just singing along to other songs and I practise by crying a lot. I think that might help. I think that that makes my voice. I’m constantly working that muscle and the sinuses, and I just show up and I have to kind of surrender to the process when it comes to recording, and that’s what I do.
It sounds quite exhausting.
It’s super exhausting and it’s probably exhausting for everyone that’s around me, too, but it gets a great thing out. I think I’m getting better at it to not make it as exhausting, but I don’t know if it would be what it is if I wasn’t pulling it from such a real place. So it does kind of make up for taking a drain on me, but it’s just like a resilience and an endurance that I have to build up that I hope is getting better over time.
Absolutely. And the end result really does speak for itself, because the album is an incredible piece of work. One more thing that I really want to touch upon is of course, the cinematic and storytelling aspects of the record. Tales surrounding a fictitious coastal town. Was there any one particular thing that prompted this concept? And is it as vibrantly realised in your head as it comes across in the music?
It’s probably more so in my mind.
I’ve been working on a few stories and I have short stories that kind of expand on this fictitious town that I’ve written about. I need to do something with them and haven’t yet but the ideas behind that town and with our visits to the coast, it is very real and very different, like how people exist in those areas and how things go. We wanted to infuse all that into the album and I think it makes me happy that these stories have been conveyed and that true Southern feel like comes across.
It really does, because my head tends to lean towards horror. I’m a huge horror fan. So when I hear ‘fictitious coastal town’ and you have the gothic vibe that exists in Oceans of Slumber, I end up picturing something almost Lovecraftian, like Innsmouth or something.
Absolutely, yeah, 100%. I would say that’s definitely the other side of the sort of folklore that we’re into. And so, yeah, somewhere between those two is what we just began to develop and probably something that we’ll stick to for a bit, because I really enjoy it.
When you reflect upon the past couple of years and the journey to this album release, do you feel that Oceans of Slumber are stronger for the experience?
Yeah, absolutely. I think as songwriters, as musicians, as people going into the studio, there is an assurance about what we’re doing and how we’re going to go about doing it that hasn’t been as strong before. We’re really not trying, at this point, to take cues from anyone else, like we’re doing what we want to do and what we know how to do well. So I guess we’re being very unapologetically ourselves and we’ll just have to see how that goes with everyone else.
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