Camden Cox: on a solo mission

On the Thursday of Amsterdam Dance Event, Camden Cox ducks into a vintage store during a break from an afternoon of networking at the Felix Meritis hotel. After browsing some of the rails, she lifts her head to see Josh and Janik, AKA Quarterhead, who she made the fizzy electro-house cut ‘System Overload’ with. Having recorded the track with the German duo remotely over lockdown, Cox has never met the pair in person before. “At ADE, I love the fact that you can put faces to names,” she tells DJ Mag as she wanders the canal-lined boulevards later that afternoon. “Everybody in dance music that cares about it comes here, it’s like a big school reunion. Everywhere you turn, there’s a friendly face — we’re all here because we’ve got the same passion.”

Camden first came onto DJ Mag's radar at the Spotify writing camp in Miami in March. A singer-songwriter for a number of years, she’s only just started DJing, but DJ Mag wants to know when she first realised she could write songs. “My mum was a drum & bass promoter back in the day in Birmingham, where I grew up,” she begins by way of explanation. “She did loads of warehouse parties there, so she knows a lot of the old skool drum & bass DJs. I used to get in from school and there’d be drum & bass blasting through the house. I used to enjoy it so much that I’d find myself humming along to it all the time when I was a kid, so there was something brewing from a really young age.”

She then started writing songs when she was still at school. “I was in a non-serious girl band and we used to perform at the talent shows,” she admits. “There was four of us, and we used to write songs with the worst lyrics you’d ever come up with.” It was when she won a school talent show that she started to feel she could be good at singing and songwriting. “It began as a hobby and then I realised I was quite good at it, so I turned 18 and moved straight to London, ’cause I realised that’s where I needed to be.” Camden quickly got into the drum & bass scene in London, and started seeking out producers to work with.

“I found that my voice — because I’ve got quite a soft, airy voice — really works over hard basslines and heavy beats, so when I moved to London, I started hitting people up on SoundCloud who had drum & bass instrumentals, which then ventured into house instrumentals,” she recalls. “No one would ever really reply to me, but then this guy Shirobon replied one day and said he’d love to hear my idea. It was a dubstep tune, so it was halftime, and I wrote this song ‘Running My Head’, which was the first thing that ever came out. It actually did alright, considering he was quite new and I was brand new.” 

From there, DC Breaks from RAM Records contacted her because they liked the song and asked her to topline something of theirs, and she started to develop a niche for writing over full instrumentals. “I only did drum & bass and dubstep at first, I did four or five releases, and then that blossomed into house,” she says. “I still dabble in drum & bass because that’s my roots, but I mainly stick with 120-130BPM now.”

Camden went on to collaborate with a multitude of acts. From a Leftwing : Kody collab for Toolroom in 2020, ‘Without You’, she worked with French producer Dombresky (“I think he’s sick”) on floaty disco house number ‘Do You Remember’ — also for Toolroom — and the minimal ‘Shake It’ with Liverpool boy Bontan for Defected sub-label DFTD. She’s done something with Gorgon City which has yet to surface, and sung with Eli Brown, Solardo, NERVO, Vintage Culture and more.

One of her favourite collabs was with Eli & Fur, who she met via mutual friends. They recorded a couple of songs in one day in LA, and the melodic tech groover ‘Burning’ was the one that came out. “It was nice to have female energy for once, it felt like there was no pressure,” Camden says of that session. “A lot of the time I’m the only girl in the room, and sometimes — ’cause I’ve got quite a little, dainty voice — I have to shout to get heard. But they’re the same as me, they’ve got delicate voices and we were literally all on the same wavelength the whole day.”

When she was in her teens, one of Camden’s favourite tracks was deadmau5 & Kaskade’s deep, emotive 2011 track ‘I Remember’. “I always referenced it, so to then get their next big collab was a real pinch-me moment,” she says, explaining how she came to write minimal vocal cut ‘Escape’ for Kx5, the new deadmau5/Kaskade project. “I wrote the song, but it’s a girl called Hayla — who I work with quite closely — who sings it. Her voice is spectacular.”

The tune, which has a slightly similar vibe to ‘I Remember’ a decade on, has already racked up three million YouTube views in six months. “I’ve written quite a few songs for other people, I spend a lot of my time doing this,” Camden explains. “That’s maybe why I sometimes find it hard to push through as an artist; some people just see me as a songwriter, but I was an artist before I started songwriting as well.”

From featuring on other people’s songs, Camden then started to make her own music. “I thought, I didn’t want to just be on the back of everybody else’s songs all the time, I had more in me,” she says. “And a lot of the time I wouldn’t get credit — the vocalist doesn’t get mentioned. I write the songs that people sing to — you go to watch a DJ play and the crowd are singing back my words — so I thought I might as well write for me instead of everybody else. So I put the features on the back burner for a bit.”

Recent singles, like the breezy ‘Elevated’ and prog cut ‘Under The Water’, are prime examples of solo material where she’s in full control. Camden records vocal ideas onto Logic at home, and uses an Apollo audio interface and a RØDE mic, although she tends to use a Shure SM7B mic in studios. “It’s really good for jamming,” she says. “Sometimes the original vocal you jam with ends up being in the track — you sat down to sing it casually, and it ends up that you can’t replicate it, so you use that one.”

Songwriting can be a very personal thing, sometimes involving sharing your innermost thoughts with the outside world. How does Camden tap into a certain mood, feeling or emotion when initially starting to write? “A lot of the time when I’m feeling a certain way, I’ll start to write down my thoughts in the moment — on my phone or whatever, in my Notes,” she says. “I’ll lock into it while it’s there, almost like a diary entry. Then I’ve got stuff backed up for when I go into a studio. The more I write down when I’m feeling it, the more I can tap back into those feelings when I’m in the studio. I’m always writing stuff, then taking it into the studio and pulling it apart, picking out key words, choosing a hook. A lot of it gets chucked away, butas long as you’ve got those key moments, that’s all that matters.”

In terms of fleshing out her tracks, she works with a number of different producers. “I work with Jon Kong from Leftwing : Kody quite a lot, he knows a lot about what people like in clubs,” she says. “I work with Freek, who co-writes a lot of John Summit’s stuff, he’s having a bit of a moment as a co-producer on a lot of really cool records. He’s been helping me out with a lot of my solo records, which is great. Tony Scott down in Brighton has worked on my last and next singles, and then there’s two guys called Twinlee — who are twins — who produce quite a lot of my solo music. Between them lot, they’re a nice group of people who all know my sound and help me put everything together.”

Cox heads towards a museum that’s advertised a neon exhibition she thought would make a good backdrop for some photos. After quite a walk, unfortunately it's closed — but no matter. It’s nearly time to accompany Camden to the House Of Sony party, which she wants to attend as she is signed to RCA, a division of the label.

Did Camden’s deal with Sony fall into her lap? “Uh-uh, not at all,” she says. “No, I had to work very hard. I had a record deal a few years ago — I got noticed and then signed, and then within three months I was out of the deal because they went bust. That was with Global. Luckily I got to keep all my masters and got out of that and went independent for a bit. Then I released a song on DFTD, Defected’s new spinoff label, and became really close with the Defected team. I think I was the second ever song to come out on DFTD, there were a lot of eyes on that label at the time — John Summit was the first single. That turned heads, which then got me taken seriously by all sorts of different people.”

After meetings with various labels, she signed to RCA, which has Beyoncé, Lil Nas X and Miley Cyrus signed to its US operation. “It’s a great label,” she reckons. DJ Mag mentions the long history of major labels interfering in an artist’s creativity and trying to mould them a certain way. Has Camden experienced anything like this? “Not. At. All,” she emphasises for effect. “What’s amazing about them is that they seem to respect the fact that I’ve been grafting for years, and they know that I know what I’m doing — I don’t need to be shaped in any way. My brand is there; the music was already there, we approached them with a lot of demos already and they wanted to sign the ones I already had. They signed me up, they let me choose my first single, they let me choose my second single... they’ve very much let me be in the driving seat. I’m so grateful, because I know that isn’t the case with some other majors. I feel like RCA respect my artistry and trust in it.”

Camden explains how her contract stipulates that she has final approval over everything. “I’m so hands- on with all the branding and the aesthetics — I just know what I want, and then they help me sort it,” she says. “With all the music videos, I write out the storyboard, I make collages of everything I want — Pinterest boards — and then hand it to the marketing team, and they help me put it together, find me a director — it’s very much a team effort.”

Inside the House Of Sony party, in an old church, the corporate free drinks are flowing. There’s a photo booth which we do some snaps in, and down in the crypt — or possibly the vestry — they’ve set up a karaoke machine. Camden sings a rendition of Justin Timberlake’s ‘Sexy Back’ to show that she doesn’t take herself too seriously, and then we pretend to carry on the interview in the confessional where there’s a big poster of assorted Sony signings such as Martin Garrix, Lost Frequencies, Kygo and Sam Feldt — auspiciously all white males. “There really needs to be diversity, whether it’s gender, race or culture,” says Camden. “There’s still such a way to go in terms of diversity in this kind of world.

“Sometimes, especially if you’re the only girl, it can look like you’re the token female,” Camden adds as we lean on the bar in search of another drink. “I just want it to be a bit more of an equal [male/female] billing for all the shows that I do, but it’s not the reality right now. We’ve got a long way to go, although I think people are becoming more conscious of it now.”

After the Sony party, we go to the DJ Mag party at Lovelee with Daniel Avery, prior to heading back to our hotels for a freshen up before the evening. Camden is DJing tonight at Club Maïa near Leidseplein, at around 1AM. DJing is a recent new string to her bow — she only started spinning at the beginning of 2022. “When I started to establish myself as a singer and I had all these writing cuts that people wouldn’t know I’d written, and I’d be begging DJs to play my tunes, it just occurred to me one day — why don’t I go out and DJ myself?” she told us earlier.

“There was nothing stopping me. So I chatted to the guys at Defected because I’m quite close to them, Ollie [Welch] and Wez [Saunders], and they taught me how to DJ earlier this year. I messaged them to say, ‘What do you think of me DJing? I’d play mostly my own tunes, stuff I’ve written and everything I’m feeling’, and they were like, ‘That’s the best idea you’ve ever had’. Literally within the same week they got me in and started teaching me. I learned from the best, and I did a few lessons from Pioneer directly too.

“I’m so embedded in the dance world, I thought DJing was the only thing missing for me,” she continues. “My mum used to promote club nights, she used to have house parties and there’d be people bringing decks round, it was such a natural progression for me. It’s never too late, and it’s opened so many doors. It’s also really hard to get bookings as a singer in the dance world. You’ll get booked for maybe a one-song PA, and get booked for maybe a couple of them a year. Whereas now I’m DJing, I’m getting so many more bookings, and it gives me an outlet to play all my own tunes. I’m gonna start singing during my DJ sets soon, so I can kill two birds with one stone.”

Camden has tried the multi-tasking juggling act of singing while DJing, and is taking it one step at a time. “It’s double the concentration, and at the moment I’m really enjoying establishing myself as a DJ — I learn new skills every time I do a set,” she says. “So to incorporate the singing, I need to make sure I’ve perfected that side of the craft first. My gig at Printworks in December is going to be my debut of doing both at the same time. I’ll be looping and layering, singing along to a lot of my tunes with harmonies and stuff. I just really want to get creative with adding vocals into it.”

That night, the atmosphere at Maïa is jubilant. Everyone at the club — and the whole of ADE really — seems delighted to be back out and about as normal. When Camden steps up to play, she drops her Eli & Fur collab ‘Burning’ before amping it up with the spikier Guz remix of her ‘Elevated’, the VIP rejig of ‘Over’, her own remix of Noizu and Secondcity ‘More Love’, and an upcoming track with Hugo Cantarra, written by Jasmin Jane. The latter are both in the building as the track gets its first club airing. Camden’s short set goes down a storm.

“It was a big moment for all of us, testing out the ‘Round’ track,” Camden says afterwards. “Because I only had half an hour, I wanted to make it a bit of a Camden Cox showcase. I actually went over my set time, Guz was ready to jump on and take over, and I was like, ‘One more’. Because I was the only girl on the line-up, I just wanted to milk it and show the guys that I could get the crowd going as much as they can. Obviously they all smashed it, and everyone was so welcoming as well.”

Several days later, when ADE is done and dusted, we check back in with the future star. “Honestly, that was the craziest ADE I’ve ever known of, I’m still ill now,” she says. “I went to a bunch of events, but had quite early nights for the rest of it. I lost my voice...” She may have temporarily lost her voice in Amsterdam, but we’re all going to be hearing a lot more of Camden Cox as we ease into 2023.