“If I wasn’t addicted to the idea of god, tree, friend, mother, and good person I could let myself love and be loved all the way through.” So sings Camille Schmidt on ‘Bumblebee Drinks Lavender’, the lead single from her debut EP Good Person. Not only does the song provide the title for the EP, it also introduces the thematic concerns of the release, with Schmidt exploring the idea of performance in everyday life. The way we wear masks of different shapes and forms according to what we feel is expected of us in any given situation, and how this habit comes to hold its own addictive pull. But what, the songs ask, is lost within such an arrangement? What do we sacrifice living with such a lack of authenticity?
Along with band members Sam Talmadge (guitar), Pele Greenberg (drum) and Eli Heath (bass), Camille Schmidt took to the studio with producer Phil Weinrobe to record the tracks, arriving with over a hundred ideas and choosing whichever felt most urgent or energizing on the given day. Weinrobe insisted Schmidt didn’t share the songs with the band beforehand, and had no sense of a tracklist either. That way they could more fully embrace the immediacy of the creative process and the chemistry which forms between musicians working together in real time. Later guitarist Jacob Drab and saxophonist Stuart Bogie added overdubs to further enrich the sound, but the lasting impression is that of the primacy of the moment. A kind of working antidote the lack of authenticity raised in the lyrics.
So although each of the six songs on the album deal with the different masks we might hide behind, the very nature of its creation see the true Camille Schmidt reaching out from behind the disguise. Take a song like ‘Red and Blue’, a picture of a relationship captured with a kind of melancholic grace, told as though from within a still life of an empty room. Though through this confessional tone rises something more insistent. A steely edge of defiance which stands firm in self-preservation. On the closing track ‘Bird on a Telephone Wire’, Schmidt sings “I’ve lived my whole life in shame, like a child in the corner, back turned away,” but across the EP you get the sense that, through a gradual stripping of defences, this child has stepped out of the corner and decided to make themselves heard.
Good Person is out now and available from the usual places.
