camylio on creativity, connection and authenticity

Over the past few years, Camylio has built a dedicated audience through his emotionally honest songwriting and deeply personal approach to storytelling. As he prepares to enter a new era of music with his debut album ‘Take My Bones’, he continues to explore themes of vulnerability, identity, and human connection, both through his songs and his relationship with fans.

We attended a recent press conference with Camylio to hear more about his creative process, the importance of authenticity, and finally discovering a sound that feels unmistakably his own.

You recently spoke really openly about imposter syndrome ahead of the album release. How do you navigate the pressure of such a major career moment while staying creatively honest?

I think one of the ways is by finding a space in which you feel comfortable enough to kind of let that guard down, whether it's with specific collaborators, by yourself, etc., when it comes to creating. But I think one of the greatest things about this musical internet community these days is you have, from literally the biggest artists in the world like Noah Kahan down to many of my peers here that I see on a weekly basis in LA, talking about the same things.

And I think nothing is more important than artists of every single size kind of peeling that curtain back every once in a while to discuss how much it can be really stressful and really anxiety-ridden. The best moments of your life can be accompanied by the most stress and pressure you've ever felt. But yeah, I think getting to hear that perspective from people that I look up to has helped me, and no matter where I am in my journey, I want to make sure I'm paying that forward to my audience as well.

A huge theme in your recent posts has been community and the relationship between artist and listener. Has your understanding of success changed now that you’ve experienced that kind of connection firsthand?

Definitely. I think, especially when you're young and you haven't even just played live shows and met a lot of your audience, it can be super disconnected in a way because if your audience lives constantly on your phone and you never have conversations and get to hear people's stories and understand how the music connects with them, there is definitely, in some ways, a barrier there.

But I've been really, really lucky both to be able to get out and play and speak to people that have listened to the music and have stories now that they resonate with. But also, I think it comes with growing up a bit and being in it for long enough to have an appreciation for how insane all of this is. Not a single day goes by where I don't wake up questioning if it's just a dream, that I woke up and I'm nineteen again in my dorm room.

There’s something really cinematic and emotionally direct about both your music and the way you communicate online. Do writing songs and writing posts like your recent ones you shared about imposter syndrome come from the same emotional place for you?

Absolutely. I try to include, in the little Notes app timestamp, the actual time that it's posted, so I'm writing them right before I'm posting them. They're not batch-made a week in advance as some content rollout. I'm sitting in my car somewhere, thinking about what I really want to talk to people about, and I think that's the same spirit and energy that comes with a well-written song or an emotionally honest moment.

Whatever the format is, and whether I'm singing or not, or it's text on a black screen, I think honesty is important. And in a world saturated by all this new technology and algorithms and everything else, I think that the only thing you can do as an artist is just be honest.

With take my bones being your debut album, what does this project represent to you emotionally, especially now that it’s finally going to belong to other people too?

It really feels like I'm finally coming to the final chapter of a book that was started in the very beginning. I've had projects along the way and EPs that share pieces of this story since the first viral cover videos in 2020/21, but I think this is me both maturing as a person and talking about where I am now, but also musically finally making the things that I've always wanted to make and really discovering a sound that I can say, "This is a Camylio song. This is what this sound is."

Your music has resonated so strongly with the BookTok community, especially around fantasy and emotionally-driven storytelling. Why do you think your music connects so deeply with those kinds of stories and audiences?

I think those stories tend to be kind of hyperboles of real life. It's easy to look at them as these abstract things, where I think those stories contain real stories and real characters with real emotions that mirror things that people go through in real life.

That tension, that push and pull, the not being sure if it's a good idea and doing it anyway, and the consequences of it. Or, in a lot of these enemies-to-lovers stories, a lot of the time it's even a character not being able to come to terms with themselves and accept the love they deserve, or things like that.

And I think that's just what real life is. So I think I'm writing songs that are emotionally representative of my experience and trying to resonate with people through their lives, and I think it just happens to also connect to these stories that contain a lot of the same themes and tropes.

Follow Camylio on Instagram and stream his latest release ‘Take My Bones’ on all major platforms.

Written by Caitlin Kennedy-Sheerin.

Image Credit: Zade Batal