Special interview - CAMMIE BEVERLY from OCEANS OF SLUMBER

Words - Bonnie Archer

A chance meeting with Cammie and Dobber Beverly at the Crobot/Cradle of Filth/Danzig show in Austin (Dobber is the drummer for opening band, Necrofier) was the perfect opportunity to set up an interview to discuss the bands's latest album, Starlight and Ash, released July 22nd. This one is...different. Find out all about it here.

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BA: Things are starting to heat up for the release of the album, “Starlight and Ash.” You're starting to slowly release some singles, right?

CB: Yeah. We got two singles out, the next one comes out the end of June, and that one’s going to be a full-featured music video that we had someone else envision and record, so it's going to be really cool. It’s our first time like doing a video like that.

BA: On Spotify you already have “The Waters Rising” and “Hearts of Stone,” and you’re getting quite a few plays on them already.

CB: Yeah, it’s going really well. It’s nice to get that reception for the new singes, especially since I feel we went in such a different direction.

BA: Yeah you did! (laughing). You’re not kidding, because one thing that your husband, Dobber, very much emphasized when I got a chance to speak with him after the Necrofier/Cradle of Filth/Danzig show, is that “This is not a metal album.” But the funny thing is, a few minutes after he said that he was very proud to show me (as he scrolled through the messages on his phone) the reaction from Dom Lawson. He asked me if I knew who he was, and I’m like, “Hell yeah I know who he is” (both laughing). I’ve subscribed to Metal Hammer for decades. Dobber was so pleased that Dom said he got “chills” after listening to it, just an amazing reaction from somebody who knows metal. So it must be awesome to get that kind of response from somebody who is definitely a “metal person.”

CB: Oh yeah.

BA: So it’s no secret that you’ve had some great things happen in your personal life. You recently got married, you put that out there –

CB: Yeah…

BA: …so that’s a very happy thing, and then I listen to this album, and I hear a little bit of the angsty, heartache-y, desperation kind of stuff, and I’m wondering, where is that coming from?

CB: I guess I would have to say that I’m a chronically unhappy person. I’ve always struggled to be happy. An aside to that is I’ve struggled with a lot of depression. And the thing about depression is seeing things negatively.

BA: Uh huh.

CB: And so, maybe, the best outlet for me is putting that into the music, that I have as a source to carry it, so I feel that I’m relieved of it, and try and focus on happier things and cultivating a more positive outlook. I’ve been doing a lot of self-work, and I’ve been trying to find a lot of education about parenting, and “untriggering” ourselves, and re-examining areas where it seems a lot of things come down to how we were parented, things that we grew up around in our formative years. So when we looked at this album, we asked everybody to share with us their childhood trauma, and the guys in the band basically talked with me and in group session, and each song was dedicated to making that into a story. The story line is this figurative town, kind of like Castle Rock is for Stephen King (but less gory), a place where we brought these stories to life where they were put in kind of a safe space, but they still identify the areas of hurt that we all have.

I have a well of grief that I’m always trying to put a lid on. I think about trying to write happier, upbeat songs. I never have up until this point. I’ve also never really tried. But I guess it works out good, because Dobber never writes me happy music (laughing).

BA: I get that. You can only write what you feel. The self-exploration thing that you just mentioned, I think that’s also a continuation of a journey that you started on the last album.

CB: Yeah, a hundred percent, yeah.

BA: I definitely got a Southern vibe from this album The South kind of permeates it. Like “The Lighthouse” almost has a gospel-kind of sound to it.

CB: Mmhm.

BA: Some of these songs are just so deep…talking about salvation, “everything I’ve ever loved is at the bottom of the river”, “take me South, take me home”…you can tell they’re very personal, and there are some really old-school messages, like, “And she’ll say, ‘Raise him up’” (CB chuckling), such an old school concept, which I kind of enjoyed hearing. You don’t hear that stuff anymore.

CB: I agree. We really wanted to take it to our roots, and make it potent to what we experienced in our lives and in our history. Dobber is an old soul, and he has roots in old Texas. We’re very tied to family and family history, and these anecdotes and colloquialisms mean a lot to us. With as much new trending lingo as is going around, it’s just nice to settle into something that’s familiar for us. Instead of trying to be trending, we’re keeping it low and close to home and our hearts and felt as right as we could make it.

BA: If I had to pick a favorite, I really liked “The Hanging Tree.”

CB: Yeah (approvingly).

BA: I like the refrain a lot: “Sometimes we forget…”

CB: This is my favorite album that we’ve ever done, maybe it’s because we put more time into it. Sometimes I’ve felt rushed in the past, but it’s usually my fault, putting things off to the last minute (laughing). I tried to hold myself to a better work ethic for this one. This song – we’d gone to help some friends move. They’d gotten evicted from their home due to some financial foolery and mishandling, and they’d lived there for 18 years, and it was a historic house in the middle of the city. As customized as it could be. Alternative metalhead people. And trying to move them out was taking apart the house, and they were so sad, and I was so bothered by the whole situation, like I wish we had known sooner, to try to help them out and raise money or whatever, but it all came down to moving out, and there was all this stuff in the yard. You could tell you were moving people that had never planned to move again. It left me so bothered that I just wanted to put that in a song, and it kind of transformed into these spaces that hold these memories for us. Like, someone else is going to move into that house, but no way will their spirits ever move out.

BA: Right.

CB: And tying it into the Southern storytelling that we were doing, it’s called “The Hanging Tree” because throughout Texas and other places in the South you have trees that used to be “hanging” trees. That’s where slaves were hung, or criminals were hung, or whoever, and in Shepherd, Texas, where we go all the time, right behind the jailhouse there, they used to have the old hanging tree that was there for the longest.

BA: Wow.

CB: And just to know that you can pass these places, and these spots, and these spaces and they have that history in them? It’s just something profound to me.

BA: Of course.

CB: So I kind of tied that hurt that I felt about them leaving that house and how you can have these trees, and they’re majestic, usually they’re thicker, have stronger branches, and they’re beautiful trees, but they hold in them this living thing, because trees feel, they grow, they’re alive, and this majestic, nature-filled living thing has this terrible history tied to it, all those feelings just kind of rolled into one and me trying to put that song together. Stuff like that is what boils in me, and what I find incredible - the stories that can be around us and the tragedies that can be around us without us even knowing.

BA: The name of the song, it made me wonder if there was some kind of reference here to slavery and people being hung from the tree. It’s a great song. Are you the one playing the keyboards?

CB: No, it’s Dobber.

BA: So, “The Spring of ’21.” What’s that about?

CB: So Dobbar had a big loss, a woman he’d known for about 18 years, a motherly figure in his life passed away. That is his memoriam piece for her.

BA: I see.

CB: When I saw the title, I was surprised that he left it like that, because usually what it’s drafted as doesn’t make it all the way through (laughing).

BA: This to me is chilling with a glass of wine music. The music you listen to after you’re done fighting traffic during rush hour. You’re home, everything’s okay, you can take off your work clothes, you can unwind and relax, that’s when I would listen to music like this.

CB: I can see that for sure. I think there’s definitely music that is for sharing, cultivating everyone else in different ways, and there’s music that’s for you. I kind of feel that way about this album too. It’s for replenishing and resourcing that personal time.

BA: It is. And, well, like your husband said, “It ain’t metal.” There’s not a shred of metal on here.

CB: (laughing)

BA: On your last album, you had songs that started in this vein, and then in the middle of the song, there’s like an explosion, here comes the metal!

CB: Yeah, we definitely dabbled and tested the waters with the last album and then moved into just this different structure of songwriting, to where the heaviness is implied, I guess. Or a bit more abstract. Because I guess on “Red Forest Roads,” I would say that’s the heaviest song on there.

BA: Right, uh huh.

CB: Nothing too sustaining. I feel the weight of the song on the listener feels almost as heavy as metal, but technically we didn’t do that in trade of portraying my voice more at the forefront and then having this structure of songs that just gives us a little bit more dynamics in a more cinematic way versus just a straight, hard-hitting way.

BA: And the thing is, I know that you love metal! (both laughing). I know you do! I saw you rocking out to Danzig! And you knew every word! And Necrofier! So I know you guys come from a metal place.

CB: Yeah…

BA: But it’s great that you guys can also do this too. And this is not something that every musician can do. And the drums were right there also. First it was your voice, and then the drums were also keeping pace with your voice.

CB: Yeah, Dobber is so dynamic. He can do so much with drumming, that it’s not always fitting for him to blast beat everybody’s faces off. It’s just a structure, that as we get older, like he has Malignant, he has Necrofier, and so every band that he does doesn’t have to necessarily encompass that heaviness.

BA: Exactly. He’s got outlets for the metal angst and other places he can put that.

So, you also managed to secure an amazing artist for your cover art. I looked at some of his stuff, Eliran Kantor, and I was like, “Oh wow, there’s the Testament cover! There’s Kreator! There’s Venom Prison!” How did that come about?

CB: Dobber reached out to him. He’s been a fan of Dobber’s, and Dobber has been a fan of his work. He agreed to do our cover and our singles. I am dying to get my hand on some prints. I want to frame all of them.

BA: Oh, yes!

CB: With him being so connected in the metal scene, he was very approachable, and we were quick to get ahold of him. When we saw the cover…I LOVE the cover. There’s so much for your eye to catch. You see the image at first, but a prominent characteristic of his artwork is you see the initial image and you’re impacted with that emotion, and then you’re finding all the details. I love how captivating it is, the color choices and stuff that he used. We talked about an idea that we had, and he perfectly brought it to life. It’s satisfying when you have this image or idea in your head, and you can work with other artists who can bring it to life. And it’s also serving to them because they love what they’ve created. It’s been wonderful.

BA: Did you give him the music and let him listen to the album and then come up with the drawing?

CB: He had the album, and we had a band pow-wow, and talked about what we thought the cover should entail. Dobber made a crude drawing of an idea that he had. It’s this idea of mother, and like a play on Romulus and Remus, the two children raised by wolves who founded Rome, and this idea that this town started out of this folklore story about this mother and child and now there’s this saintly-like pillar at the heart of all the other things that happen throughout this town, and as a reflection of the stories that are the childhoods of everyone. I wanted to focus on how it always comes back to the mother.

BA: Always.

CB: So we sent him the notes and the little crude outline, and he got it. With the singles, we didn’t specify anything in particular. The “Hanging Tree” one is perfect. He’s so intuitive.

BA: I really love the colors he used. They’re muted but still very vibrant.

CB: Yeah, there’s such a richness to them.

BA: Who came up with the title, “Starlight and Ash?”

CB: Dobber did. We had played around with a lot of titles, but this one had kind of been on his mind for a while. He has this idea of this expansion and upward trajectory, but how at the end of everything, it’s “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”

BA: Aha. Okay.

CB: Like in the spectrum of a lifetime, the most brilliant that you can be, and the most bottomed out, like starlight and ash. So we wanted to put that together and thought it kind of framed the more mystical side of what we were feeling with this album.

BA: I got it. This album definitely has the potential to appeal to an audience that extends beyond the metal audience. I asked Dobber about that. He said, “Maybe our record label doesn’t know how to market us.” The question is, how do you get it out to that audience?

CB: (laughing) That’s the million-dollar question.

BA: Right? Because the message, the music, the lyrics, your voice, could find a home in a lot of homes, frankly.

CB: It’s been kind of an uphill battle. Expanding our reach, and even being given a chance to get our music to a different or wider audience. Touring will help – it was something we weren’t able to do with our last album. Making our own crowd, our own scene, because while there’s so many genres and subgenres, if someone isn’t doing something like we are, we’re on our own to cultivate the people that do want to hear it. This run of tours that we’re going to do, we’re putting it together and we’ll go out. I joke and say, “We’re just doomed,” even though I don’t necessarily describe this new album as doomed. But for a lack of better identifiers in metal, for all the subgenres, people don’t know what to label us. “Country doom”, or “folk doom…?” I’m like, whatever, sure, whatever you need to do to get us on your radar or make us make sense.

BA: Yeah, and with this album in particular, it’s not a metal album, so none of the metal sub-genres really fit this one at all.

CB: We may do a headlining tour on our own. As more people hear us, as more feelers get out, then we will kind of see where it goes. We obviously haven’t made things easy for ourselves. We’re just making the music we want to make.

BA: That’s all you can do. Be true to yourselves, make the music you want to make, and you just hope that it appeals to other people. Whose idea was it to cover “House of the Rising Sun?”

CB: We have been throwing that back and forth, Dobber and I, for a while. We always like to include a cover on every album. We had two or three other songs we were considering, but when that one came up, I want to say I said this one would fit perfectly because it has that Southern feel, it’s bluesy, and it has that gritty, just bottomed out essence to it. He said, “Yeah!”

BA: It is really the perfect cover for this album. You sing it in a very slow, measured way, and the listener really gets a chance to absorb it. It’s got a very specific tempo to it, and you do it really well.

CB: Thank you. It slides in there, and people will be like, “Wait a second, I know that song!” It embodied that story it has to tell. I wanted to make it feel like I was there. It was a lot of fun.

BA: All right, Ms. Cammie, it is a pleasure talking to you. I wish you nothing but success with this album. It’s beautiful, it’s moving, it’s wonderful, and I hope it finds its way into the hands and the ears of people who will truly appreciate it, because it deserves to be out there.

CB: Thank you so much.

Starlight and Ash will be released on July 22nd through Century Media Records.