Ready or Not, Here Comes Cam!
Cam started to go down a rabbit hole familiar to any woman who has just given birth. The "Till There's Nothing Left" singer was going to criticize how she looked on television, but she stopped herself.
That she could stop and did stop is something that's tangibly changed for the country singer in 2020. After an unexpected C-Section that she described to Taste of Country in some detail, emphasizing the guts and the two weeks afterward where she could barely move (“Anyone who’s hoping to have a baby, I’m not trying to scare the s--t out of you,” she says) Cam and her husband Adam started to figure out parenthood, but it wasn't easy. In fact, the first night home, she wanted to bring the baby back to the hospital.
The irony is, Cam had wanted to line up her music release with her baby's arrival, thus doubling down on her workload.
“In my mind I was so, like, ‘I can do everything,'" she tells Taste of Country, kind of laughing. She understands why that was a bad idea now. Fortunately, it didn't play out like she'd hoped.
“I was such a bitch while I was pregnant, too,” she'll add later, looking around at her team to see who may agree. Luckily, everyone is in their own technology bubble for this late-February interview. Cam has always had the confidence to speak her mind, but the filter is especially porous on this day.
Watch: The Kinky Truth About Cam's New Song, "Till There's Nothing Left"
Watching Cam talk about motherhood, one gets a clear look at the quirks of her personality. She's admittedly the woman who often just wants to lay on her couch all day, but she'll also become bored with that lifestyle and let her competitive urges overcome her. On red carpets, she's nothing short of coordinated and glam — who remembers the days where she always had a shock of yellow somewhere on or near her body? — but she says she'll gladly go days without showering if she doesn't have a reason to be clean.
“I watched back the Today Show performance and I remember being like, ‘Uh, my body looks different.’ Then I was like, ‘Just f—kin’ get over it. You had a baby,'" she says.
There's another word for this push and pull: honest. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," meaning that today's thoughts and convictions are free to be tomorrow's memories without penalty. Cam explores those inconsistencies in her art as well, and at times that sets her up to be the villain (the other woman in "Diane" and the one apologizing in "Burning House.")
"Till There's Nothing Left" may leave her apologizing in a different sort of way. The song explores back seat lovemaking in ways that feel personal because they are. That's all fine and well for the sometimes hippy artist, whose grandmother raised her to know, “Sex is like a milkshake. Once you have it you’re always gonna want it.”
But for her serious, well-kept businessman husband? In Cam's defense, she says she told him she's been telling their story in interviews and he just giggled.
“We’ll find out if he’s still giggling as it makes its way around," she adds.
In the end, Cam did return to work just eight weeks after giving birth to Lucy Marvel Weaver. That's fast for a singer who more or less had major surgery on the very muscles she needs to push out her sound, but also for any woman after a first child. One can only assume that competitive side started to crowd out her go-with-the-flow impulses. After all, there's a lot riding on her next studio album, not just for her. Cam feels that as a woman who is secure financially and has a strong team around her, she needs to be successful in spite of the obstacles for women and mothers in the workplace and in country music.
“There’s a lot of pressure as well that I put on myself, being one of the few women in the country music sphere," she says.
So she packed up the baby, packaged a few treats to mollify anyone on a plane who didn't appreciate a screaming baby and got back to work.
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