Q&A: Camille Schmidt Redefines Intimacy on Debut Album ‘Nude #9’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
Photography Credit: Bao Ngo
INCREDIBLY STRONG AS IT IS REVEALING – Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Camille Schmidt unveils her debut album, Nude #9, a ten-track exploration of vulnerability, intimacy, and self-realization. Seamlessly weaving together elements of synth-pop, indie rock, folk, and punk, Schmidt presents a body of work that is as eclectic as it is cohesive. Through her unflinching honesty and evocative storytelling, Schmidt creates a rapturous portrait of herself and the relationships that have shaped her.
As a child, Schmidt spent countless afternoons in her parents’ art studio, observing models and the paintings that followed. These nude portraits, often titled impersonally—“Girl with Dogs #3” or “Woman Sleeping #7”—left an indelible impression on her young mind. Years later, this curiosity and sense of artistic intimacy inform Nude #9, which serves as a series of deeply personal vignettes. Instead of detached labels, Schmidt imbues each track with raw emotion and vivid detail, breathing life into moments that feel achingly real.
Her songwriting reaches new heights on Nude #9, embracing a broad sonic spectrum while staying grounded in her lyrical authenticity. Broadening her palette to include starry-eyed ambient soundscapes and thrumming post-punk rhythms while digging deeper into romance, sexuality, friendship, and her own sense of self, Nude #9 is sincere and whimsical, hilarious and deeply felt.
“A lot of these songs were written completely stream of consciousness,” Schmidt says. Writing without self-editing was freeing, allowing thoughts to unspool before she had a chance to doubt her intuition. The result is an album that feels at once familiar and completely new at every turn.
From the witch doctor with questionable cures on the riotously fun “Fish Pills,” to the proper names of exes and friends that mark songs along the album like dates atop diary entries, the thrilling and occasionally heartbreaking lyrics on Nude #9 are culled from Schmidt reflecting on her experiences.
“I spent so much of my life not being honest with myself or other people,” Camille said of her writing process for the album. “I thought, what if I stop trying to get good with myself? With anyone else? What if I just reflect the truth of what I’ve seen? What if I just say what happened?”
In creating such a candid self-portrait, Schmidt invites us to look directly at our own shame, her gaze warm but unflinching, honest but playful, cutting but just as forgiving.
Photography Credit: Bao Ngo
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?
CAMILLE: That's a good question. I feel like there's the base level of just needing to get stuff out, so the internal sound and lyrics coming out feels really urgent at that moment. I've been thinking a lot lately about how to write songs that feel like they can capture all of the things I'm thinking and feeling, whether that be super high brow or super low brow. I think a lot of the sound or lyrics or feeling is me trying to include that as truthfully as possible in the music. I think a lot of the things I talk about in therapy end up in the music. My conversations with friends, stories people tell me, conversations with friends about things that are going on in their life. A lot of my friends’ music has been really inspiring. I have a really lovely music community in Brooklyn, so that has been very inspiring and influential to the sound of what I'm making now.
LUNA: What kind of atmosphere or emotional space do you aim to create for your listeners?
CAMILLE: Ideally when I'm writing a song, I'm never thinking about that. I think about what I like the most when I hear a song. When it feels like someone is being really vulnerable and honest, and there aren't any pretenses about this is what this should sound like or I'm going make it sound like this thing, or I'm going to try to make myself sound good. A space that feels very honest where you could feel things that maybe feel uncomfortable to feel outside the capsule of this song. I feel like there have been so many songs where an emotion that I find really hard to access on my own, whether it's a sort of sadness or anger or nostalgia or whatever it is, I'm so grateful when there's a song that I can listen to and that can almost hold the emotion. If there's any way that these songs can hold emotions for people, or be spaces where people can really feel whatever they're feeling in them, that would be like the best case or the most beautiful situation I could imagine for them.
LUNA: You have released your debut album Nude #9 and it feels deeply personal, with themes that explore yourself, your family and your relationships. What is the inspiration behind the project and what subjects and emotions do you explore?
CAMILLE: I think again, a lot of the inspiration was this feeling of I have all this stuff I've been keeping below the surface and I really want to express it, even just myself in a song. I think a lot of the songs are written out of self-urgency, just a feeling that I need to say this out loud for myself and have my own container for these experiences that feel harder to talk about, or that I've never really had my own narrative around. These experiences have been narrated by other people. I think that was a big inspiration for writing the album. What ended up coming out was a lot of experiences of a lot of my sexual experiences, whether that be with men or being queer. A lot of interpersonal dynamics with friends. A lot of my relationship with my body, growing up and a lot of mental health stuff. I feel like a lot of the things I've just been thinking about or a lot of the things that have been part of my life ended up in the album.
LUNA: The album blends synth-pop, folk, indie-rock, and punk in such a seamless way. How did you approach blending these genres while maintaining a cohesive sound?
CAMILLE: I worked on the album with my friend Ben, who produced it. I feel like we're just following instinct for which direction it would go in. Some of the songs ended up being more synth-pop, and some ended up being more punk or more rock. I think we tried to let every song be what it wanted to be or what would be the most fun for us to make at that moment, as opposed to being like, this doesn't align with the other one. I think there ended up being a lot of different sounds in there, but we had this feeling that we kept coming back to this other worldliness in the songs and how we wanted every song to have this feeling of being in touch with a world that's maybe close to ours, that we can't access, but we all know exists. When we were working on all the songs, we would try to find one element that felt like it was accessing that. I think in some small way, it ended up bringing everything together.
LUNA: I would love to touch more on the creative process. Can you walk us through the creative process for Nude #9? How did the songs evolve from the initial idea to the final version?
CAMILLE: While I was working on the EP, while it was in its mixing and mastering stages, I was writing a bunch of more music and I didn't really know what to do with it. My friend Ben and I ended up connecting and talking about making an album and I had sent him 10 demos. He wanted me to enter a period of writing a lot of songs, so every week for six months, I would write somewhere between one to four songs and send them to him, and we talk about them and and over time, I feel like once I was just writing so much, it started becoming clear what the album was going to be about. When I went to the studio in LA, we had like 45 demos to choose from. We just sat and we listened to all of them, and it ended up being pretty clear. I think we narrowed it down pretty immediately to 14 songs. For the most part, we would just be hanging out and I would kind of be like, ‘okay, I feel like playing this song. Let's work on this one.’ Then we would record scratch vocals, scratch guitar, and see how it felt, and started ideating about it. We had a few people who we both really love working with and then we would start tracking different things. We would spend a lot of time composing and thinking about the sounds, but most of the songs are pretty similar to the demos, and I think that's because a lot of them were written pretty much like streams of consciousness and we wanted to keep that feeling there. It was studio time, but because it's also Ben's home studio, we were also drinking tea and hanging out in the backyard and taking walks, and there's a lot of free associative time mixed with actual recording.
LUNA: What is your favorite song from Nude #9 and why do you love this song? Is there a certain element, lyric or message that you gravitate towards the most?
CAMILLE: I really love “Daddy Long Legs,” that's one of my favorites to perform live because I get to yell at the end and that feels so good, but that's a song that's emotionally hard for me to listen to. When I listen to it, it's almost a little intense. The song that I keep coming back to right now, because it's something I'm going through in my personal life now still is the new Nude #9 song, and thinking about how to have a healthy love or healthy relationship and feeling like it's so much harder than it could be. I feel like “Fish Pills” is a song that I just needed to get out so intensely that it feels so good to have some of those things verbalized for myself.
LUNA: One of the standout elements of the album is its emotional depth. How do you hope listeners will connect to these stories and what messages or emotions do you hope they can take away from it?
CAMILLE: I feel like part of me feels nervous for people to hear it. When you hear something in a song, it's not as intense as maybe experiencing those things, but I do have a nervous feeling of having those emotional experiences out there. There's a lot of things that I discuss that are sometimes taboo to talk about, whether it be types of surgeries, sexual experiences or relationship dynamics. I think if there's any takeaway, it's that these things happen. It's an insane experience being a human being and being a woman or being queer. Life can be really beautiful, but also really disturbing and distressing. The takeaway is that it's okay to experience life in all its complexities, and it doesn't always have to be good, or it doesn't always have to be bad, it can be this mix of things. These are the most personal songs I've written or put out. I don't know what people's reaction will be, or even what I hope for. I'm thinking a lot about Maggie Nelson's Argonauts, and how honest she is in that and how helpful that was for me to read about, whether it be about her partner's mother dying, her sexual experiences, or her thoughts on motherhood, or all these things that we don't normally talk about or give space for in our culture. It was so relieving to know there's a space for this. If it can give anyone a little more space to be human, that would be cool.
LUNA: How does it feel to have such a vulnerable work out in the world?
CAMILLE: It feels like two things at once. It feels so relieving and also it feels so scary, because there's no place to hide. These are my real feelings on these relationships in my life, and I'm using real names, and these are the real experiences I've had that I haven't talked to a lot of my friends about, or that my family doesn't know about. It feels both good and being like, ‘well, this is me, and this is my experience that I haven't really talked about.’ It feels scary to be that vulnerable as well. I'm curious how it will feel as time passes. I always think about that Lucy Dacus line where she says in five years, these songs will feel like covers dedicated to new lovers. Right now, they still feel pretty personal.
LUNA: Nude #9 is such a significant milestone. What have you learned about yourself as an artist during the process of creating this debut?
CAMILLE: I really learned to trust myself a lot on what I like and what I don't like. I feel like lyrically, where I was going with this was emotion. Something I've been thinking about personally has been a lot about how to be really honest, not just honest in general, but with myself, and how to be in touch with what I'm feeling. When does this situation feel good? Does this feel bad? Do I like being with this person? Do I not? I think that was coming out in the lyrics a lot, where it was trying to get back in my body and not be all intellectual about it. I think that as I was making this album, there was a parallel process going on where I felt like I was co-producing with Ben at points and, and I felt like in our work together, I really had full say over what sounds I wanted to add or take away or decisions to make. With this album, I was able to be more confident with the sound. With each song, I feel like I came out with realizing I do have an artistic vision. There's a specific thing that I want, and I know what it is, and when that feeling comes up, I can allow it to be louder. I can also really listen to it and trust it. It was a really exciting experience learning to trust how I feel and what I wanted.
LUNA: If you could go back and tell your pre-Nude #9 self something about the journey of making this album, what would it be?
CAMILLE: Fully trust yourself with your ideas and your feelings. When you're feeling something, listen to it and follow it. I feel like it would be a message of self-trust.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the upcoming year look like that you would like to share with Luna?
CAMILLE: I'm doing a release show for the EP in New York, and then I'm going to do one in LA, which I'm really excited about. I'm writing more songs and thinking about the next album, which is crazy. I think I'm going to be playing a lot of shows and figuring out what the next project looks like. I'm excited to figure out what that will be. I really crave being in the process of making again. More making and more performing.
Photography Credit: Bao Ngo
