Spend enough time interviewing musicians and you’ll find yourself at risk of falling into a rut.
You start asking the same questions, getting the same answers in return. You even begin following a formula when it comes to writing the stories up; starting each piece with a pithy hook, moving through a description of the recording process and/or recent tour, and ending with a casual statement disguised as a significant one.
But every now and then, a musician comes along who forces you to break the mould. Georgia Maq, the lead singer and songwriter of Camp Cope, is one of those musicians. “Siri used to be really funny,” Maq says early in our conversation, sighing. “Now if you ask her, ‘Siri, where’s the best place to bury a dead body?’ she doesn’t show you abandoned mines anymore. It’s like, ‘Siri, what happened?’”
Though Maq is ostensibly here to talk about Camp Cope’s brilliantly pained and painful debut LP, the interview touches on a staggering array of topics. The American political race is discussed (“My ideal situation is Bernie Sanders … I just think he’s so beautiful. He’s for the people”), along with Americans in general (“They’re all afraid of each other”), guns (“I wish all guns were put in a pit and burnt”), and the art of performing live (“It didn’t really come naturally. It scared me a lot to perform in front of people”).
The all-encompassing scope of Maq’s conversation is reflected throughout Camp Cope, a record that makes the mundane mythic and vice versa. It’s also an LP full of deep, impossible-to-shake sadness – tragedy so significant it settles in your bones.
“As you probably gathered, I’m not a very uplifting person,” Maq laughs. “I do have a lot of sadness. I am one of the many people in the world living with depression and mental illness. All my songs are kind of sad ’cause they’re about my personal experiences.”
Indeed, one of the most striking lines on the record is also one of the darkest. “It all comes down to the knowledge that we’re gonna die / Find comfort in that or be scared for the rest of your life,” Maq laments on ‘West Side Story’.
She barks out a laugh when the lines are read back to her. “That’s such an emo song! Whenever someone says my lyrics back to me I get so embarrassed. But singing them is totally different … [It’s] an outlet. It helps. It helps trying to get everything out. You have all these things buzzing around inside your head and to come to terms with them and find peace with them, you’ve got to get them out and do something constructive with them. I find I do that with my songwriting. It’s cathartic.”
She laughs gently. But the question remains: does she take comfort in the idea of death, or is she scared? “I don’t know. We’re all scared of death,” she says. “I have experienced a lot of death. I feel like my whole life has been laced with deaths. Really sad, unfortunate deaths. You know the more you do something the more you get used to it? Not that I’m used to people dying and used to deaths. But it’s only talking to people after an experience like that you realise death is a part of life. You learn to appreciate and make use of the life you’re living now. You might as well just do it. If you don’t throw yourself into things, you’ll never know and you might regret it. One day you might die all of a sudden.”
A tragic passing served as the inspiration for Camp Cope’s final track, ‘Song For Charlie’ – a song soaked in heartache, full of lines like, “When I asked what closure felt like / No-one could give me a solid answer,” and transformed into something altogether epic by the rust-and-honey timbre in Maq’s voice. “In 2014 my mum’s partner made the decision to end his life,” Maq says, “and that song’s about that.”
But despite the pain that rattles across the record like a stick against a chain-link fence, it’s not without its beauty, or optimism. “I don’t like ending things on a sad note,” Maq agrees. “I always like putting a bit of humour and hope in there … If you can’t find humour in things, why bother?
“There is a comfort in the fact we’re going to die. Our generation probably won’t have to deal with how fucked global warming is going to get. It’s bad but, like, I’m not going to have to live through 50-degree days. So that’s nice … Also, leaving your mark behind in the form of art I think is really beautiful and important. You don’t remember businessmen … but you always remember artists and their art. Maybe [art] is just me wanting to live forever.” She laughs again.
“I like the life cycle. I garden a lot, and things grow … and you have a beautiful [flower] and then it dies and it enriches the soil beneath it, and then more things grow from that.”
The self-titled album Camp Cope is out now through Poison City, and their sold out gig is at Black Wire Records onFriday May 20, with Ouch My Face and Hannahband.
