Twenty year-old, Cam Blake, from Maple Ridge, released his debut album, Bad Vacation, in January. I had the chance to Zoom with Blake and catch up with as we attended high school together back in the day.

Blake grew up in a musical family. At eight, he started writing and playing music. He didn’t find a passion for it until he was sixteen, when he started rapping and making beats with his Dad’s equipment. He taught himself how to produce and use Logic, which is a professional recoding software. He first put out a rap album when he was seventeen which he released to Soundcloud, followed by two EPs. He didn’t become serious about music until creating Bad Vacation, taking just over a year to complete.

For high school, he went to Samuel Robertson Technical, in Maple Ridge where he joined a program called “School of Rock”. That is where he formed his first band, Strange Ways, which also helped solidify his love of playing on stage and performing. Blake says, “It’s my favourite thing to do so it’s been lame to not play shows right now.” Blake has been playing with three of the same guys, Jack, Reece and Zach, since his School of Rock days. The three of them are also in another band called Bookclub.

His musical influences go back to classics like Pink Floyd, Jimmy Hendrix and Rush as well as new music, as he points to the wall behind him of a poster saying, “my boy Mac Miller.” For his dream collaboration, “this is pretty out there and probably never going to happen but to be able to work with Thundercat would be super cool. He’s an absolute monster.” His music incorporates modern indie and psychedelic rock and molds them together to “make it sound good.”

Before the lock down, he was playing shows almost every weekend and some were in some pretty sketchy dive bars “with lots of heart.” They have also played at the Biltmore Cabaret and the Imperial. “It was ramping up and getting to be a good year and now I’m just in my room,” Blake says daydreaming about when he gets to perform again. His dream venue to play at when the world open back up is the Vogue. The venue is all ages and he remembers in high school, going with his friends to watch shows once month. He’s always told himself, “one day we are going to get there.”

Making an album during COVID, Blake says it was both a good and bad situation, “I had a lot of time to work on music and record but I also didn’t have a lot of inspiration because I was sitting in my basement everyday.”

With over 30 thousand streams, Blake describes the album as a recap to his year and it feeling strange to be out in the world. “Each one of the songs are a month of the year. It feels like the album is the year I just put out as sound,” Blake says.

For Blake’s recording process, he recorded all of the demos and guitar himself, then used MIDI drums on top of the tracks. His band member, Jack, did the rest of the drums for ten of the twelve tracks on the record.

He liked the fact that the title Bad Vacation is “simple” and he thinks people may “assume it has something to do with the lockdowns because it was a bad vacation but the name is also to do with the theme and the story the songs are telling.” There is only one song to do with being in lockdown, I Can’t Make Any Sense of It All, featuring Molly Annelle, which is basically about being isolated.

The way he normally writes music is by coming up with different phrases or words that he can build off of and puts them in his phone to eventually use. When he sits down to write, he usually has a melody or progression in his head which he builds from the ground up. Sometimes he starts with just a guitar track or he uses bass, drums and guitar. Blake says he can only write one solid song every month. There are folders on folders of loops and lyrics saved on his computer which are what he considers to be “throw aways.”

As soon as he finished each song, he knew right away if it would make it to the record or not. The first track he completed for the the album was track 8, Something Sweet.

His music video for Self Worth is coming out today. Leading up to the video, in November, he released three parody “sitcom” episodes with his bandmates Max and Drew. The decided to put the record out before the anticipated video. Blake still hasn’t seen the video himself yet, “I’m going to see it when everyone else sees it. I’m super stoked.”

The video was shot by Raunie Mae who has filmed and edited two of his previous music videos, as well as Vancouver TikTok legend, Max Boonch. Raunie was also the one who helped pick the Bad Vacation album cover. “She is kind of my art director and is the one with ‘the eye’ for really good stuff,” he continues, “she points things out and I’d be like ‘ya thats dope,’” he laughs.

Astoria Tracks is a record label that Blake and his bandmates own. He describes it as a “collective.” They don’t have artists sign papers, it’s mainly figuring out distribution for them. The artists still own all the rights to their music and Astoria Tracks takes no money from them either. He says, “we are all just friends and like to make music together. It’s a good time.”

For his next record, Blake has already finished most of the demos. Since June, he has been writing for it. He says he’s expanding on Bad Vacation and it’s “a little out there.”

Download Bad Vacation here and give him a follow @camblakemusic on Instagram.