Kamille is happy, blessed and is looking forward to sharing her new music with the world that reflects this.
Kamille’s forthcoming EP is self-produced and will mark her first solo project after ten years in the music industry. This new project comes after over a decade of songwriting that has led to the talented musician penning hits for the likes of Little Mix, The Saturdays, Dua Lipa, Mabel and FLO just to name a few.
A Grammy Award winning talent, Kamille beams as bright as her yellow nails as she joined GRM for a chat about The Brits 2023, her pregnancy and her new single “Muscle Memory” featuring Nile Rodgers.
Speaking from her office via Zoom, Kamille said, “At the moment I’m working from home in my studio and I’m trying to wrap up this EP I’m making which I’m really excited about because I’m self-producing the whole thing and that’s been incredible for me!
“I’m just really gearing up for the release of music – I’m getting my head into that mental space to start releasing again which is really exciting! I’m just making sure that I’m getting all the bits done I need to do and yeah, watching lots of Netflix, which I’m loving at the moment.
“I’m obsessed with the show The Last Of Us! I love a dark show, I’m weird. Anything to do with a zombie apocalypse, I love it – I’m there!”
“I like a series because I like getting stuck in over time. I hate with movies that they’re just over. I like that I can keep going back to a series and taking it in my own time and just enjoy it with some food. One of my favourite things to do is eat and watch a series.”
Like her watch habits, Kamille gets stuck in over time with artists too – writing hits for artists across long spans of time and adding her creativity to their consecutive projects.
Kamille’s credits can be found on Little Mix’s project Salute all the way up to their swansong album Between Us.
Keeping in line with her love and history of working with girl groups, Kamille spent some time in the studio with buzzing girl group FLO who received global acclaim with their single “Cardboard Box” and recently received a writing credit on FLO’s new single “Fly Girl” that features Missy Elliot.
In response to if her notable work with several of the biggest girl groups of our time is a coincidence, Kamille said, “No, it’s because I’m obsessed with them! I just love girls, I’m just a girl’s girl. If you tell me your man has cheated on you, woe betide because I will write a song about it and we will find revenge! That is literally my life’s work – to empower women when their ex is trash.
“Typically, in girl groups, there’ll be a girl in the group who needs that and I love being able to do that for them. I love different personalities as well and I love hearing harmonies blend and I love vocals and I’m just that person who loves hearing women come together. I think I’ll always love working with girl groups, I’m really excited – I actually want to make a girl group, that’s a dream of mine. I would love to create a girl group and just live through them for the rest of my life.”
Reflecting on some of her biggest achievements, Kamille says of her career highlights thus far, “it always stands out to me when I knocked myself off number one as a songwriter and as a black woman. I had a number one with Jess Glynne and then a week later, I knocked myself off with another one with Clean Bandit and I will never forget that – that is something I will tell all of my children and grandchildren about and will annoy them with for the rest of their lives because that is such a flex.”
“I think becoming a Grammy Award winning songwriter with Dua Lipa has been an incredible moment. I always dreamed of having success like that in America and to do it from the UK has just been incredible.
“I’m doing these things whilst literally at home, in my bonnet in London. It’s funny how the things you tend to want in life, they’ll come at a moment when you never expect them and you’re not ready for it – it’s just beautiful.”
Creativity clearly comes naturally to Kamille but her early stockbroker career and Economics degree was miles away from her current dream life as a songwriter.
“I’ve had to go as far away from that degree as possible in terms of being creative. It’s completely on the other end of the spectrum and I would say that it’s really important to not be in such a conscious mind when you’re creating music – you want to let yourself completely go and not think of anything. I’ve trained myself to let go of that side of my thought process when making music. The only point that that comes in really is when it’s time to do taxes – fucking horrible!”
“Finding out what you don’t want to do definitely helps you to understand what you do want to do. It’s that conviction and knowledge, the way you feel as well when you’re doing something that you love, you just know it and I think the only way you find that out is through doing things that you you don’t really want to do.”
Now settled and sure about her path, songwriting ideas can come to Kamllle from anywhere and at any time.
“Songwriters always say this, but you know, you get ideas when you’re on the toilet! it will just come whenever – it’s an annoying thing, it’s like a thunder bolt of lightning and it hits you and you have to get your voicenote app out!
“It happened to me in a cinema the other day, I was trying to whisper a melody into my phone and everyone was looking at me, like, ‘who is this crazy person?’ – it happens to me all of the time!”
“It reminds me of that film Think Like A Man with Mel Gibson where you just hear things and you want to stop them but you can’t stop it. It’s like a really funny, weird voice in your head that just appears any time and you’ve just got to be prepared to either take in the idea or let it pass.
“An important thing about songwriting is that it can be a five-minute process sometimes, a three hour process or a three month process and it’s just a weird art that you can’t define.”
Kamille shared that she and husband Tomi were expecting in a heartwarming video on YouTube that was accompanied by a song dedicated to her incoming arrival. In her usual open and honest style, Kamille has been sharing her journey with fans on social media – offering reflections and anecdotes on morning sickness, working whilst pregnant and embracing sexiness during pregnancy.
In one of her viral TikTok’s, Kamille took aim at critics who say that pregnant women can’t be sexy and offered proof to the contrary.
Reflecting on her maternity fashion and the inspiration behind that TikTok, she told GRM, “Watching Rihanna slay that whole pregnancy era and show us, as she rightly should, how it’s meant to be done.
“I just feel like women should be unafraid to embrace their pregnancy body and be really sure of how beautiful they are. They’re incredible. We are so incredible as women. Watching myself transform and my body change has been such an interesting process for me, because I’m literally growing a new life and it’s not about me being hard on myself at this moment, or feeling insecure, it’s about me celebrating who I am.
“For anyone to say that you shouldn’t be wearing this, or you shouldn’t be doing that. I’m like, you must be absolutely crazy! This is the one time where I feel the most empowered and the most ambitious. I think that’s why I even ended up making a whole EP on my own and producing it completely alone, because I just felt so strong and I felt like I had this little friend here with me who had my back. Women should just feel so beautiful when they’re pregnant, because they really are so incredible.”
Pregnancy hasn’t just given Kamille a reignited sense of empowerment and ambition but also a new source of songwriting inspiration.
“I’m definitely writing about happiness a lot more…” she says, “I feel very blessed that I’m able to do this job and carry a child and I know how hard it is for a lot of women. I just feel very lucky, I feel extremely grateful at this moment and I think a lot of the music that I’m making is me just being grateful to even create. I think I just have this gratefulness – that’s just my vibe at the moment.
“I think even being able to make music right now, for me, is so fulfilling, I think this whole new project is just a bunch of good vibes because I have nothing bad to say right now. I’m just happy.
“I wrote this song the other day about dreams coming to you and having amazing things in your life that you’ve worked hard for and it’s a beautiful song, you’ll hear it soon.
“I’m just happy about life and I just want to embrace that. There’s been so many moments in my life where I haven’t been, I’ve been suicidal, I’ve had so much depression, and I think this is a turnaround for me and I’m just really happy to be here! I’m just happy.”
Fans may find that “Muscle Mermory” featuring Nile Rogers sounds familiar after it was teased by Kamille on TikTok months before release.
“I tend to drop bits that I’ve just made as a way of just seeing – ‘well I like this but do you guys like it?’ And then when I get a response, it helps me finish things that I might not have typically finished. It’s a really nice outlet to be able to do that.
“I made this song on my own downstairs in my studio at home when I had morning sickness. I was writing and producing it all alone and I sent it to my management like guys, “Here’s is this idea I made it’s probably rubbish but here you go” and everyone was like, ‘this is amazing! You have to finish it!’
“When I finished it, we were talking about collaborations and I was like, well, the only person I can really hear on it is the great Nile Rogers and I’d worked with him before, we’ve worked quite a few times at Abbey Road and I think I said to my management, ‘you know what, don’t even bother sending it to him, he’s just done “Cuff It” with Beyonce, he’s not going to say yes’ but they still sent it to him as my managers do and then I got a text like’ Nile Rogers loves it, he wants to he wants to work with you on it’ and I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’
“So the next thing I knew, I was at Abbey Road again in Nile Rogers’ studio, and he’s telling me stories about Luther Vandross, and he’s playing the guitar all over my song and I’m just like, ‘What is life? This is unreal’, all whilst having a baby in my belly. It was just a very weird moment and I hadn’t told anyone I was pregnant yet so it was just a lot of emotions going on that day.
“I’m so grateful to God that that happened and for me as a woman to have produced that song on my own, Nile couldn’t believe I made it. It took him a minute. I’m proud of that, I’m really proud and I hope it inspires more women to think about production and explore that side because a lot of women don’t really feel like they can but you totally can. You can do anything you put your mind to.”
Describing the rest of the EP, Kamille says the project is “nostalgic and creative”.
She adds, “it’s so fun, it’s just vibes, just know that it’s gonna be my truth because it’s just me in a room. There are also incredible collaborations that I never thought would be ever happening that have happened and I can’t believe it!
“It’s going to lead to so many performances and amazing things. These EPs are like chapters of my life so there will be more of them throughout the year – it’s just the start of consistent music from me.”
Listen to “Muscle Memory” below.