“I was comfortable with my own alone time. I could just explore my own imagination.”

What he did with that time was draw, read, and write fantasy stories. And he checked out every book on animation the school library had, which turned out to be a lot of books about cel animation and the Disney process, techniques he had no possible way of executing at nine years old, and read about anyway, purely for the pleasure of knowing how it was done.

He went home and did just that. He found software and pulled sprite sheets off the internet and built his own sequences out of them. His first animation was Mega Man on a skateboard, the skateboard drawn by hand under Mega Man’s feet, the environment drawn in MS Paint. From there he found a free 3D modeling program called Anim8or and used tutorials to teach himself to use it. All before he turned twelve.

Music arrived the same year, and it arrived sideways. There was a kids’ music game where little characters walked around a board stepping on tiles, and each tile made a sound, and if you put enough characters on the board you had a song. Then his older brother brought home a pirated copy of Fruity Loops 2.5 and showed him the basics. He was on it for hours a day, every day, without ever deciding to be.

But there’s a detail from a few years earlier that explains more than any of this. His mother kept buying him toy keyboards, trying, he thinks now, to nudge him toward something. One of them was a Casio with a demo button, and the demo was “Puff the Magic Dragon.” He didn’t know the name of the song; he just knew what it did to him.

“Like, if you can imagine a little kid just sitting there tearing up because of the beauty of the melody, and the chords, the harmony under it.”

Hold onto that. It comes back at the end.

“The whole thing I was thinking about was, am I gonna be cool? Are girls gonna like me if I do this? So I look at orchestra, and I’m like, nah. Then I thought of a tuba, and I’m like, nah, girls not gonna like that either.”

His mom suggested the keyboarding class. He said okay, I guess.

He went home and rebuilt that backbeat in Fruity Loops. “And from there it was like I was just off to the races.”

Seventh grade, his mother came home from the library with the autobiography of Quincy Jones. Cam had no idea who that was. She told him: he made Michael Jackson’s beats.

That book taught him the word producer. It also taught him that the job included arranging, composing, and knowing to put this bass player with that drummer instead of the other one. And it told him about a kid in Chicago so poor his family ate rats they caught in the house.

“I’m like, well, I’m not that poor. And look what he did. So if he could do that, I could do it too.”

The other half of the education came from his big sister’s friend, who was into rap and critiqued Cam’s beats and once told him to cut it out with the crash cymbals. That friend brought over an issue of XXL with Tupac on the cover and a producer feature inside with Kanye West and Just Blaze. He also taught Cam the habit that changed everything: open the CD booklet, find where it says produced by, and that’s the person who made the beat.

Cam started checking credits on every album in his sister’s collection. The same names kept showing up under all his favorite songs.

Their beats were nearly empty and somehow completely full, and he wanted to know how. So he took his school planners and used them as listening notebooks, writing down observations while he studied records.

What he eventually concluded is something closer to a philosophy than a technique. Every element in a beat is playing a role, and the question is never whether you can add something. It’s what the thing is doing.

“It’s about efficiency. You could have a bassline that outlines the chord progression, shows you what the harmony is, but also implies the rhythm and the groove.”

He put it on and immediately recognized the chords he’d been chasing. Major sevenths, moving in parallel.

“I felt like I had found the source.”

To play any of it, he needed to actually learn piano, which he did the way he learned everything else: off the internet, alone. A British podcast, pre-Spotify, audio only, beginner lessons in order. He’d listen once with his eyes closed and follow along in his head, then listen again with his hands on a MIDI keyboard.

Senior year, he auditioned for Las Vegas Academy, a performing arts high school, playing a beginner’s “Autumn Leaves” he’d learned off that podcast. He stumbled through it. The panel, used to child prodigies and pushy parents, was baffled by him, and asked why he even wanted to be there.

“I told them, look, I don’t want to be a piano player. I make beats. Music production, you know what that is? They didn’t. So I said, okay, you know what a composer is? And they were like, yes. And I said, I want to do that.”

They let him in. It’s the only formal music education he’s ever had, and it lasted one year.

This is the thing about Cam, and it’s the engine under all of it. Give him a single word and he’ll go become it. “Producer” was a word in a book, and he became one. Point him toward the people who made the sound and he doesn’t ask to meet them. He goes down after the sound itself, alone, and doesn’t come up until he’s got it. 

He’ll tell you, about the Neptunes, that he got everything he needed from them without ever being in a room with them. He didn’t want their access. He wanted to become the thing they knew, and he extracted it from records and interviews and a jazz-camp footnote until it was his. The rabbit hole isn’t research. It’s how he turns into things.

He enrolled at an Art Institute for audio production and lasted nine months before realizing the program was built for engineers, not for people who make music, and that the Pro Tools class was teaching him things he’d been doing since middle school. He asked whether they could get him a studio internship, since every producer he’d ever researched had come up through a studio. They told him the school’s arrangement with the city was to funnel graduates into local jobs: sound for casino games, etc.

He quit the next day. Years later, the school was sued by the federal government for preying on students in exactly his position, and his debt from it was forgiven.

Then he did something counterintuitive: he enrolled at UNLV and deliberately didn’t study music. “There’s just too much music in my life. I need to balance myself out.” He picked communications, then journalism. And he built his real career in the margins: Twitter producer forums, online beat contests, a network assembled one connection at a time. He’d figured out that the way in wasn’t school. It was people.

What saved him was Jake One tweeting “does anybody know who Cam’rox Tha Beatsmith is,” and every producer Cam had spent two years befriending online seeing it at once and replying, frantically, that they knew exactly who that was.

By then he’d missed the Vegas qualifier. They offered him LA, Denver, or San Francisco, and told him he’d have to get himself there. He picked San Francisco, partly because he figured he’d lose in LA. He was broke. He mentioned it to a few close friends, who told everyone else, and his college friends quietly pooled money and bought him a round-trip ticket.

He walked into a Bay Area competition where every other producer had brought a crowd with them, and won.

The finals were in Chicago, and Red Bull did it properly: a driver holding a sign with his name on it, a black town car, the entire top floor of a downtown hotel rented out. Every room on that penthouse floor held either a finalist or a guest, and the guests were DJ Premier, Just Blaze, Nottz, DJ Toomp, S1, Jake One. There was a room upstairs full of gear where the veterans sat around with the kids and talked.

He lost in the first round. He genuinely did not care.

One of the people he met that weekend was a producer named Nascent. It would be two years before that mattered.

Then Nascent messaged him on Google Chat, just checking in the way he did periodically, and asked what he was working on. Cam mentioned Rockie Fresh and the email that went nowhere.

“And he was like, dude, I know Rockie, and his tour DJ, L-Peezy. I’ll put you in touch.”

L-Peezy loved the beats. They started talking on the phone. Eventually he asked how Cam would feel about flying out to Chicago for a week to work. Cam took the week off from Kohl’s and went in December 2012.

He never worked with Rockie Fresh. He spent the week falling in love with the city instead — a scene deeper and richer than anything in Vegas, snow he’d never seen, and hipsters he’d only ever believed in secondhand (“I only ever seen them on MTV, bro”).

On the last day, he didn’t want to go home. So he asked, sitting in the studio: if I stayed, could I just sleep here? L-Peezy said yes, and offered him a place to shower.

Then Cam called Kohl’s and quit. He remembers his manager’s Boston accent and her total lack of surprise: “She was like, yeah, I figured.“

Vic told his friend Chance about him. Chance came by. And Cam, who had been in Chicago for a matter of weeks, didn’t know who he was.

“He didn’t play me any music. He just assumed I knew who he was. Everybody else did.”

He told Chance he’d think about it. He was busy and stressed out trying to sell beats. That night at his girlfriend’s apartment he mentioned, offhand, that he’d met a guy named Chance the Rapper. Her reaction stopped him cold. She pulled up “Juice” on YouTube.

“I was like, whoa, this dude is dope. Okay, I gotta — okay. So I hit him back right away.”

The assignment Chance gave him was oddly specific. There was a song he and Vic and Peter CottonTale had written in Hawaii, and the beat under it had been sold to somebody else, so the song existed with nothing beneath it. Could Cam build a new one?

It’s hard to overstate how precisely this matched what Cam had already trained for. In high school, when he was trying to learn how to turn beats into songs, he’d DJ’d, which meant access to a cappellas, and he’d taken those a cappellas and built entirely new beats underneath them. Hundreds of times. With one rule: the remix had to beat the original.

“So when he gave me this assignment, I was ready. I was like — okay, this is gonna be easy.”

The song turned out to be “Cocoa Butter Kisses.”

Cole heard it and wanted to meet. He asked Cam to send a beat pack. Cam responded with a very calculated no.

“I told him, I could do that for you, but it’s not gonna be my best work. I do my best work in the studio with the artist. Because the relationship is more valuable than the song, even. I wanted him to see me, know me, see me in action.”

But the more interesting thread, the one Cam himself keeps returning to, isn’t the credits. It’s what he was noticing in the room.

Every beat he made came with a picture. Not a mood; a picture. A kid riding a bicycle. A specific character behaving a specific way toward another character in a scene. He never mentioned this to anyone. He just made the beat.

And then he started noticing that artists were writing the picture.

“There’d be times where I’d see an object, like a bicycle, and the person writing is like, man, I’m seeing a bicycle for some reason, I kinda want to incorporate that into my verse. And I’m like — that’s weird. I didn’t tell him that.”

Which is how a producer ends up standing in front of a projector, showing a room a clip of Cinderella and a color palette and the word nightingale, saying: this is what I saw.

He wasn’t the only one in that room, and the others remember it. In a 2016 oral history of Telefone for Pigeons & Planes, theMIND (who wrote the “Shadow Man” hook that night)  recalled Cam getting worked up because the projected images wouldn’t move: “No, no, no! No one look at the screen!” One of the words Cam kept circling, theMIND said, was nightingale. He insisted it mattered without fully explaining why. Smino put it another way: “Cam’s always got the real Jedi way of thinking.” Nobody in the room had the vocabulary for what he was doing. Neither did he … yet.

It also explains the thing people describe as his signature. Ask him about it and he says cartoony, and he means it technically: the way animation exaggerates certain features, huge heads, big eyes, for effect. His drums, which he traces to studying Dr. Dre, sit right up on you, larger than life. The chords around them add color that’s deliberately unreal.

“It even scared me at one point. I was like, if I get in the studio with a hard rapper, like Kendrick, I don’t know if this cartoony stuff is gonna work.”

He’d always heard vocal melodies over his own beats; his instinct was to sing them out loud to the artist and let them take it. Then Vic went on tour, and Cam kept working, and there was nobody around to record the parts he was hearing. So he recorded them himself. That was 2013.

He’d tried recording his own voice before and hated it every time.

“But this was the first time I listened to it and forgot that I’m listening to myself. A lot of times if I know it’s me, that’s a bad sign. But I listened to it and I was like — I actually like this.”

He sent it to Vic, who wrote back asking who the singer was, and then told him to keep going.

It became a pattern, and Cam handled it with a very specific piece of self-protection. In sessions, when he heard a part, he’d never propose singing it.

“I would never suggest that I do it. I’d always be like, you should do this, I’m just gonna do a demo. Or, we should find somebody else to do this, I’m just gonna do a demo. And more often than not, they’d be like — we like your demo, you’re doing it.”

That’s how his voice ended up on records with Noname and Rejjie Snow. On one, he sang a line about rain because it was actually raining outside the studio, in a deliberately cartoony voice, trying to sound like Billie Holiday.

But being the artist rather than the producer asks for something he genuinely doesn’t want, and he’s clear-eyed about what it is: photos of himself, reachability, being the main character.

He makes an argument for the alternative that’s worth quoting at length, because it’s the most Cam thing in the entire conversation: a producer defending his aesthetics by way of Tolkien.

“The purest way of promoting music, in a perfect world, would be more like a book. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings. You might see his image on the back. About the author, a little paragraph. But the book itself is not about him. It comes from him, it might reveal aspects of his inner world to you — because that’s what I think art does, inevitably — but it takes you someplace other than him. And you can make your home in it. You don’t have to have this awkward picture of him staring at you while you’re trying to make your home in the music. If you like my music, I’m not my music.”

It’s worth sitting with where that belief came from. This is a man whose whole method is pouring a private interior into other people’s work — the slideshow, the nightingale, the bicycle he pictured that a rapper would then reach for without being told. His gift, for twenty years, was making something of his own and handing it to somebody else to carry. Of course he believed the maker should stay out the way. Invisibility wasn’t only a principle for him. It was the shape the work had always taken, the water he swam in. He’d never made anything that was his to stand in front of.

“Am I doing this to a level of integrity that satisfies my soul.”

The answer wasn’t a definite yes.

Several things were converging. LA’s economics, where you work, pay rent, look at what’s left, and conclude that you need to work more. Burnout. And a values problem that had been building for a while: his beats going out under lyrics he found not just uninteresting but actively contrary to what he believed, his own work becoming the pleasant surface on somebody else’s message.

Then the pandemic made all of it feel urgent in a way he describes as existential.

“I thought the world was supposed to end. I could meet my maker today. How would I feel about the things I’ve been doing with my life — especially with my gift?”

So he asked himself a clarifying question, the kind that only works under pressure: if it ends here, what do I regret?

“I regret not doing this album. It was on my heart the entire time. And I was starting to feel kind of depressed because I wasn’t giving it the attention I wanted to give it.”

He stopped. Turned down work. Left LA.

What followed was six years that produced no obvious public output and rearranged everything underneath. He went back to Vegas to regroup. He traveled the country trying to figure out where he wanted to live. He met his wife when she interviewed him for her developmental psychology PhD, which involved talking to people who work in the arts. They met over Zoom, became friends, and when he finally met her in person he knew immediately he wanted to marry her.

And, for the first time since he was a teenager, he lived without a project defining him.

“My work defined who I was before that. I didn’t realize it until I had this time of no work. I’m meeting people, and they’re asking me about myself, and my default was always my work. And that wasn’t enough. There’s more to me than that.”

And then, somewhere down the list: artist. Which is a word he’d never used about himself before.

“I now know this beyond a shadow of a doubt. That I am an artist. Before, I thought of myself as a professional. I’m a professional music producer, that’s what I do, I make records.”

The distinction comes from a document he keeps rereading: a letter Pope John Paul II wrote to artists in 1999. Before he was a priest, John Paul II was a poet, a playwright, and an actor, and the letter is his address to people who make things.

One line in it did something to Cam.

“He says the vocation of all artists is the pursuit of beauty. And when I read that, I just felt seen. Like — that’s me.”

Because underneath the music, underneath the animation he never got to make, underneath the sprite sheets and the Neptunes notebooks and the color palettes, there had only ever been one pursuit.

“He talks about how beauty, in Catholic theology, is the visual component of goodness. Beauty is goodness made visible. And so music is goodness made audible.”

This is the language he’d been missing his whole life. If beauty is goodness made visible, then the thing he could always do — put a picture in someone else’s head, make a room see the unseen — was never really his in the first place. It came through him from somewhere he didn’t author. The nightingale, the bicycle, the color that’s deliberately unreal: he wasn’t broadcasting himself, he was pointing at something and getting out of its way. 

“It became fashionable to be the guy with all the hits and to make all the money, to be the mogul. It became cool to not be zealous about your stuff being beautiful and good. But beauty is so important to the world that I believe we won’t be able to survive without it.”

He means it structurally, across everything: architecture, film, literature, art, music. And he draws a straight line from the entertainment industry’s commodification of it to something he sees getting worse.

“We see beauty falling lower and lower on the priorities. And we see in society depression and anxiety and despair going up and up. I don’t want to raise my children in a world where beauty is not valued.”

His dream, described plainly, was almost aggressively unglamorous. A healthy son. Being the kind of father to him that he didn’t have. Cam was raised without a dad and didn’t meet his own until he was twenty-four. More children. A quiet life. He reaches for Tolkien again, and Rowling: people who got to impact the world with their gifts and still go home to something quiet.

Years before any of this, I’d heard TenderHeaded and felt something I couldn’t account for — a sense that whatever was happening in the music went past the music. I didn’t have a word for it then either. Sitting with him now, I do: he’d been pointing at the same thing I’d been hearing, from the other side of it.

“It felt like a really lofty goal. And I never put it together that that was my goal and that’s what I ended up doing — until just now.”

He came back to it as we were wrapping.

“A lot of the things I set out to do as a kid, I did. Without realizing it. Until you ask me and I’m thinking about it and I’m like — I did say I wanted to do that. Damn, I did that.”

Then the part I keep thinking about.

“I’ve always been my own worst critic, and I always felt that I didn’t do what I set out to do. It just was a thing that weighed on me. But talking to you, I realized that I did. It just looks different.”

Twenty-something years earlier he was the kid opening CD booklets to find out who made the beat, taking notes on his favorite producers in a school planner meant for homework.