Rachel Cambrin
Vancouver
Biography
It's hard to talk about any influences that might appear in my writing since a lot of the musicians I listen to or admire, I don't sound like at all, and counter to that, I keep getting told I sound like this group, or that guy, or have been “obviously influenced by so and so”, when in reality I've never listened to them or in the case of poets, read them.
One of my favorite songwriters that I don't sound like at this time is Antônio Carlos Jobim. He's the guy that wrote Girl From Ipanema, Desafinado and Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars. To me, his song writing is just “plain beautiful” in melody and form with bitter sweet melancholy. I learned a bunch of his songs in the past but again the constraints of the genre that I have decided to focus on exclude writing sambas or bossa novas. In the band ORDINARY LIES that I cowrite in, there's an example of his influence in the song, Lost In The Shuffle.
Of the latter, the artists I seldom listened to or read, that a few people have said they hear influences of, might be Jack Kerouac or Dylan. If those influences are there it comes second hand by way of Bruce Springsteen as he and his volleys of rhyme and imagery held my attention for a good period of time during the early E Street Band days.
Along with Dylan, Kerouac, Springsteen and the various other verbose writers, I too love a relentless onslaught of rhythmic prose and rhyme in what I call “carpet bombing”. Kerouac seemed to have pioneered the technique, frenetically dropping verse upon verse, each building consecutively on last, ever increasing in forward momentum. I only listened to him briefly, stopping days after, deciding that I didn't want to be influenced by him directly, regardless if “his mark” was already there or not.
The Beatles, The Monkees, John Sebastian and “Jangle” writers of the Sixties were the biggest influence on my sound since that is what I listened to when I was growing up. However it was my brother I probably benefited from the most and his his tastes because, when I was younger, I wasn't really into the singer songwriter thing, preferring bands like The Allman Brothers, Hendrix, The Police, Clash, Ramones, Frank Zappa and above all, ACDC.
A huge influence for me happened upon a visit to an exhibit of The Impressionists at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007. I was struck at how they used energy, paint and the brush stroke, abandoning the painstaking process of rendering reality, in pursuit of a feeling, or emotion, and its expression. I felt that this mind set could be used in the recording of songs if not in the actual writing of them. In the song Take My Hand a single mic was use to record the vocal and guitar at the same time with minimal overdubs for other instruments.
Most recently country writers have been the front and center of my gaze along with their method of song writing. During the process of learning their songs, I was struck, how the songs were under 3 minutes in length and the chorus only occurred twice in almost all cases. Although I wasn't about to start writing country songs, this revelation gave me permission to shorten my own songs that previously had been too long.
Working as a courier on the east side of Vancouver along with my own struggles in recovery has effected my lyrics in topic and mood and most recently the songs The Zero Block and Aunt Mary are examples of what and how I have been wanting to write for some time.
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AKA Cambrini’s tracks
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