Cam talks about her song "Burning House"

It's tough for talented women to get their songs on the radio these days, particularly due to the mainstream industry's obsession with the whole bro-country movement. This is why it's such a pleasant surprise to hear Cam's "Burning House" right along there with so many lesser songs. It truly stands out whenever it comes on the radio.

Cam took a few minutes to explain how she write this sincerely personal song. It's not a happy story, but it's extremely real.

“It came from a real dream,” Cam explains. “I had this boyfriend on again/off again in college, he was my college sweetheart, and the last time it ended, I was the one who ended it. And I didn't do it very nicely. You know when you're more worried about taking care of yourself, than the other person when you decide to get out? And, like, about a year or two later I was going to see him -- a mutual friend was throwing a party -- and I knew it was kind of like my chance to apologize. And it wasn't that I wanted to get back together, I just felt like I could see now that there was enough time and I didn't handle as well as I should have. So I was planning in my mind the night before. 'Okay, I'm going to kind of get him off to the side so we're alone. And I'll say this,' and planning out my apology. So, that night I had all of that on my mind and I had this dream where there's this burning house with all these people standing around it. And the firefighters and stuff were saying, 'He's in there, but you can't go in there. There's no helping him and the house is about to come down.' And I just run in the house anyway. And he's kind of trapped by a beam or something so he really can't get out. But instead of leaving to save myself, I just lay down next to him and hold him we die together so we won't have to die alone."

Cam's dream eventually led to the wonderful song.

And it was such a heavy dream. I remember waking up being, like, 'Wow, I just have a lot of guilt or something,' and I told it to my co-writer, Tyler Johnson, and he just sort of repeated my dream back to me in, like, a couple phrases and he had this guitar part. It was so cool, like, right away! And then he had this verse that we just loved so much and we actually recorded a little demo of it next to a fire that had this crackling sound in it. And we showed it to Jeff (Bhasker), the executive producer – and he's sort of been, like, our songwriting mentor this whole time – and he was, like, 'This is an amazing song! I want to help you guys finish it. And he helped come up with this chorus with this melody and concept and the sleepwalking part is just this idea that you can only be with this person in your dreams. That's the only way you can fix things. It came together in such a cool way, and such a real song didn't have to get overproduced or anything. Just the emotion of it was just there in this bare bones arrangement.”