“It’s weird: all the music and the topics and just my life is like one big metaphor at the moment. It all merges into one.”

True that. Camille Trail is on the move: a new single (Gotta Get To Know You) and a newly single life, a new sound (vibrant indie folk) and a new home on the coast, complete with learning to surf. Sure, they’re all the kind of things that can be terrifying, “but they completely define who you are”, she’ll tell you.

“When I wrote Gotta Get To Know You my long-term partner and I had split up and it was that moment where, holy shit, what do I do now?,” she says. “I moved to a whole new place, I got new friends, new hobbies, completely started over. Everything is new and different and exciting now and I wanted the music to reflect that as well.”

The split turned out to be “a beautiful blessing, even though it was such a sad time” and you can see that life balance in the balance of the new song: a dark-sky melody paired with a sunshine rhythm that is always moving, just like when sadness hits a life but life keeps going. Yep, the song feels like what it’s talking about, like that life she’s singing about.

“Healing is never a straight line,” Camille says, and it turns out if you don’t know what direction to take, getting on and falling off a board in the water can help clear the mind. Way better and cheaper than medication, therapy or herbal remedies. Think of it as the Camille Trail Guide To Life.

“Your problems will fade away. And if they don’t,” she laughs, “at least you can look at the beach.”

On hand for the beach gazing and new direction is producer and songwriter Garrett Kato, a man very much at ease with acoustic folk pop and someone Camille admired from afar for several years. She’d long thought of working with him but the songs and style hadn’t matched. Until now.

“We were just trying all this weird stuff. There are some really weird sounds on it that we didn’t think we’d include but we thought, let’s just roll with it, see what happens.”

It was the music work equivalent of everything in Gotta Get To Know You: learning what you can do, learning what you want to do, and trusting in yourself. Or as Camille puts it, “you don’t know what you don’t know but I am comfortable now with having no idea what I’m doing, because I know I’ll figure it out.”

Which is what she’s done with her career so far to be fair. Her debut, River Of Sins, was top 5 on the ARIA country charts and she’s racked up nominations in the Golden Guitars and Queensland Music Awards. But that’s almost ancient history for the restless songwriter.

“A lot of life has happened in three years. A lot of growing up” she says, her ears opening to new sounds, her passport racking up new stamps, her circle widening as she found herself at Folk Alliance in Kansas City early this year, sick, jetlagged and unsure, but welcomed.

“It was just like this really beautiful energy: so many creative people in the one space and it was really inspiring,” remembers Camille. “It was very cup-filling: it’s overwhelming but it was also, Yep, this is what I want to be doing.”

It feels right, it sounds great, and the indie folk label fits for now, but don’t try to pin Camille Trail down.

“People ask what kind of artist are you and I’m like, I don’t know. At this point of time my music is this but I don’t know what kind of artist I am. I feel like we are always figuring that out every day.”