We Spoke with Camille Camille About Growing Up, Emotional Uncertainty, and Why Nobody Really Feels Like an Adult
In your twenties, it is easy to assume that life will eventually just click into place.
At some point, decisions are supposed to become easier, confidence is expected to settle in, and the emotional turbulence of early adulthood should theoretically fade into something calmer, more stable, maybe even slightly wiser. Growing up, at least in theory, comes with the promise that eventually you will know what you are doing.
Reality tends to be considerably less cooperative. Instead of clarity, adulthood mostly arrives carrying responsibility. Not the polished, optimized version sold by productivity podcasts and suspiciously confident people on LinkedIn, but the uncomfortable kind. The kind where nobody can actually tell you whether you are making the right decision. Nobody knows if moving abroad will make you happier, whether changing careers is brave or reckless, whether staying in a relationship means loyalty or fear, or if walking away will feel like freedom or simply another version of loneliness.
You realize there is no secret committee of wiser adults steering the ship behind the scenes. Nobody is going to hand you instructions or confirm that you are doing life correctly. Eventually, whether you feel ready or not, you become responsible for your own trajectory. Freedom sounds romantic right up until consequences enter the chat.
You realize there is no secret committee of wiser adults steering the ship behind the scenes. Nobody is going to hand you instructions or confirm that you are doing life correctly. Eventually, whether you feel ready or not, you become responsible for your own trajectory. Freedom sounds romantic right up until consequences enter the chat.
Endless possibility is liberating, sure, but it also breeds a very specific kind of anxiety
Perhaps this explains why so many people in their late twenties and thirties live inside a strange emotional contradiction. On paper, life often looks relatively stable. There is work, bills somehow get paid, relationships exist in one form or another, responsibilities quietly multiply. Underneath all of that, however, there is often a quieter feeling people rarely discuss honestly enough: the suspicion that nobody fully knows what they are doing.
Psychologist Jeffrey Arnett described this period as “emerging adulthood,” a prolonged stretch of uncertainty marked by identity shifts, instability, and the pressure of building a meaningful life without particularly clear instructions. Previous generations often followed a relatively predictable script: education, career, marriage, family. Today, the script feels considerably messier. Careers rarely move in straight lines anymore. People reinvent themselves repeatedly, move countries, leave jobs, question relationships, rethink identity, start over, and quietly wonder whether everyone else somehow received a manual they accidentally missed.
Perhaps the strangest part of growing up is realizing certainty never actually arrives. Most people simply become better at functioning while feeling slightly confused.
You can feel that contradiction all over Enchanted Sea, the second album by Belgian singer-songwriter Camille Camille, released on May 29 via Labelman.
You can feel that contradiction all over Enchanted Sea, the second album by Belgian singer-songwriter Camille Camille, released on May 29 via Labelman.
Known for delicate guitar arrangements, understated folk textures, and a voice that somehow feels intimate and distant at the same time, Camille creates music that feels deeply personal without becoming performative about vulnerability. Comparisons to artists like Jessica Pratt, Josephine Foster, and Angel Olsen make sense sonically, although Enchanted Sea still feels entirely like its own world.
Inspired by Camille’s experiences navigating life in the second half of her twenties, the record moves through emotional uncertainty, love, longing, responsibility, freedom, and the strange tension between wanting complete independence while quietly craving stability at the same time.
Nature also plays a central role throughout the album, although not in the overly romanticized “escape into the woods and heal yourself” kind of way. Across Enchanted Sea, silence, distance, stillness, and open landscapes feel less like aesthetic decoration and more like emotional grounding - spaces large enough to make difficult thoughts feel slightly easier to sit with.
One of the album’s most memorable moments, “Saga’s Lullaby,” emerged from a quiet night sail on the IJsselmeer, where darkness and stillness slowly shaped the atmosphere surrounding the song. The image feels strangely familiar in the context of adulthood itself: moving forward without complete visibility, learning to trust uncertainty, and making peace with the fact that clarity rarely arrives all at once.
There is something comforting about music that refuses to pretend growing up suddenly becomes easy. Sometimes adulthood feels less like arriving somewhere and more like learning how to sit beside confusion without allowing it to completely swallow you.
We spoke with Camille Camille about long-distance love, vulnerability, emotional uncertainty, nature, and why growing up still feels strangely unfinished.
– “J’ai rêvé” came from a long-distance relationship. Did that distance make your emotions more intense or more difficult to understand?
— The distance created a sense of longing and missing towards my partner which surely inspired the creative process. Whereas the solitude gave me the time and space to be able to feel these emotions and turn them into a song.
– This is your first song in French. Did writing in your mother tongue change the way you express vulnerability?
— It sure did, I think sharing my most personal thoughts in French felt like letting myself be naked on another level.
– Your music feels very calm on the surface, but the emotions behind it are quite complex. Do you see your songs as a way to process those feelings or to stay inside them?
— I definitely see my songs as a place for my emotions to exist outside of myself. It helps me to materialise all these feelings and allowing them to “be”. I love the way they help me capture a moment that I get to keep or revisit from time to time.
– You mentioned that the song evolved from a sad ballad into something more hopeful. What changed for you emotionally during that process?
— Healing, time and a sense of appreciation for the journey as a whole. A desire to celebrate the storms that were weathered.
– There’s a strong sense of nature and space in your music. Do you think being close to nature affects how you deal with uncertainty or emotional instability?
— Oh yeah. There is nothing quite like being surrounded by the big outdoors to put things into perspective. An open space so wide it suddenly makes ones worries so insignificant you nearly want to laugh it out.
– When a song is deeply personal, what happens to it once you start performing it for others? Does it still feel like yours?
— In time, I feel like the songs become their own entity, detached from the source they arose from. During some performances I might feel some songs more intensely and singing them to an audience can be deeply cathartic. But then I sometimes almost feel like I am flying over them whilst on stage, allowing me to see and feel them from a new perspective.
– This album explores the transition into adulthood and the tension between freedom and responsibility. What has been the hardest part of that shift for you personally?
— Realising that I am the only person in controle of my own trajectory. That I need to do the things I want to do because no one will do them for me.
I feel like we often go through life in a constant state of longing or waiting. Waiting for when we’ll have more time, more stability, more peace… But when that time arrives we usually find ourselves awaiting something else without even realising it. I think getting (and staying) conscious of this has brought a new perspective on how I navigate life.
I am 30 and I sometimes still find myself wondering what I’ll do when I grow up. Haha!
– Looking back at your earlier work, do you feel like you’ve become more honest as an artist — or just more precise in how you express things?
— They both came out as honest and precise as could be at the time they were made. More than five years separate them, therefore there is an evident evolution in my sound and songwriting. It is true that I might have felt more freedom to be “me” for this second record, despite the sense of expectation that comes after releasing a debut album. I felt like I could allow myself to be a little bold and bring to life all the instruments that had been resonating in my head. Despite the underlaying melancholy in Enchanted Sea, the recording process has mostly been a playful one and I can only look forward to bringing these songs live with my band!
Nobody figures adulthood out overnight.
If anything, we just get better at tolerating the unknown. Decisions stay messy, relationships stay complicated, and freedom still brings those random existential crises they conveniently left out of the school curriculum.
Growing up, it turns out, is about learning to walk forward without a map, trusting yourself to keep moving, and accepting that perfect clarity is mostly a myth.
That’s exactly why Enchanted Sea feels so comforting. It’s just honest about how weird this phase of life actually is. Even when everything looks stable on paper, so many of us are still just figuring it out in real time. Wondering what the hell you’re doing with your life is just the baseline of growing up.
Nature also plays a central role throughout the album, although not in the overly romanticized “escape into the woods and heal yourself” kind of way. Across Enchanted Sea, silence, distance, stillness, and open landscapes feel less like aesthetic decoration and more like emotional grounding - spaces large enough to make difficult thoughts feel slightly easier to sit with.
One of the album’s most memorable moments, “Saga’s Lullaby,” emerged from a quiet night sail on the IJsselmeer, where darkness and stillness slowly shaped the atmosphere surrounding the song. The image feels strangely familiar in the context of adulthood itself: moving forward without complete visibility, learning to trust uncertainty, and making peace with the fact that clarity rarely arrives all at once.
There is something comforting about music that refuses to pretend growing up suddenly becomes easy. Sometimes adulthood feels less like arriving somewhere and more like learning how to sit beside confusion without allowing it to completely swallow you.
We spoke with Camille Camille about long-distance love, vulnerability, emotional uncertainty, nature, and why growing up still feels strangely unfinished.
– “J’ai rêvé” came from a long-distance relationship. Did that distance make your emotions more intense or more difficult to understand?
— The distance created a sense of longing and missing towards my partner which surely inspired the creative process. Whereas the solitude gave me the time and space to be able to feel these emotions and turn them into a song.
– This is your first song in French. Did writing in your mother tongue change the way you express vulnerability?
— It sure did, I think sharing my most personal thoughts in French felt like letting myself be naked on another level.
– Your music feels very calm on the surface, but the emotions behind it are quite complex. Do you see your songs as a way to process those feelings or to stay inside them?
— I definitely see my songs as a place for my emotions to exist outside of myself. It helps me to materialise all these feelings and allowing them to “be”. I love the way they help me capture a moment that I get to keep or revisit from time to time.
– You mentioned that the song evolved from a sad ballad into something more hopeful. What changed for you emotionally during that process?
— Healing, time and a sense of appreciation for the journey as a whole. A desire to celebrate the storms that were weathered.
– There’s a strong sense of nature and space in your music. Do you think being close to nature affects how you deal with uncertainty or emotional instability?
— Oh yeah. There is nothing quite like being surrounded by the big outdoors to put things into perspective. An open space so wide it suddenly makes ones worries so insignificant you nearly want to laugh it out.
– When a song is deeply personal, what happens to it once you start performing it for others? Does it still feel like yours?
— In time, I feel like the songs become their own entity, detached from the source they arose from. During some performances I might feel some songs more intensely and singing them to an audience can be deeply cathartic. But then I sometimes almost feel like I am flying over them whilst on stage, allowing me to see and feel them from a new perspective.
– This album explores the transition into adulthood and the tension between freedom and responsibility. What has been the hardest part of that shift for you personally?
— Realising that I am the only person in controle of my own trajectory. That I need to do the things I want to do because no one will do them for me.
I feel like we often go through life in a constant state of longing or waiting. Waiting for when we’ll have more time, more stability, more peace… But when that time arrives we usually find ourselves awaiting something else without even realising it. I think getting (and staying) conscious of this has brought a new perspective on how I navigate life.
I am 30 and I sometimes still find myself wondering what I’ll do when I grow up. Haha!
– Looking back at your earlier work, do you feel like you’ve become more honest as an artist — or just more precise in how you express things?
— They both came out as honest and precise as could be at the time they were made. More than five years separate them, therefore there is an evident evolution in my sound and songwriting. It is true that I might have felt more freedom to be “me” for this second record, despite the sense of expectation that comes after releasing a debut album. I felt like I could allow myself to be a little bold and bring to life all the instruments that had been resonating in my head. Despite the underlaying melancholy in Enchanted Sea, the recording process has mostly been a playful one and I can only look forward to bringing these songs live with my band!
Nobody figures adulthood out overnight.
If anything, we just get better at tolerating the unknown. Decisions stay messy, relationships stay complicated, and freedom still brings those random existential crises they conveniently left out of the school curriculum.
Growing up, it turns out, is about learning to walk forward without a map, trusting yourself to keep moving, and accepting that perfect clarity is mostly a myth.
That’s exactly why Enchanted Sea feels so comforting. It’s just honest about how weird this phase of life actually is. Even when everything looks stable on paper, so many of us are still just figuring it out in real time. Wondering what the hell you’re doing with your life is just the baseline of growing up.
