All about Cameron Tapp

Cam Tapp is no stranger to success. For Cam Tapp, Melbourne-based, Tasmanian-born, acoustic guitarist, award-acclaimed singer-songwriter, with international ground-breaking download recognition, it’s almost a case of ‘I can see clearly now’… a sort of Johnny Nash optimism, after a long climb to his own mountain summit, from where Cam enjoys a panoramic philosophical view of back and beyond.

At mid-30, the adage that one thinks of the road ahead more than what’s been traveled, Tapp revels in the images of what he’s done and where he’s heading…and even what he is : a unique-voiced, and poetic chameleon, adapting to a rapidly-changing global techno-environment that even Obama says is a challenge to everything that has gone before.

Cam follows the industry pull to a degree but as an independent muso can avoid Poe’s maelstrom, stirred by pop culture whim. Indie is a harder road, but the views are clearer with occasional glimpses of serendipity and even epiphany. This comes from the drive for true expression. His favourite word is THE. True Human Expression, the engine-room of the Indie; the origins of humanity…and with Cam Tapp that’s where it all started.

Only the heart kept beating in an emotional life crisis…and pulsed into a lyric and a sentiment that excited his best friends at the time, his dog and guitar, and went straightaway to heart-strings across the world…when iTunes took his song The Guide and launched it to all countries simultaneously. A world first, with the biggest and newest music industry dynamic…online digital downloads.

The Guide soared to Number One on iTunes-charting in some countries and a flabbergasting #? on the US digital billboard, hitting more than a million downloads in the first week of its debut. Back home Cam Tapp was being judged by his industry peers as one of Australia’s top-respected Indie artists, culmination in a clean sweep of the 2007 MusicOz Awards of his Aussie band Borne, including Artist of the Year, best acoustic singer-songwriter, the Garth Porter Producer Award and the Nova Unsigned Initiative award, in all a prize package worth $70,000.

In the past several years, Cam’s success has been recognized not just in special invitations to iconic international gigs venues such as SxSW and Glastonbury but the The Guide and other songs on his Borne albums have scurried into US TV networks such as Friday Night Lights, Army Wives, The Philanthropist and even accompanied the big softies on the catwalk as the theme song for WWE’s 25th anniversary. In Australia too The Guide moved with Pal pet-food into the rescue business with thousands of abandoned dogs being liberated from death-row into new homes.

And then came the bushfires and Victorian country kids with aching hearts in search for meaning and the true meaning of career independence saw Cam Tapp as a sort of pied piper. From his own empathy with so many little-tackers came a spontaneous expression that would weld him to the kids and teachers stepping outside his band with a song and a chorus of mending kids, that hit number one in the Aria Australian singles chart…Lest We Forget.

After five Borne Albums, the first of Cam Tapp, on his independent journey to wherever it takes him, comes ‘The Little Black Book Of Light’…with many others yet to be given expression as only Cam knows how…in unique lyric, acclaimed guitar-work and voice from true human expression, the anthem of the artistic Indie.