After Ladder To God’s show in Houston, I caught up with guitarist and frontman Cam Smith and talked a little about tour life, influences, and everything good in the world.

F: If you want to start this off with a little introduction, that would be great.

C: Absolutely. I live in Birmingham, Alabama. That's where I'm from. I work at a coffee shop, and I'm not doing music, but I’m very grateful to be able to do music in the way that I do it, while living in a very cool city that not many people know about.

F: So, you're pretty embedded in the modern shoegaze scene. I'm wondering, how'd you get introduced into music, what was your first band, and how'd you start playing live music?

C: Yeah, as a teenager, I was really into metalcore and hardcore, and I went to a bunch of DIY shows at the Firehouse in Birmingham, and I really got involved with my camera, and just did photography for many years. Just shooting any local show I went to. Eventually, I'd do some tours with local bands, doing weekenders out of Alabama. Then, this band, Orthodox, from Nashville, was the first band I ever did a full U.S. tour with, and I was just doing photos. It just led to meeting new people, and I ended up meeting Teenage Wrist from LA in 2018, after “Chrome Neon Jesus” came out, and I shot one show for them in Atlanta, where I just basically DM'd them and was like, “Hey, can I please bring my camera? I already bought a ticket.” And that led to me touring with them the next year and doing photos. Nothing and Basement were also on that tour, which is how I met Nicky from Nothing, and this was May of 2019. 

F: So you've only been with Nothing since the quarantine?

C: Pretty much, yes. I met Nicky pre-COVID, and then never worked with them again before COVID hit. And I was continuing to do my own thing, like even when shows came back in 2021. Any touring that I did was metalcore or hardcore stuff. And Nicky randomly hit me up one day in November of 2021 while they were in the middle of their release tour for “The Great Dismal”. And he was like, “Hey, you should do some photos for us for part of this tour,” and I was like, “Alright, word, that'd be awesome.” And he's really bad at communicating, so it was getting closer and closer to the tour, and I didn't really know what was going on. And literally, the day of the show, I booked my flight, flew to Richmond, Ubered to the venue, and showed up. And we did three weeks, and I've done every single show with them since then.

The second tour I ever did with them was in Europe, the next year, and I did merch and photos. And then we did Europe again later that year. I did Europe twice in less than 4 months for about a month each.

F: Did y’all play the same countries, or what did the tour look like?

C: It was crazy. It was honestly a fever dream. The first tour was awesome. It was in the spring of 2022. Everything went perfectly, and then we went back in the summer, and it was a total nightmare where everything went wrong, but we made it through, and it definitely trauma-bonded us, and that was the first tour I ever managed.

F: What were the highlights and lowlights of that? What's your favorite story from that tour?

C: So the European summer tour of 2022 was crazy. Nicky hit me up like a week before the tour, and he was like, “I can't find a TM. Are you down to do it?” I just told him, “I have literally never TM’d before, but sure.” I was only 22 or 23 at the time, and I had never TM'd, especially in Europe. Summer in Europe is weird. Most venues are shut down. A lot of clubs don't have shows in the summer, and it's really just the fest circuit. We had a bunch of fests, but they were in the craziest places, and it's hard to get club shows, so we had a lot of off days, which is crazy. Nothing has a reputation of being pretty alcohol heavy, so with all the off days came a lot of alcohol.

There was a day we were in Barcelona. I think it was day three of a six-week tour, and we were looking at 40-plus days ahead of us. We were loading out after an awesome show, and I noticed Christina from Gouge Away, who was playing bass for us at the time, lying on the ground of the venue. Which was super random because she was fine five minutes earlier. We were like, “Yo, are you okay?” and she was like, “I can't see anything.” She 100% got roofied at the venue. So, Guillaume, the driver, the sound guy, and I took her back to the Airbnb. Nicky, Doyle, and our drummer at the time, Mike, went out and partied.

Around three in the morning, I get a call from Mike, and he’s like, “Hey, we're here. Can you let us in?” I let them in, and that’s when I found out Nicky had lost his phone in the taxicab in Barcelona at three in the morning. The cab driver basically held his phone hostage. I spent the entire next day calling this taxi company, and they refused to give it to me. They were like, “We don't have it. We don’t know what you're talking about.” Then we called the promoter from the show, who’s from Spain, and he called them. Immediately, they were like, “Yeah, we got the phone, we'll give it to you.” They just didn’t want to give it to the Americans.

At that point, we were already in Italy. We had to leave, so this guy, Pablo, was gonna mail us the phone. Shoutout Pablo—this is not his fault at all. Around three days later, when we were supposed to get it, we showed up at the spot, and the address is supposed to be an Amazon Dropbox, but it’s completely in the middle of nowhere. There was no Dropbox, just an empty field. No phone. I had been trying to tour manage by myself, and all of Nothing’s assets were on Nicky’s phone. We couldn’t get into social media, no email, and the shows were barely advanced. We were just showing up blind, and it was incredibly stressful.

Two weeks later, we’re in Estonia, and we’re finally supposed to get the phone again. They reshipped it, and we’re there for three days, so we’re thinking, “Okay, surely it’ll get here.” On the third day, when we have to leave for the next show, it still isn’t there. We canceled the show, which is the only show Nothing has ever canceled that I’ve been a part of, besides when we had COVID in 2021. As we’re leaving, it’s like God appeared. This guy, Roman, who put us up in Estonia and booked all our shows there, found the phone in the last hour. We got it back, but at that point, it had been about three weeks, and those three weeks were horrible for morale. The whole group was struggling. Once we had the phone back, everything was fine again.

A few days later, we showed up at this venue in Denmark the night before the show. In Europe, a lot of the venues have lofts you can stay in, and this one was totally empty, no staff at all. They let us in and were like, “Alright, you can stay here. We'll be back tomorrow.” The venue had a full bar, and they said we could drink whatever we wanted, which was dangerous. Of course, everyone drank all night. They’re doing cartwheels around the venue, and Nicky grabs his rib and says, “Oh, no, I think I, like, broke my rib after a cartwheel.” It was a rib he had broken ten years before, so he was in horrible pain.

We did the show the next day, stayed there again, and around three in the morning, I saw him get up and leave the room. I tracked his location, and he had walked to the nearest hospital. They told him they couldn’t do anything. The next day, before a 12-hour drive to Belgium, he pulled me aside and said, “Hey, I need to go to the hospital. I don’t want to tell the others, but I need you to go with me.” He forgot his passport, so I had to go back and grab it. By the time I got to the hospital, he was already in a bed, and they had put him to sleep. They told me he had all the symptoms of a heart attack, but he didn’t actually have one, so they gave him a box of morphine, which was the dumbest thing they could have ever done, and for the next three weeks, we had a box of morphine in the van, a lot of alcohol, and people who wanted to have fun.

A few days later, we’re in Brussels walking around after dinner, and the streets are all cobblestones. Nicky and I were about 30 feet ahead of Christina and Doyle, and I heard Christina say she wanted a piggyback ride. I turned around as she was jumping on Doyle’s back, and all I saw was this tower of people falling face-first in slow motion. Doyle’s glasses shattered into his face, and Christina’s finger was completely sideways; she broke her hand. Absolute worst-case scenario. An ambulance picked them up, and Nicky and I both rode on one Lime scooter through cobblestone streets to the hospital. We couldn’t even find the entrance at first. We just kept circling the hospital for like 20 to 30 minutes. Eventually, we found Doyle, who was standing outside with a Coke can pressed against his face as an ice pack, and Christina was sitting in the lobby covered in blood. The hospital didn’t even really care. They wrapped her finger and sent her out.

At that point, the tour had hit rock bottom. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. Everyone was looking for an out, like how do we cancel this and get out, but we didn’t. No shows got canceled after that. One of the last shows was in Germany, and we were driving through a storm. We were on a bridge when there was a bright flash of white light and the whole van shook. Somehow, Guillaume kept it straight and didn’t wreck. It turned out that we had been hit by lightning. It was terrifying, and I swear to God that’s 100% true. You can ask Nicky or anyone. That tour was a karmic tour of just endless pain. Something crazy always happens on Nothing tours, whether it’s self-inflicted or not, but no tour has ever been as cursed as that one.

F: In terms of musical background for Ladder To God or just you as an individual, could you tell me about some of your influences and all-time favorite bands/artists? 

C: My favorite band ever is definitely Red House Painters, and pretty much any Mark Kozelek project, honestly. Sun Kil Moon's incredible, but the solo shit is a little shaky. If you're going to listen to the solo stuff, you have to listen to the live records. The live records are incredible. “Lost Verses Live” used to be my favorite live record ever, but I think “White Christmas” is it for me. 


F: Can you speak on “White Christmas”? 

C: Yeah, “Admiral Fell Promises,” the version on that record, is the best version of that song for sure. Maybe in the top five Kozelek song performances ever. “Smokey” is my number two favorite. “Smokey” was my favorite Kozelek song ever for a very long time, and “Have You Forgotten” as well. The record version is on “Songs For A Blue Guitar”, but the “Vanilla Sky” version is awesome. So he's definitely my favorite ever. I've known of him and listened to him for a very long time, but like, it didn't hit for me the way it did until maybe 5 years ago. 

Earlier than that, before him, I was just figuring my taste out. I didn't really know. I did all the hardcore, metalcore touring. That's all I was really into. My introduction to alternative music at all was the band Counterparts, melodic metalcore, kind of like Misery Signals. 
And I was in that world for a long time, and then I found Slowdive. I think Slowdive was the first shoegaze band I ever found. It was the comeback record in 2017, the self-titled one. I found that, and it definitely opened my eyes, and, because I had my introduction to guitar at church, I played at this crazy ass mega church called Church of the Highlands in Alabama. So, at 13 years old, I learned how to play guitar in hopes of playing for the church. 
And I did end up playing for years, but when I was 18, I stepped back for many reasons, but that is why I know how to play guitar and have the pedalboard that I do. That’s why my guitar tone is the way it is. I saw how they did it. Early Coldplay and U2 are the main influences for modern worship music. And, they take that, which is just really strong songwriting, and they slow it down, and put some reverb on it. If you listen to the first two Coldplay records, you can hear that influence through the modern shoegaze that's happening right now, too.
It's [church] a crazy thing to get looped into, and I'm lucky I got out, but it made me the musician I am. My fundamentals on guitar are from years and years of only playing worship music.
So, a lot of the progressions or the way I think about music have been ingrained in me from when I was learning guitar. 

F: Yeah, the intro to “Everything Good In The World” is very reminiscent of worship music to me. It's like what plays while the pastor’s like, “Father God, we ask you to bless the tithe plate that's coming around right now.”

C: Exactly. It's like that shit, 100%. Yeah, I mean, that music. Not to belittle anyone that plays that music, because I know great people are doing it for what they believe in, but it’s designed to be emotional and to make you feel a certain kind of way. A lot of the music I write is me wanting you to feel the same way, but I don't want your money, and I'm not going to pretend to give it to God, you know? 

F: Yeah, for sure. Pivoting from your background, could you talk a little bit about how you joined Nothing and Cloakroom?

C: So, I met Nicky and Doyle on the 2019 tour with Teenage Wrist. That was Doyle's first-ever tour with Nothing, and then I didn't see them again until at least two and a half years after that, and when you tour with people, you get to know each other. They knew I played in bands in Birmingham, and they knew I could play guitar, but none of these bands ever needed another guitar player or bass player, and I was also 22 or 23. I didn’t expect these bands to want that, you know? I was happy enough to do photos and merch. 

A few years go by, and I'm still doing Ladder To God at this point, but we’re not really touring or playing shows. We had tracked the first Ladder to God EP right before the Europe tour at the very end of 2021, and we were getting demo mixes back on my first year on tour with Nothing. So I'm showing them the mixes and whatnot. And, obviously, I was a fan of these bands before I was ever touring with them. Whether any photographer wants to admit it or not, you're there because you're a fan, and, like, you don't say that.  You can say it, but I didn't. I was very shy, and I still am, but it was really hard to go to these bands and be like, “Hey, can I take photos?” And then trying to do your best work and trying to impress them, it's very hard.
And I respect all photographers who do that. Always shoot your shot. The worst thing anybody can say is no. I'm very lucky that they brought me in to do photos. 

F: What did you do to stick out? What do you think led to you touring with Nothing?

C:
 I think a lot of people try to be pretty wacky with the editing, and it can be really cool, but I was so sick of carrying around a bunch of gear. I told myself I wanted to limit what I would use to shoot bands, and this goes for any creative thing. Especially your pedal board, guitar, or songwriting in general. If you put limits on yourself, and you're like, “I'm only gonna do one camera and one lens tonight,” or if you're writing a song and you're like, “I'm only gonna use 3 chords,” it leads to way more creative things that you have to force yourself to learn. 

I learned how to do that with a camera with Nothing, and I would really try to get any crazy look that I wanted, or anything that I was doing to be taken raw on the camera and not worry about it in the edit. Whether it was (a) crazy light drag or long shutter, I was like, “I'm gonna figure this out in my camera and not just rely on Photoshop to do this for me.” And it led to a lot of photos that I don't know if I would even be able to do again.

In 2024, we were all in LA for Sound and Fury. Nothing was playing, and I was there to shoot the band, and Doyle pulled me aside one day, and he basically told me that Cloakroom had just finished a record, and they couldn’t play it live, and they wanted me to play second guitar. They've never had a fourth member, so I immediately said yes, and the process of learning that set was insane. Doyle basically gave me nothing. The set was 10 songs, and five of them were off the new record, “Last Leg of The Human Table”. This was about seven months before the record came out. He brought this to me, and Cloakroom had a tour lined up in November of that year with Better Lovers, Spy, Full of Hell, and Gouge Away. And so I had about 4 months to learn these songs, which I think is fine. I had spent years learning worship songs the week of, and those songs are obviously a lot easier, but I had never played in Cloakroom, so it was not easy. I basically had to learn the album by ear. The videos Doyle sent me were the most insane things I've ever seen. He sent me a video of the song “Disillusion Wave,” where he was in a pawn shop in Las Vegas, and he found a toy electric guitar and played it
acoustic and out of tune, and only played the first verse, and that was it. 

F: If I were you, I would have just gone to YouTube at that point.

C:  Bro, I did. I found videos of them playing in Europe. Those were the clearest angles I could see of Doyle, and I basically had to zoom in on his hands, and at the time, they were only playing “Disillusion Wave” songs. So I learned those 5 songs by watching YouTube videos of live sets, and the live versions of Cloakroom songs are not like the record. So I couldn't learn the record; it was very different. 

F: So, I recently learned that you haven’t always played under the name Ladder to God. Can you tell me about the origin of the band and the name change?

C: Absolutely. The band was originally called “Just Like Heaven”. I made this band with my best friend, whose name is Cam as well, in 2019. At the time, we were kind of going in an alt-rock direction, with catchy vocals, good hooks, and choruses. And we wrote a six-song EP, 50/50; he wrote 3, and I wrote 3. He and I wrote the whole thing super quickly, and that EP is called “Synthetic Skin”. Honestly, some of those songs I still really love, but we never really got a chance to do that band. We never got a fair shot because we recorded it in 2019, put it out in January of 2020, and two months later, COVID happened, and we had never played a show. So, we never played a show for years after starting the band, and in 2021, when shows came back, we put on a show and played most of those songs. Listening back to that show, it's super rough. It's not great, but I'm still super proud of what he and I made. So we played, like, five shows under the name Just Like Heaven, and in 2022, we started writing new stuff, which is the “Devour Me” EP, and I wrote all of those songs myself. I kind of brought all of those to the table, and Cam was just down to do those songs, and we felt like it was enough of a change in sound to change the name. We both kind of didn't want that name anymore anyway, and it'd been a few years, and the sound was way different than the first EP, so we changed the name and image up a little to reflect the new sound.

F:  How'd you land on Ladder To God? 

C: So Cam actually came up with it. It's a lyric from the song “The Apostate” by Swans. We’re both big Swans fans, “Ladder To God” is an awesome image in my mind, and Michael Gira is a great lyricist, so we took that and ran with it. 

F: So, how many songs do you have unreleased? 

C: So many. 

F: How many do you think you're gonna release? 

C: We have some studio time booked, and the plan is to track three or four new songs. I have more, but since Nothing’s going to Japan, I don’t have much time.

F: And then you HAVE to go play with Hum in Chicago? 

C: Yeah, yeah. I’m contractually obligated, I HAVE to. 

F: And, Chapterhouse. 

C: I know. It's gonna be awesome, man. 

But basically, January is the only time I have to do a tour and then record some music for this band, and I've never given this band the effort that I wish I could, you know? I'm always doing something else, and I'm really hard on myself with songwriting. It's really tough for me to see if it's good or bad; I'm just too close to it. So I’ve never given this band enough effort, even though I really want to. The two songs we just put out have been written for two and a half years, you know? It's silly that it took three years to put out two songs, you know? But I just never had the time, and nobody else would do it besides me. I love Cam to death, but it kind of turned into me writing everything, which wasn't intentional, but it's just kind of how it was. 

Then it kind of turned; he left the band and, whatever, it wasn't that deep. We’re a local band, but now, it's pretty much all on me. I have a demo folder full of songs, and I'm just trying to figure out what direction to go, you know? Red House Painters is my favorite band, and we don't sound like them, and, like, we never will, but I want to sound more influenced by that. More stripped back, more melancholy, you know. Lyrics are the hardest thing in the world, and he is the best at it, 100%. 

F: Recently, I don't know, but like. Yeah, he, I mean, his music now is... It's a podcast with music behind it. 

C: Yeah. It's a podcast with music. And sometimes it's genius, and a lot of the time it's not. 

F: Yeah, I did not like his new album at all. He played a couple of those live. 

C: Really? 

F: It was kind of annoying, I'm not gonna lie. Because he just played the instrumental over the PA, he was just reciting it. Which is kind of interesting, but it was, like, 10 minutes of, like, “I looked at Twitter on my phone, and I saw that my friend from high school had passed away, and then I had another coffee, and I went to the grocery store.” It's ridiculous. There's a song that goes just like that. 

C: That's awesome. 

F: Wouldn’t it be awesome though, to get to the point where you can do bullshit like that and people will still sell out a 300 capacity room?

C: Yeah, that's the goal, I guess. The new stuff, I'm really excited about, and I don't know if anyone else will be, but that's cool. It doesn't matter to me. The songs we just put out, I was expecting nobody to care. I wrote those songs 3 years ago, and we don't really play shows. We don't tour, and I know I'm in other bigger bands, but I don't try to use that to, like, draw to this band. I just want it to be its own thing, and I'm so grateful that literally anybody cares at all, because I don't expect it or feel entitled to it. 

The new stuff will be even quieter. And, I know that's not in trend for the scene. It’s typically the louder, heavier, and more riffy the better, and my music is the opposite of that, and I’m only getting further away from that. I think that's also nice because there's a lack of that in my mind. There aren't that many soft, gazey bands besides, maybe, Knifeplay, and they're still heavy, but they're not doing it like these other bands. Knifeplay is awesome, and Mintfield too. I think Mintfield is my favorite modern shoegaze band. They're unlike any other band in the scene. So, so good, so melodic, and the drums are phenomenal.

F: Can you kind of explain your songwriting process? 

C: Yeah. So, I do it all in my bedroom, at my computer, and I have an interface, like every other musician in the world. 100% of the time, it's just starting with a guitar part, and I'm not very riffy when I write, so it's usually a chord progression. And then I'll layer it with leads, layer it with bass, and then when we go in the studio, I have the whole thing all ready to go. It just needs to be recorded. The vocals are always last. In this newest song that I wrote, I basically took lyrics from a Red House Painters song, and sang them over a song that I wrote, and then replaced all of that with my own words. I didn't have any lyrics written for the song, and I didn't know what I wanted it to be. So I just sang something to help me create a melody that might help me write lyrics, knowing how many syllables I want to do. I picked “All Mixed Up” by Red House Painters off of “Songs For A Blue Guitar”. Obviously, I'm not going to use these words, but I replaced them with lyrics I wrote, and it helped so much to make a song, and that's how I write every song. 

F: Ladder To God and shoegaze in general are very effects-heavy. What's your favorite pedal if you have one? How do you dial in your tone, and how do you create your ambiance?

C: So I've had a lot of the same pedals for 10 years now, and my secret weapon is definitely the Timeline from Strymon. It's a delay pedal, but it's far more than that. It has so many settings that can do synth, lo-fi stuff, reverse stuff, swelling. It does everything. I mostly use it for delay, but it's such a powerful pedal. The Trinity from TC Electronics is my secret reverb. I could take everything off of my board except for those two pedals and have almost the same tone as my regular tone.

The fuzzed-out, distorted stuff all kind of changes. I've had different pedals and never had a consistent one. Right now, I have the bass Swollen Pickle from Way Huge. I use the bass Swollen Pickle because it gets so much more low-end than the guitar one, which I used to play, but it's just not heavy enough. I usually have a RAT as well. I took it off my board right before this tour, and I only use it stacked with the Pickle. When you stack those two, it's insane, but I never play the RAT by itself. Nicky also broke my RAT, so it's stuck on the same settings. When we were in Austin on the tour with Whirr, Nicky did a front flip off my pedal board and broke all the knobs on the RAT. It still works, though. It's a powerhouse pedal. 

F: What's your favorite show that you've ever played with any of the bands you’re in?

C: Honestly, last night in Denton was awesome and blew my mind. Ladder To God’s never played anywhere near here, so I was very thankful that it was as awesome as it was.

Nothing playing Slide Away LA was insane, and we didn't really get into how I started playing in Nothing, but Nicky called me three days before Slide Away, New York, and was like, “Hey, do you want to play?” And I was like, “Well, I have to.” He gave me 24 hours to learn the 10-song set, and he basically called me and kind of talked me through each song and what he wanted, and I learned the whole set in one day. 

F: So, were you TMing Nothing up until 2024? 

C: Since that Europe tour, yeah, I did photos and merch. Then, when I started TMing in Europe in 2022, I TM'd from that year through basically Slide Away this year. I was still kind of helping out a little bit behind the scenes, but since I started playing, I've kind of taken less responsibility in that band.

But back to the original question, my favorite show with Nothing was either Slide Away LA at the Palladium or the Nothing and Whirr show in Atlanta at the Masquerade, mainly because a lot of my family and friends got to come to that. It was the closest show to home, and they've never seen me play a show like that. So that was awesome. 

For Cloakroom, we just did a tour with Boris, and I knew those shows were going to be good, but I didn't know how good they were going to be. We played in Denver, where I also have family who got to come see me play. And it was awesome, man. It was so sick, and they got to see Boris, which was awesome too. 

F: My final question is, what advice do you have for people who want to shoot bands, tour manage them, or play in them? What are your words for the youth?

C: You just have to do it. Nobody's gonna do it for you. Always shoot your shot. The worst anybody can say is no, you know? And, I think you should also know your boundaries, you know, taking your shot doesn't mean berating people and plugging yourself in where you're not really supposed to be. I was a kid, too. I was 18, hitting up bands to take photos, but even then, I didn’t want to overstep and cross the line where these people were gonna be weirded out or wouldn’t want to hire me. I was a huge fan of Teenage Wrist, a huge fan of Cloakroom, a huge fan of Nothing. I got into it just by reaching out, and obviously, you have to work hard and try to do a good job, but I was the shyest kid ever, and nobody was going to shoot that shot for me. I just kind of had to do it and push myself out there.

 Most creative people are shy, you know, you're not gonna be making art if you're not that way, I think. And, if you want to start a band, start a band. It's gonna be bad at first, and you have to be bad to be good, you know. You're not just gonna be good. You're not gonna be good at taking photos for years. You're not going to be good at guitar for years. You're not going to be good at tour managing for years. I wasn't. It's trial by fire, and you just gotta, like, throw yourself in there, and find a way in. Be resourceful. If you have an in, if you have a friend who knows a friend, who knows a friend, like, use it. Don’t manipulate people, but be genuine in that way. Obviously, people use people to get things, but if you're gonna do that, you better be honest and genuine about it, and try to be a respectful person. 

 I am extremely lucky to be where I am, but I got it by just pushing myself out of my comfort zone. You just gotta be nice and, if someone throws you in the van and they want you to help out, just do it, even if you don't know how to do it. You learn by doing it. Just be aware. Having awareness is key. And, it'll happen, because people have to do these roles, and I'm lucky it's me. It could be you. It could be someone else. Like, it's gonna be someone, and it's gonna be the people that want to do it. So, just, you have to keep doing it.