Cam Meekins
From
Wellesley, MA / Lamp City
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Cam Meekins
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Bio
Born in Newton Massachusetts, and raised in Wellesley, Cam
Meekins got involved with music at a very young age. “My
parents were always playing music around me, and my older
brother was in a band so I saw him playing music all the time,”
Cam recalls, “as a result I got interested in music myself really
early on.” He began playing drums at 5 years old after getting
a drum kit as a Christmas present from his parents. “They
always encouraged me,” he says. As he got older he started
learning other instruments. “I basically stole my brother’s
guitar, and played it upside down-- because he’s a righty and
I’m a lefty. I played that thing upside down for two years, until
finally my parents bought me a lefty guitar and I could learn
how to play for real.” By the time Cam was ten, he was selftaught
on the guitar, bass, piano and drums.
This automatically transitioned into production, which Cam
started doing in middle school. “I made a lot of hip hop beats
but a lot of acoustic stuff back then too, like Dave Matthews
Band, Sublime, Dispatch; and on the hip hop side my
influences were Kanye West, Jay-Z, Biggie, all the East Coast
stuff.” After a brief middle-school distraction with sports, Cam
picked music back up again in high school, making beats for
other rappers. “I realized everyone I was making music for was
wack, and decided to just try being an MC myself,” he says,
“that’s when I began with the performing part.”
In his sophomore year of high school, Cam suffered a near
death experience, the result of a Jet-ski accident. This
traumatic event caused him to prioritize his life differently and
made him realize his true life’s goal was music. From then on
he was full speed ahead: recording mix tapes, performing at
shows, and hustling his way online, on the street, and onstage.
In early 2010 Cam reached out to music producer Matty Trump,
who was well known in Boston after having helped launch the
careers of other notable local artists in the area. “I hit up Matty
on email, and he agreed to give me a beat for some ridiculous
price,” Cam laughs. “But we did the ‘Just Like You’ record in
two hours, wrote and recorded it the first time we met, which
was pretty cool.” From then on the two started working
together more, discussing collaborations on an entire project
for Cam—and then Trump moved away to Los Angeles. “It
sucked, messed me up,” Cam remembers, “But by then Matty
saw my potential and had full faith in me, so we stayed in
contact, kept working on everything, kept things moving
forward.” In the Spring of 2011 the two had completed and
released the mixtape “1993”— named for the year that Cam
was born— a collection of thirteen wildly original songs that
went on to huge success in the underground hip hop world,
and resulted in Cam quickly getting on the radar of major
labels. On June 3, 2011, Cam Meekins graduated high school.
The signs of Cam’s impending superstardom are clearly there,
but this is a career still very much in its genesis phase. “I don’t
think there’s any limits to what I can ultimately do,” Cam
explains, “there are so many different things I want to grow
into. I want to do my own music, but I also want to write and
produce for other artists as well. Someone like Jay-Z or Kanye,
those kinds of people really inspire me. I admire their work
ethic, and I’m on the same page in terms of the way that they
think, the way that they see talent and see how the industry
works and know how to get their business overall to where
they want it to be at. I want to be a music mogul!”
Meekins got involved with music at a very young age. “My
parents were always playing music around me, and my older
brother was in a band so I saw him playing music all the time,”
Cam recalls, “as a result I got interested in music myself really
early on.” He began playing drums at 5 years old after getting
a drum kit as a Christmas present from his parents. “They
always encouraged me,” he says. As he got older he started
learning other instruments. “I basically stole my brother’s
guitar, and played it upside down-- because he’s a righty and
I’m a lefty. I played that thing upside down for two years, until
finally my parents bought me a lefty guitar and I could learn
how to play for real.” By the time Cam was ten, he was selftaught
on the guitar, bass, piano and drums.
This automatically transitioned into production, which Cam
started doing in middle school. “I made a lot of hip hop beats
but a lot of acoustic stuff back then too, like Dave Matthews
Band, Sublime, Dispatch; and on the hip hop side my
influences were Kanye West, Jay-Z, Biggie, all the East Coast
stuff.” After a brief middle-school distraction with sports, Cam
picked music back up again in high school, making beats for
other rappers. “I realized everyone I was making music for was
wack, and decided to just try being an MC myself,” he says,
“that’s when I began with the performing part.”
In his sophomore year of high school, Cam suffered a near
death experience, the result of a Jet-ski accident. This
traumatic event caused him to prioritize his life differently and
made him realize his true life’s goal was music. From then on
he was full speed ahead: recording mix tapes, performing at
shows, and hustling his way online, on the street, and onstage.
In early 2010 Cam reached out to music producer Matty Trump,
who was well known in Boston after having helped launch the
careers of other notable local artists in the area. “I hit up Matty
on email, and he agreed to give me a beat for some ridiculous
price,” Cam laughs. “But we did the ‘Just Like You’ record in
two hours, wrote and recorded it the first time we met, which
was pretty cool.” From then on the two started working
together more, discussing collaborations on an entire project
for Cam—and then Trump moved away to Los Angeles. “It
sucked, messed me up,” Cam remembers, “But by then Matty
saw my potential and had full faith in me, so we stayed in
contact, kept working on everything, kept things moving
forward.” In the Spring of 2011 the two had completed and
released the mixtape “1993”— named for the year that Cam
was born— a collection of thirteen wildly original songs that
went on to huge success in the underground hip hop world,
and resulted in Cam quickly getting on the radar of major
labels. On June 3, 2011, Cam Meekins graduated high school.
The signs of Cam’s impending superstardom are clearly there,
but this is a career still very much in its genesis phase. “I don’t
think there’s any limits to what I can ultimately do,” Cam
explains, “there are so many different things I want to grow
into. I want to do my own music, but I also want to write and
produce for other artists as well. Someone like Jay-Z or Kanye,
those kinds of people really inspire me. I admire their work
ethic, and I’m on the same page in terms of the way that they
think, the way that they see talent and see how the industry
works and know how to get their business overall to where
they want it to be at. I want to be a music mogul!”
Recent News
- Cam Meekins "The Receipt"4/10/2012
- Cam Meekins' New Video2/27/2012
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