The opening shot of Camille Rae's music video for her song "I Need Me" is an almost uncomfortably close shot of her face. The camera slowly zooms out as her eyelids open, her eyes showing a glimpse of the immense grief of lost love explored in the video. "My videographer, Jacob Long, was the brilliant mind behind this shot," Rae said to Queens of Country in an interview. "It was so vulnerable! I did feel completely exposed and raw. It also wasn't the most flattering shot, but that didn't matter to me."
Throughout the three minute long video, the camera constantly returns to this vulnerable shot. "This was the scene where I finally channeled that sadness and vulnerability I had been reaching for," Rae said. "The flood gates opened and all the crying was authentic." The power behind this stunning video stems from that one recurring image.
"I Need Me" tells the story of a woman grappling with the decision to leave a man. The first line of the song is stark and powerful: "No matter how I feel, how you feel is better." The line begins and ends the song, and Rae said that it's the line that sums up the message of the song. "As humans we will forget where we were, who we were with and what we were doing, but never how we were made to feel," Rae said. The song recently hit the Top 30 on Music Row's Country Breakout Chart, making Rae the fastest rising independent country artist to chart since Aaron Watson.
"I Need Me" tells the story of a woman grappling with the decision to leave a man. The first line of the song is stark and powerful: "No matter how I feel, how you feel is better." The line begins and ends the song, and Rae said that it's the line that sums up the message of the song. "As humans we will forget where we were, who we were with and what we were doing, but never how we were made to feel," Rae said. The song recently hit the Top 30 on Music Row's Country Breakout Chart, making Rae the fastest rising independent country artist to chart since Aaron Watson.
"As humans we will forget where we were, who we were with and what we were doing, but never how we were made to feel." — Camille Rae
Emotionally, the video was draining on Rae. "This was definitely a much harder process because it was so intimate and vulnerable," she said. "I had to channel the exact emotions that I wanted to portray and then carefully display them in a way that wasn't too forward or too vague." Despite that, she said, that the emotionally taxing element of the process was worth it because the video came together perfectly.
The sadness portrayed in the video ends on a higher note with the last scene, indicating a hopefulness in the video. Rae used the video as a way to tell people to live their lives and to not be afraid of doing what is best for themselves. "Are you going to choose to stay and drown in this life around you or are you going to make the terrifying, yet liberating sacrifices to be happy and whole?" Rae said. "The last scene tells my audience that I chose me."
Watch the video below.
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