Songs Never Heard
A craft podcast that spotlights some of the best songs you've never heard.
Songs Never Heard
S2E1: Tired of Trying to Be Found (Cam Ostrom)
A song that inadvertently solved the very problem it was looking to explore.
Tired of Trying to Be Found on Bandcamp: https://ostrom.bandcamp.com/track/tired-of-trying-to-be-found
More of Cam’s music:
Robert Howell:
My name is Robert Howell, and in this series I share, and dig into, some of my favorite songs that I've come across while in and exploring the underground songwriting scene. Songs written by talented people who are creating music that deserves wider recognition. Songs that, unfortunately, most of the world may never hear.
Welcome to "Songs Never Heard."
This episode's song literally solved the problem that sparked its creation. Let's hear "Tired of Trying to Be Found" by Cam Ostrom.
Cam Ostrom:
Staying inside
With my warm blues
My heavy heart
Weighing me down
And I don't
Understand
Why you won't
Hold my hand
And how long
Will it be
Until you stay
Here with me
I'm so tired of trying to be found
Giving it time
To figure you out
I'm living in
Tall, tall shadows of doubt
Now I can't
Face the fact
That you don't
Want me back
Will I get
What I want
At this point
Probably not
I'm so tired of trying to be found
Well I never
Loved you right
Now I smoke
Lemon light
You're the first
In my heart
And the last
One who leaves
I'm so tired of trying to be found
I'm so tired
Of trying
Robert Howell:
December, 2022. Cam Ostrom is sitting in his home studio streaming on Twitch to a handful of viewers scattered across the internet. COVID had pushed everyone indoors, and while he'd made friends online, none of them were making music. Or producing. Or writing. He kept introducing himself into creative spaces, trying to find "his people." Trying to be seen as more than just another person in the chat.
Cam Ostrom:
I didn't want to be seen as like a fan or a consumer, I guess. I wanted to be a creator and that applies to more than just music.
Robert Howell:
The frustration of it sparked a phrase that wouldn't leave him alone: ' Tired of trying to be found.' Just the sound of those words together felt right. He opened a new Notes document on his phone, something he does constantly, and typed them in.
He also had these waltz-like chords lying around from a song about his grandmother that wasn't working. Open D tuning. Three-four time. When he paired them with this new phrase, something clicked. The song that emerged would carry multiple meanings. Yes, it was about creative isolation, but it also became about love. Loss. The exhaustion of constantly putting yourself out there.
What surprised Cam most was how quickly it all came together. He doesn't find writing music particularly easy. Usually everything feels laborious, and he often ends up unhappy with where things land. But this song was different. He barely remembers writing the lyrics or pairing them with the chords. They just married themselves to each other immediately, like they'd been waiting to meet.
Cam believes this was the moment he hit his stride as a songwriter. After years of doubting whether he could write original music, whether he had something to say, this song answered those questions. It felt like him. It was him.
The waltz timing mattered. Three-four time gave the song space to breathe, matching that exhausted feeling in the title. The open D tuning on his guitar created these lethargic, resigned chords that seem to understand exactly what the lyrics were trying to say.
Robert Howell:
The way he sings "I'm so tired of trying to be found," is not bitter or angry. It's just honest. The exhaustion of a creator wondering if anyone's actually listening. If the effort of putting yourself out there again and again is worth it.
Of all the lyrics in the song, "Now I smoke lemon light," stands out as the most mysterious. Even Cam admits, it doesn't entirely make sense to him, which might be exactly why he loves it. When I asked him about it, he lit up with enthusiasm. This was clearly a line he'd been waiting to talk about.
Cam Ostrom:
Lemon light feels like the inverse of limelight, where if you're in the limelight, it's enjoyable, you're front and center, you're seen. Lemon light, it's the lemon to the lime, where you're in a different kind of light, but you're not exactly where you'd want to be.
Robert Howell:
The image gets even stranger when he talks about smoking it. Like being on a stage with smoke machines, adding haze to obscure yourself further. Hiding. Retracting. He cycles through different interpretations, never quite landing on one. The line asks more questions than it answers, and Cam seems perfectly content with that uncertainty.
It's the kind of lyric that stays with you precisely because you can't quite pin it down. Cam knows it works, even if he can't fully explain why.
Cam produced this song entirely in his home studio with whatever he had on hand. He's a left-handed guitarist who plays a right-handed guitar, flipped upside down, strings reversed. It creates an unusual strumming pattern, high strings to low strings, that most experienced players might notice sounds different. He can't hear the distinction himself, but it's there, part of what makes the song uniquely his.
The arrangement stays deliberately simple. Two, maybe three acoustic guitars panned to opposite sides. Drums from a free LABS plugin, and the kit panned all around the mix to create a more binaural, fuller sound. The ethereal keyboard textures that drift from ear to ear? Another free LABS plugin. Those "paddy" keys that Cam says felt almost like cheating, adding atmosphere so easily, he eventually stopped using them in later songs.
The bass might be the most resourceful choice of all. It's not actually a bass, it's an electric guitar run through an octave pedal. Cam's embarrassed by it. Says he never loved the tone, but it was all he had, so that's what he used.
There's a beautiful looseness to the whole recording that Cam embraces. You hear it in the guitar string squeaks, especially near the end. And the slight imprecision in the playing. Those little imperfections aren't mistakes to be fixed, they're what make the recording feel so warm and human , giving it a unique sonic thumbprint.
Cam Ostrom:
I'm just, I'm a pretty noisy player. I'm a pretty inaccurate player. I love that aspect of how I play. So those are all just like little fun things that I think make it a song that I've made.
Robert Howell:
The double-tracked vocals add a similar warmth. Cam describes the joy of trying to match your first take exactly, and then discovering where you went wrong. That slight inexactness creates the humanity in the mix.
Even the recording happened in pieces. The acoustic guitars were tracked on two very different days. Cam can hear where they change, where the mic placement shifted, but he mixed it well enough that most listeners would never notice. It's his secret hidden in plain sight.
"Tired of Trying to Be Found" is a curious case where a piece of art solved the very problem it was created to explore. Cam started the song in a moment of isolation when his initial attempts to connect with the music world felt like a constant uphill struggle. The solution it turns out was not to try harder, but to articulate that profound sense of fatigue and then trust the world to meet him where he stood.
Yes. The phrase, 'tired of trying to be found,' was born from a specific frustration, a reaction to the exhausting effort of constantly having to introduce himself and prove his place. But the beautiful thing is that the song, once completed and released, resolved that feeling. It stopped being a plea and became the destination itself. A kind of unintentional signal others could follow.
In his own words, the song is successful, not because it made him famous, but because it helped him find his community.
Cam Ostrom:
If the song has done anything, it's found me so many people who understand me. So I guess in that respect, the song has done its job. I'm finding the people that I hadn't found before.
Robert Howell:
That is the simple, profound irony of "Tired of Trying to Be Found." It is a song about the exhaustion of putting yourself out there that, once fully realized, acted as a final definitive beacon. The music doesn't just describe the fatigue of the journey, it fundamentally changed the journey itself. It's a powerful work of art that, through its own vulnerable honesty, earned its own version of recognition.
"Songs Never Heard" is created and produced by me, Robert Howell. It's a tribute to all the seldom heard music that, in my opinion, rivals what you'd hear on the popular charts.
Until next time, keep writing.