Songfacts®:

• Cam's most popular song, "Burning House" describes a torched relationship where the only place the former lovers can be together is in her dreams. But the dream is of a burning house that Cam can't escape.
  
  "'Burning House' is about a relationship that I had on-again/off-again in college with a guy that I really cared about," Cam explained in a 2017 Tedx talk. When it was our final kind of off-again time I ended it, and I didn't end it very well. I started to realize I could look back and see how selfish I was and I wanted to apologize. I had this dream about this farmhouse that was on fire, and then I'm faced with this option of leaving him and saving myself. What I did was lay down next to him, hold him so he didn't have to die alone, which is some heavy stuff. It's a lot of guilt - there's this element of something in your life you cannot fix. That's why I love sharing that with people, and I love hearing your stories when you tell them back to me."
• Cam wrote "Burning House" with the song's producers, Jeff Bhasker and Tyler Johnson.
  
  Johnson was working with Cam on songs for her major-label debut EP, Welcome To Cam Country (they had teamed up before, co-writing the 2013 Miley Cyrus song "Maybe You're Right," Cam's first big placement as a writer). She told him about her dream, and he encouraged her to turn it into a song. They made a demo and played it to Bhasker, a red-hot songwriter/producer whose credits include "Uptown Funk" by Mark Ronson and "Just Give Me A Reason" by Pink (he and Johnson often worked together).
  
  Bhasker was struck by the melody and the image of a burning house. He came up with a chorus for the tune, and the trio finished it up at the Bhasker's home studio.
  
  "A lot of times, a production might just be there to make up for anything that the song is lacking," Bhasker told Billboard. "If you've got a great song, you let it shine, and I always personally try to write a song that stands on its own, that can just be played with a guitar and piano."
• A crackling fire was found in a sound effects library, which Bhasker laid underneath the instrumentation. "It's not very overt at all," he said, "but I did kind of think that that needed to be on there."
• Surprisingly, this wasn't the first single from the Welcome To Cam Country EP. That honor went to the uptempo "My Mistake," which didn't get much attention. But when Cam performed "Burning House" on the syndicated Bobby Bones Show, it generated a buzz and leapt from obscurity into the Top 20 of the iTunes chart the next day. Arista quickly released it as a single, and it launched Cam's career as a singer.
• The Trey Fanjoy-directed video finds Cam at a party in a burning house. This was before AI, so some of the flames were real, and they proved hard to handle at times. "It's been a crazy day. From puffy sleeves that got removed on the dress, to flaming cocktails bursting, and then lighting my dress on fire," the singer told Entertainment Tonight just after the video shoot. "I just did a walk up the stairs, and the carpet caught on fire. We're really lucky everything seems to be okay, and it's going to turn out beautiful."
• This was chosen by the staff of Rolling Stone Country as their Best Country Song of 2015. They said:
  
  "Unlike anything else on country radio, the spare, haunting track doused any lingering bro-country machismo... It also captured the natural confidence that defines that California-raised singer-songwriter. Instead of the usual somebody-done-me-wrong woes, she is the one who has delivers the lethal romantic blow as she yearns to 'take what's lost and broke and make it right.'"
• Emily Ann Roberts performed the song on The Voice season finale on December 14, 2015. Her cover debuted at #4 on the country chart, two places behind Cam's original version at #2. This marked the first time ever that two takes of a composition had ranked in the Top 5 simultaneously on the chart. The previous best pairing on the country tally was back in 1959, when Buck Owens and Ray Price spent four weeks in the top 10 together with versions of the Owens-penned "Under Your Spell Again."
• Country music was very male-dominated when Cam released "Burning House" in 2015. It ended up being the only single released by a female country singer certified Platinum (one million units sold) the year.
• The relationship that inspired this song dates back to when Cam was a student at University of California, Davis, where she graduated in 2006 as a dual major in psychology and Italian. After graduation she spent time volunteering in Nepal, which was where the dream happened.
  
  "When I was on that trip, my boyfriend at the time was supposed to come meet me, and we were going to do some traveling," she told Radio.com. "The day before he was supposed to come, I told him, 'If you come, we're just going to be friends.' And I told him over email. And it wasn't very nice. And that was the breakup that I felt so bad about, that I had that dream about a burning house. That's a very embarrassing story because it was a very hurtful thing to do."
  
  Cam didn't write the song until years later. She worked in psychology as a researcher before releasing an album on her own in 2010 and moving to Nashville in 2012.
• The song first appeared on the Welcome To Cam Country EP in March 2015 and was released as a single that June. It reached #2 on the Country chart that December and peaked at #29 on the Hot 100 in January 2016. The song was also included on Cam's major-label debut album, Untamed.
  
  Cam got married in 2016 and had her first child, daughter Lucy, in 2019. She didn't put out another album until 2020 (The Otherside), and waited another five years to release her next one, All Things Light. Along the way she picked up her first Grammy Award, earning a trophy for her songwriting work on Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter, which won the 2024 award for Album Of The Year.