Hotel Books

Emerging from Porterville, California in 2011, spoken word poet Cameron Smith launched Hotel Books as his solo endeavor. Over a fusion of ambient textures, post-hardcore drive, and emo dynamics, he channels raw, emotionally charged verse, and the project has carried him and his collaborators on repeated tours across the U.S., Europe, and Australia. Smith embraced spoken word’s outsider status as well as the freedom to shape lyrics without melodic constraints. As a committed Christian, he treats the band as a vehicle for sharing his own experiences while remaining accessible to listeners outside the faith. With a constantly shifting lineup of musicians, the group issued four EPs on Smith’s Dead Letters Collective imprint, beginning with Call Me Human in late 2011. InVogue Records signed the band in 2014, resulting in the double EP I’m Almost Happy Here, But I Never Feel at Home that July. Both the debut full-length Run Wild, Young Beauty and Smith’s poetry collection Most Nights, I Wish It Was You appeared on InVogue in 2015; the book serves as a companion to the album, drawing poems from new and older Hotel Books material alongside short stories written in 2011. The follow-up album Run Wild, Stay Alive arrived the next summer, and Smith delivered his third LP, Equivalency, in 2017.