By Taylor Adams Cogan

It’s true that being in the right place at the right time can change everything. Especially if you’re like Cameron McCloud, who was determined to always show up.

It was this way that Cameron’s band, Cure for Paranoia, got its start in Deep Ellum. But the road there began years earlier.

Cameron started going to Deep Ellum when he was in high school, going with friends to the Prophet Bar, hearing Erykah Badu might be playing, and trying to get there in time to perform in front of her.

By 2014, he was a college dropout selling CDs at malls, living at his mom’s house, where she pushed him to get a “real job,” he says. So, he made a switch. Perhaps not in the way she expected: He didn’t pursue a desk job, but instead focused on what he wanted to do.

“I’d catch the train to Deep Ellum, and I would tell my mom I was going to look for jobs, but I was going to different bars like Stonedeck or High & Tight, Three Links, Wits End – bars where I knew people played live music,” he says.” “I wasn’t really lying because I was going there to see if I could get gigs there, which didn’t happen.”

But in 2015, Dallas native and N.W.A. collaborator The D.O.C. made a comeback with his “Straight Outta Dallas” homecoming show, featuring Texas music legends, including Erykah Badu.

“I just wanted to be in the room at Bomb Factory. A friend of mine and I snuck backstage and said, ‘Erykah’s walking toward us with her entourage, we should go speak to her, rap to her,’” he says. “I’ve always had this thing about sneaking backstage or into places; it just feeds my soul. I enjoyed being there because I felt like I was supposed to be there, so I acted that way. Nothing was progressing in my career except that I was there.”

But at the same time, Cameron didn’t jump at the chance. At this point, he had rapped to Kendrick Lamar and other artists he admired or wanted to be like. He wasn’t feeling like much more would help, particularly rapping in front of a singer, he says. But, he did it anyway.

“I rapped to her, and all of her entourage started getting out their cameras, phones. At the end, I bowed to her, and she bowed back,” he says. “So, as I left, I was thinking, ‘No one’s going to believe this happened.’ But at the same time, I felt like something could happen, from the way people reacted who were there, I needed the city to react.”

He recognized one of the people filming from sneaking in, so he asked him for the footage. He then sent it to a friend who worked at Throat Magazine, saying to post it on their page, saying, “Some kid raps to Erykah.”

“And exactly what I thought would happen: People would comment, ‘That’s not some kid, that’s Cam!” he says.

It went viral enough for Erykah Badu to see it, and the next day, her right-hand man was asking Cameron to rap for her birthday.

Cameron, who had not long ago been chasing stages to see the Dallas legend, was now being asked to perform at her event, which would sell out the Bomb Factory.

“I ended up performing at the thing in front of more people than I had ever seen in my life,” he says. “After I’m done, I just walk off, and everybody’s losing their shit.”

The piano player pulls him back on stage to make sure the audience knows who he was, and that was the moment people knew this Dallas talent for what he is.

But just months before that, Cameron had been in a different place. The summer before he was on Bomb Factory’s stage, Cameron was placed on medication for bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia. He had just lost a job that his mom had encouraged him to get, and when his band was going on a trip to Colorado, he hopped on the chance.

On the drive, they worked on music, beats, and wrote some work. It was through that conversation that Cameron realized what music was to him: it was a cure for paranoia.

“We were all quiet for 10 seconds, then we were the Cure for Paranoia,” he says. “It turns out the music was more therapeutic.”

His newly named band was about to get known. While Cameron had been hopping around venue to venue in Deep Ellum for years prior, after he performed at the Bomb Factory, he was being asked to fill those stages, playing five shows a week.

“That’s how I ended up getting adopted into Deep Ellum, and it really was my career, that became my job,” he says. “I’ll never forget my mom being like, ‘I’m so glad you didn’t listen to me.’ It was the best feeling.”

Take a listen to Cure for Paranoia today: You’ll get why Cameron kept pushing. And who knows, maybe it will cure something for you, too.