If Cam learned anything from touring with Dierks Bentley this year, it was that you shouldn’t ever put yourself in an us/them situation.

“Dierks does such a great job of making sure there is no barrier between him and the audience,” Cam told me before she kicked off her own headlining tour in Chicago on Thursday (Oct. 27) night.

“I always try to do that, too, but watching someone else do that really helps," she said. "If you are trying to ‘put on a show,’ then you automatically see yourself as separate. Instead, Dierks thinks of the show as this party that they’re all at together. He is drinking with them. He is having a good time with them. That makes him super present. He doesn’t act it out."

And while the rooms she's playing now are much smaller than the amphitheatres she played with Bentley, when she told him about her tour, he looked back very fondly on his own club dates.

“He said places like this, Joe’s Bar, are where he first developed his own show," she said. "You’re always thinking about where you should be next, instead of realizing that the people at the show are remembering it fondly."

But even after watching Bentley work for much of 2016, Cam made sure this show was 100 percent her.

“I really wanted to do some things that other people don’t do. I kind of started with a clean slate,” she said.

The Burning House Tour will make 13 stops in small clubs before wrapping on Dec. 19 in Las Vegas.