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Art&Seek’s Holly Fetter recently visited Camile Cortinas and Eric Neal in their home studio. She has this to report:

Filming local musician Camille Cortinas for the Artist Studio Tour was a twofer – her boyfriend, Eric Neal, is also a musician, and they both use their home to record. When I sat them down for their Jon & Kate (pre-divorce) style interview, Camille had just returned from her 5 to 10 a.m. shift at Starbucks. This sort of busy schedule is pretty typical at their house – Eric teachers guitar and bass during the day and performs in “hundreds of bands” at night (He plays with Camille, Cas Haley, Salim Nourallah, Danny Balis and many others), while Camille holds a job as a barista as well as doing commercial voice work. She’s the voice of Hot Pockets and the Texas Lottery and performs and recording regularly. Right now, they’re working on a music video for kids involving puppets, an idea which came to Camille in a dream. And if all that isn’t enough, Eric has been nominated for the 2009 Dallas Observer Music Award for “Best Instrumentalist.”

If you would like to give us a tour of your own studio, shoot us an e-mail ([email protected]) and we’ll tell you more about how to do that. Now, here’s more from Camille:

Camille Cortinas

Medium: Music (and occasionally foam, felt and fake fur).

Number of years in this space: Two

What do you enjoy most about working here? Every room is a different project – we have separate rooms for writing, recording, building puppets, teaching lessons, etc. It’s nice to have it all at your fingertips.

How would you improve it if you could? I wish we had more storage and it was better insulated. We work and live in a residential area – it’s an old neighborhood, and the walls are thin. So we have to be very conscious of our volume. It would be a dream to have better sound insulation.