Camila Cabello and the write stuff

Bottle-blonde hair with dark roots sticks to glossed lips, and stilettos are swapped for chancletas as they spill out of the Collins Avenue clubs. Reggaetón and Latin rhythms collide with shocks of EDM by night, and the beats of Denzel Curry and Kodak Black take you home. There’s the party, the laughter and idle afternoons indulging girlhood rituals – but then there’s the hangover, too. Another summer night’s end closer to womanhood.

“The life of a writer feels truer to me than that of a singer, or a public figure,” Camila Cabello reflects. “This was my first taste of that satisfaction.” Though C,XOXO is her fourth record, in many ways, it marks an introduction; a coming-of-age story from an interrupted adolescence and a warped navigation of adulthood. Plucked from her Miami hometown in ninth grade and reared under the hothouse lights of The X Factor, Cabello was invited to join the Simon Cowell-designed Fifth Harmony who went onto become one of the best-selling girl groups of all time.

She abruptly departed Fifth Harmony in December 2016 to embark on a solo career following the astronomic success of opportune features with Shawn Mendes on “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and Machine Gun Kelly’s “Bad Things”. But it would be the hip-swaying “Havana” in 2018, honouring the instinctive passion of her Cuban heritage, which earned Cabello her crown.

Cabello would become the first Hispanic singer to release a certified Diamond single which climbed to the summit of the Billboard Hot 100 for weeks, becoming not only a career-defining moment but a decade-defining one in the summer of “Despacito”. Shrewd collaborations with Mark Ronson, Pharell Williams and Swae Lee earned her musical legitimacy, but it was 2019 which would prove to be a decisive year in her life so far. “Señorita”, her second duet with Shawn Mendes, would launch her profile into a new stratosphere of attention – equal parts blessing and curse.

The display of their romantic chemistry in the music video stoked relentless tabloid scrutiny. After the single’s release, Mendes and Cabello publicly confirmed their relationship which, despite being accused of being a PR stunt, lasted until they parted at the end of 2021. The song’s Latin influence captured the zeitgeist and remains as one of the most streamed tracks of all time on Spotify, but forced Cabello into a stylistic iron maiden. As the trend waned and interest floundered, any deviation from her expected Hispanic sound paled in comparison to her phenomenal and well-timed successes. The scope of her capability had been narrowed into a one-trick pony perception.

Her third record, 2022’s accomplished Familia, was something of a parting gift: an act of total immersion in her heritage and a final invocation of the sound that she loved enough to let go. Though she is a credited writer on all her post-Fifth Harmony songs, the swathes of behind-the-scenes collaborators and boardroom influence minimised her credibility as a songwriter in her own right. Despite Cabello’s commercial dominance, as an artist, she felt she was still very much in chrysalis.

C, XOXO is a whiplash-inducing departure from the artist you have believed Camila Cabello to be. It’s more than deep-fried peroxide as an attempt at reinvention, more - though her detractors would have you believe otherwise - than a Charli XCX manqué. It’s her first release with Interscope Records after parting with Epic Records, her label since the start of her career, and so things are changing around here.

On the record, Cabello cuts the fat, armed only with executive producer El Guincho, the architect behind sonic left-turns including FKA Twigs’ Caprisongs and Rosalía’s Motomami and co-producer Jasper Harris whose fingerprints can be found on the works of Kendrick Lamar, Jack Harlow and Post Malone. With Cabello taking the driver’s seat in songwriting for the first time in her career, C,XOXO is her vision without compromise; a world conjured from fiction which strikes, as storytelling so often does, at deep-rooted truth. She isn’t looking for a new personality. All she is seeking to share with you is the real one.

“This was the album I needed to make the other three in order to get to,” Cabello says. Her desire to write began as a teenager (“you know, when I was in ‘the group’”, she phrases evasively), locking herself in the bathroom to work on songs of her own. This first taste of loyally capturing and translating her emotions, making sense of it all, is something she has never lost her appetite for. “I think this album marks an evolution in terms of me carrying out what my intentions have actually been from the beginning of my career: to make pop music that feels kind of left-of-centre. To be on the inside, while still being a little bit on the outside.”

The word Cabello uses to describe C,XOXO is the central star around which everything on the project orbits: “Weird”. Its lead single, “I Luv It”, is a nosebleed-inducing collision between a pummelling Jersey Club beat and a mutant orchestra in the vein of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The synths are hungover, electrically-charged but running low - and Playboi Carti’s verse is no different. It’s the opening track of the album and without warning, we are plunged deep into an uncanny fever dream. “It’s almost like I’m in a video game,” she tells me, an unwitting parallel of a line in Harmony Korine’s 2012 movie Spring Breakers: “Just pretend it’s a video game. Like you’re in a fucking movie.”

She tells me of the books that accompanied her throughout this process including Anne Lamott’s modern classic Bird by Bird, an instruction on the craft of writing, and Ann Patchett’s essay collection These Precious Days of similar wisdom. “I love the life of a writer,” Cabello enthuses. “The mindset of being observant and writing things down almost like a field researcher is what feels right to me in my life.”

There is a darkness and degree of confrontation intrinsic to C,XOXO which is altogether absent from Familia and its devotion to brightness and colour. “A lot of the therapy I was doing, and a lot of my personal growth was involved with embracing the complexity of life and embracing the parts of myself that are hard to accept,” she explains. “It was about outgrowing the teenage mentality that believes anxiety is bad, jealousy is bad, sadness is bad. I think I would judge myself a lot of the time for feeling the ‘wrong’ thing, and as I get more into my own spiritual practise of Buddhism and therapy, I’ve started to realise there is no such thing as a bad emotion. I mean, there are unpleasant emptions, but I think if you want to live a full life as a human, you have to be open to all of it and be curious about the uncomfortable, uglier emotions inside of you.

"I believe the most interesting art is not the kind where there’s a good guy and a bad guy: maybe the good guy has flaws, and the bad guy has redeeming qualities. Nothing is ever simple, and I’ve been trying to explore the complexity of that.”

Though C,XOXO is one part Miami art piece, one part homage to pop culture of the 10s with collaborations from Drake (who appears twice on the record, “Hot Uptown” conjuring the spirit of his imperial phase; “Uuugly” being his own solo interlude that plays out like a plaintive lullaby) and Lil Nas X, alongside a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it interpolation of Pitbull’s “Hotel Room Service” on “B.O.A.T” – it is also about the ephemeral magic of girlhood and the lessons that make a woman.

“I’m twenty-seven now, and it looks a lot different to how I thought it would look,” she acknowledges. “My second album was called Romance because I thought that was the end all and be all. I’ve been so happy to be single for a minute, and I’ve found so much reward and so much fulfilment in getting to know myself and consciously learning what my values are, what’s important to make and what makes me happy.” Friendship, she has learned, is an essential part of that. “Dream Girls” is a bombastic, top-down celebration of the girls she grew up with and an ode to a vibrancy of spirit that adulthood rarely leaves intact.

Its companion, “305 Till I Die” is a dream-like montage of memories. “I knew, from the very beginning, that I wanted to have different interludes in the album to give your ear a break from my voice and words, and tell a story in a different way. We wanted to set the scene and create this musical bed to build from,” she reflects. “El Guincho spent, like, five hours looking at vlogs of girls going to Miami and cut them together. He sent it, and it was amazing. It felt like a portrayal of girlhood and excitement that you really feel through the energy of that track. It has a whimsical kind of gentleness, and it’s really beautiful.”

I wonder how Cabello reflects on her own girlhood, particularly when her adolescence has been skewed by the glare of global fame. “It’s a hard question to answer, because I don’t know what the other reality is, you know what I mean? I missed out on some experiences, for sure, and not to play the tiny violin for myself, but I know my nervous system went through a lot,” she shares. “My late teens and early twenties were just a whirlwind of toxic stress. I had to spent a lot of time recovering and healing through therapy to retrain my nervous system to know that I was safe and that I was fine.” One of the album’s softer turns, “Twenty Somethings”, sees Cabello try to cut her losses in a relationship that causes a war between her head and heart: “When it comes to us, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing / Twenty-somethings, should have left the party sooner…”

Though C,XOXO represents a kind of artistic rebirth for Cabello that might be hard to digest, she insists that it was not a calculated decision but the result of a series of small revelations. “I did feel typecast, subconsciously, and I wanted to show people I could do more than just ‘Havana’,” she says. “My real fans know that. My bigger songs are the reason people know me, but I don’t think they’re the reason I have fans. With this album, I there wasn’t a moment when I decided to reinvent myself - I was just led by curiosity and what felt exciting to me. But really, it’s because I have more confidence to be myself and take more risks.

"I’m less weighed down by things that would weigh me down when I was younger. Me being the songwriter made this album infinitely more personal to me, and being in control of these micro-directions with Jasper and El Guincho started to feel addictive. Honestly, it’s as simple as once I started dyeing my hair a year ago, I just want to keep doing shit to my hair. Once you start, it’s really hard to stop. It’s like a drug. For this album, for this era, I’m addicted – but then I’ll do something different.” She laughs, “I mean, my hair will be fucked…”

When Cabello unveiled “I Luv It”, she was met with intense backlash from online pop communities, denouncing her as a “flop” and commenting that “she will never be that girl”. I ask how she navigates the trial by public opinion. “I think it’s something I actually talked about a lot in therapy,” she says, “where I feel like it’s so reductive to describe artists as just ‘pop girls’. I feel like we’re all doing different things. We’re all presenting different worlds and different fantasies for people to live in – and you don’t even have to choose just one! Choose three or four fantasies at the same time, shit…

"It’s such an exciting time for pop music right now, specifically for girls in pop music. I would definitely not be honest if I said that I don’t have a competitive thing inside myself because of the culture that feeds into that sometimes, but I constantly try to retrain myself to see it as a myth – because great art is what everybody wants. I try not to read into it too much, because I feel like trying to capture the zeitgeist is unsustainable and will drive you fucking crazy.”

Another charge against Cabello is that of inauthenticity. The parallels drawn between C,XOXO and the preserve of Charli XCX have been central to this criticism. “It’s all down to context,” she answers. “I hadn’t done any interviews for ‘I Luv It’, and I hadn’t really explained the world of C,XOXO, so you didn’t see the vulnerability on the rest of the project. It’s like seeing one tiny corner of a painting and judging it on that, rather than the whole thing. Honestly, I thought it was fair because no one had seen me talk about this stark change. You might not get it the first time, but the third or fourth time you listen. I just wanted everyone to wait, because there’s no other song on the album that sounds like ‘I Luv It’. The spirit of the album is a slow unfolding.”

She shares some advice given to her by Harmony Korine: “You always have to look at every album, every song, as a brick in the house you’re building.” She says, “I don’t want to get so easily caught in the trap of looking at things in the short-term, worrying about who’s popular and who’s not. I try to be patient and make great art. I’m not trying to make everybody like me. I just want to make sure that those who love me have the best fucking experience, and that’s all I care about. Whoever wants to join our party, join our party.”