Camila lost friends – but found her voice
HER breakout solo smash from last year, Havana, which has led Billboard’s pop radio chart longer than any other song by a solo female artist in the past five years, has turned Camila Cabello, 20, into an avatar for young girls on the cusp of steeper emotional terrain.
At 15, she was beamed into the homes of millions of Americans as a contestant on the US version of the reality-singing competition, The X Factor.
The show placed her in a fivewoman vocal group modelled on One Direction that the viewers at home named Fifth Harmony.
Two albums on Simon Cowell’s Syco label in partnership with Epic Records and six tours followed in five years, during which time Cabello was, if not officially the group’s lead, a consensus favourite, with the biggest voice and those disarming eyes.
And then it all went to pieces. As manufactured pop groups tend to do.
Only in this case, the split seemed sudden and surprisingly vicious: one day, Fifth Harmony was performing at the final stop of the Jingle Ball tour, smiling and hair-flipping.
The next, contentious and contradictory statements were released, and Cabello found herself on the lonely end of a sharp divide.
That was just over a year ago. In the interim, Cabello has struck out on her own, putting her hands on the controls of her professional life for the first time.
Her new album Camila will test her prospects as a solo proposition.
The biggest stars to break away from groups – Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé – did so from stronger footing, in eras when the music industry was thriving.
Today, Cabello is just one in a cacophony of voices aiming to break through in a harsh, post-streaming environment.
“It’s not easy for anybody, regardless of your starting point,” said Tom Poleman, chief programming officer for the radio conglomerate iHeartMedia, which recently booked Cabello solo for its Jingle Ball.
“The field is so competitive that you really need the planets to align.”
Cabello comes from a line of strivers. She was born in Havana to a Cuban mother and Mexican father and moved back and forth between Cojímar and Mexico City until age 6.
One day, her mother, Sinuhe, told her she was going to Disney World and the two spent the next month together riding by bus to an immigration centre at the Mexican border with the US.
Sinuhe had been an architect in Cuba, but in Miami, where she and her daughter moved in with a close family friend, she found work in the shoe department at a Marshalls.
Cabello’s father, Alejandro, emigrated later and earned money washing cars at the mall. Eventually the couple saved enough to start their own construction company.
“My parents’ story helps me to know what’s important in life,” Cabello said. “A lot of times you can be here and be on Twitter and you think that the world is the internet. But I know what it’s like in the places my family has come from and the struggles people go through.”
It caught Sinuhe and Alejandro by surprise when for her 15th birthday in 2012, Cabello asked them to drive her to audition for the second season of The X Factor.
“She was so shy, so shy,” said Sinuhe, who now travels with her daughter on the road, describing how her oldest child would burst into tears at family parties with large crowds and loud music.
“We didn’t even think music was a possibility for her.”
In Fifth Harmony with Ally Brooke, Dinah Jane, Lauren Jauregui and Normani Kordei, Cabello was living a dream. The group performed at the White House (twice) and released addictive hits like Worth It and Work From Home that racked up more than 1 billion streams and earned them legions of fiercely loyal fans.
But dreams can change. In a statement released in 2016, the four other members of the group suggested that Cabello had turned her back on them, communicating her intentions to leave “through her representatives”.
Cabello responded that she had long been open about her desire to explore a solo career and was blindsided by what amounted to a public excommunication.
Over a feast of Cuban food at one of her family’s favourite restaurants in Miami and in a subsequent interview in New York a week later, she agreed to speak about how things fell apart.
She said that her collaboration in late 2015 with Shawn Mendes, the first time a Fifth Harmony member released music under her own name, had created tension; that she had asked to help write lyrics for Fifth Harmony songs and was rebuffed; that she initially wanted to stay in the group while working on a solo album, but the other members shut her out instead.
“I was just curious and I wanted to learn, and I saw all these people around me making music, writing songs and being so free,” she said. “I just wanted to do that and it did not work.”
Cabello said that after the awkwardness of her collaboration with Mendes, things further soured when she began attending writing sessions with producers, including Diplo, Cashmere
Cat and Benny Blanco. Eventually she said, she was given an ultimatum. “It became clear that it was not possible to do solo stuff and be in the group at the same time,”she said. So she made her choice, basing it on what she said was her conviction that “if anyone wants to explore their individuality, it’s just not right for people to tell you no”. Since the break-up, Cabello has tried to move on from hard feelings, throwing herself into Camila. But it hasn’t always been easy. A breakthrough came while she was working with producer Frank Dukes, born Adam Feeney, who has made his name as a prolific, but low-key co-conspirator of selfstyled stars like Drake and Lorde. “There’s not another artist in the world who could have done Havana, she just owns it,” Feeney said. – The New York Times