The pop singer and songwriter, formerly of the girl group Fifth Harmony, has filled pages of notes on her iPhone with ruminations on the sugar rush of embryonic infatuation and its aftermath — words of hunger and grit that her fans turn into Instagram captions and scream back at her in concert.
On a December afternoon in a leafy neighborhood here, Ms. Ten years ago, in the butterfly garden at Pinecrest Elementary School, a young Romeo set a date with her among the Panama roses and gave her her first kiss, unlocking the source code for a bottomless trove of love songs. Though not yet of legal drinking age, Ms. Cabello has come a long way from the schoolyard. 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, a series of contentious and contradictory statements were released, and Ms. Cabello found herself on the lonely end of a sharp divide. That was just over a year ago. In the interim, Ms. Cabello has struck out on her own, putting her hands on the controls of her professional life for the first time.
Today, Ms. Cabello is just one in a cacophony of voices aiming to break through in a harsh, post-streaming environment. Cabello solo for its Jingle Ball. At times, sole proprietorship has been overwhelming, with people constantly asking Ms. Cabello for her creative input or asking what happened with Fifth Harmony — a subject she does her best to avoid. And so for 11 days in late December, in the cocoon of her hometown, she took a break.
On a tour of its green, al fresco campus, wearing True Religion overalls with one suspender undone and black hightop Chuck Taylors, she looked at ease and made everyone around her feel the same. An old teacher asked whether she would be going on tour soon and she said she was in no rush. Cabello comes from a lineage of strivers. 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 center at the Mexican border with the United States.
Alejandro, Ms. Eventually the couple saved enough to start their own construction company. Cabello said. It caught Sinuhe and Alejandro by surprise when, for her 15th birthday in , Ms. Cabello was living a dream. But dreams can change. In a statement released at midnight on Dec. Cabello, in a subsequent statement of her own, said that she had long been open about her desire to explore a solo career and was blindsided by what amounted to a public excommunication. She said that her collaboration in late with Mr.
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. Cabello said that after the awkwardness of her collaboration with Mr. 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.
Since the breakup, Ms. In August last year, the remaining members took a less-than-subtle jab at their former groupmate with a stunt that opened a high-profile performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. As the camera zoomed in on a dark, elevated platform showing five women in silhouette, one was dramatically yanked off the stage as if hit by a truck. She had been at home in the living room with her mother. She gathered herself. Like the pop astronauts who went solo before her, Ms.
Cabello is now both a known quantity and a blank slate, caught between an outsize past and an uncertain future. Her first single as a solo artist was an early artifact of this wobbly developmental period. Gold said it took time for Ms. Cabello, free of the army of handlers and tacticians who maintained creative control of the girl group, to feel comfortable asserting herself in front of more seasoned collaborators.
A breakthrough came while she was working with the producer Frank Dukes, born Adam Feeney, who has made his name as a prolific but low-key co-conspirator of self-styled stars like Drake and Lorde. Many potential collaborators had come to the studio armed with sleek, brassy Top 40 munitions in the style of Fifth Harmony hits. But Mr. Over sushi during an early session with Ms. Cabello last winter, he played her a deceptively simple instrumental with a prominent salsa piano riff.
Feeney said. Feeney executive produced and includes writing by Ms. Cabello on every track, are infused with tonal or lyrical references to her Latin heritage. Cabello said she took inspiration from the Latin music that soundtracked her childhood, as well as more contemporary reggaeton revisionists like Calle 13 and J Balvin. Then she blended those sounds with the auteur pop of artists like her friends Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, hoping to unearth her own original recipe.
Poleman, of iHeartMedia, said it is Ms. In an under-lit, overpriced restaurant in Midtown Manhattan after her break in Miami had ended, Ms. Then she had a tour to design, and music video concepts to finalize and a social media campaign to figure out.
She started to explain why things were trickier now, how she no longer had anyone to pick up the slack. The music kept making her lose her train of thought. Finally, after a few vain attempts to catch it, she gave in and stopped explaining herself and sang along. Home Page World U.