Camila Cabello finds joy in her roots for new album 'Familia'

Camila Cabello says she found joy in her roots while working on Familia, her new studio album. The pop singer and songwriter, born in Havana to a Cuban mother and a Mexican father, immersed herself in the music she listened to while growing up and even ventured to write for the first time a couple of songs fully in Spanish.

“I was curious what the process would be, because my process in English is very like me on a mic, and I just sing whatever kind of comes to my head, including lyrics. So I was like, ‘I wonder what’s gonna come out in Spanish,’” she said in a recent interview via Zoom from Los Angeles.

The first thing that came out was Hasta Los Dientes (Spanish for “to the teeth”), a pop tune featuring Argentine urban singer María Becerra about feeling jealousy for a boyfriend’s past. And then Celia, a rhythmic song which seems to reference Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa, in the chorus: “Ha vivido toa la vida sin azúcar / Conoció a Celia sin ir pa’ Cuba” (“He has lived his whole life without sugar / He met Celia without going to Cuba”).

With 12 songs in English, Spanish and Spanglish, including the singles Don’t Go Yet and Bam Bam with Ed Sheeran as well as collaborations with WILLOW (psychofreak) and Cuban singer Yotuel (Lola), Cabello released her third solo record under Epic Records on Friday, April 8.

“My heritage and roots are such a big part of who I am, and more and more something that makes me feel really connected and joyful and something I wanna get closer with as I get older,” she said referring to her parents and grandparents when asked about the title of the album, which in English means “family.”

But she also mentioned her close friends and collaborators, her “family by choice,” as she called them. “It’s like really about community and how important relationships are for me, and I think for all of us,” she said.

‘Interesting and weird’

Musically, the pop album features classic rhythms like mariachi, mixing the old and the new in songs like La Buena Vida (The Good Life), which Cabello sings in English accompanied by Mariachi Garibaldi de Jaime Cuellar, with a Spanish chorus sang by the Mexican band and the singer’s father, Alejandro Cabello. She debuted it last October on an NPR Tiny Desk (Home) Concert celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, where she presented it as one of her favorites from her then-upcoming album.

“That was one of the songs I wrote with (producers) Ricky (Reed), Cheche Alara and Edgar Barrera. We were playing songs that I listened to when I was a kid: I played some Alejandro Fernández, we were listening to mariachi songs that my dad would play when I was younger. We were like, ‘What can we do that is like interesting and weird?’”

They tried combining a rhythmic pop song with mariachi and were excited with the result. “Yeah, they killed it on the production,” she said.

There’s also Lola with Yotuel — which she co-wrote with Mike Sabath and Scott Harris — about a woman that wants “patria y vida” (homeland and life) as opposed to “homeland or death,” Fidel Castro’s motto. The line comes from the Latin Grammy-winning song of 2021 Patria y Vida, by Yotuel, Descemer Bueno, El Funky, Gente de Zona, Yadam González, Beatriz Luengo and Maykel Osorbo. It became an anthem of the demonstrations in Cuba that year after some of its authors dared to express their disagreement with the government for the first time.

“I was so excited when Yotuel said yes to writing on that song (Lola) and collaborating on it with me because, to me, Patria y Vida changed history and gave people a lot of bravery and hope that things could change in Cuba,” Cabello said.

Representation through song

To her, Lola represents not only the people from her native country but from any other nation with systemic oppression where “talented, smart people don’t get the same opportunities because of where they were born and where they live,” said the singer, who moved to Miami at the age of 6. “I was just reflecting about what my life would have been like if my family hadn’t come to the United States and all the possible kind of alternatives.”

As for Bam Bam, which many fans think is a song about Cabello’s break-up with Shawn Mendes, she said that “of course is something personal, every song (on the album) is whatever I was feeling that day (I wrote it).”

On track three, psychofreak, Cabello sings: “I don’t blame the girls for how it went down…” and confirmed those lyrics referred to her former group members. “That song is basically about anxiety and all of the different things that have made up like my journey with anxiety and starting off really young in the industry.” Cabello revealed she now has limited but positive contact with the women from the group. “We have been like supportive of each other through like DMs and stuff,” she said. “I’m like in a in a really good place with, with them.” (With inputs from Reuters)