The Second Version of SPELLLING

A few years from now, when we’ve survived this wretched decade we’re all living through—that is, if we do collectively make it to its end—we will discuss and argue and make lists about what art defined it, what music will withstand the erosion of time even as we move past our current moment. When and if those discussions happen, I’ll stand and say that “Boys at School” by SPELLLING, the musical project of Oakland-based songwriter Tia Cabral, is the song of the decade. I may struggle to make this case, as it defines my own experience more than it does a specific period of time, and its delivery system—coming through a seven-minute, progressive pop epic divided into movements which swell with spite by their end, full enough to burst—hardly stands in line with the indie music moment into which it was born.

Maybe it’s just because this specific decade (minus about three months) lines up perfectly with my twenties, and has soundtracked the time where I reckon with my own adolescence and finally grow into a fuller version of my adult self—desperate to live while the earth I hold dear is begging to be put out of its misery. Yet, I can’t think of another song from any time which has better captured the specific sensation of being a young person confined to a setting in which you are barely visible, how the bitterness that experience plants in you only festers as you age, even once you’ve snapped the lock to your enclosure and are now allowed to roam free.

Mirroring the time in teenage life it depicts, “Boys at School” has simple concerns—acceptance, fear of being ostracized, the fact that the greatest gift you can give another person is to take them seriously—but it balloons those concerns into a thrilling, lush epic, capturing their enormity with twinkling synths and Cabral’s ethereal vocal. As such, it’s those visceral moments where our shared passion transcends the body—this same form that my own boys at school looked at like it was less than nothing—where the song becomes truly special, where we feel the depth of the wound. I think the greatest lyric delivery of the decade comes near the song’s end, where you can hear Cabral’s voice sharpen as sings, “I’m meaner than you think,” and lets it soften and soar again for, “And I’m not afraid of how lonely it’s going to be.” I simply can’t express how much this song would have meant to me if I’d had it in high school. I would have written those words on my arm every day before I boarded the bus, covering it in layers of sleeves until I could make a better world a reality for myself—leaving my old form behind and blowing it to smithereens.

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When the artist known as SPELLLING calls me from her home, with the piano which she writes all of her songs on in frame behind her, she is the first to bring up this type of transformation—and is maybe the only person I’ve talked to who’s brought up David Bowie in our conversation before me. Cabral struggles to remember a quote of his she’d heard another artist mention in their own interview, which I later find he said in 1993, looking back on his own career of shapeshifting: “There was a theory that one creates a doppelganger and then imbues that with all your faults and guilts and fears and then eventually you destroy him, hopefully destroying all your guilt, fear and paranoia.”

“That’s such an intense and weird concept that I feel like people always flirt around with in so many movies and in literature: this version of yourself that embodies either things that you’re aspiring towards, or maybe things that you don’t like about yourself,” Cabral says once she’s walked me through the gist of the sentiment, despite not having the quote in front of her. “I can literally see this other version of me that I’m in communication with when I’m writing and making things. I think, sometimes, when you relate to being a certain gender—my whole life there’s been the construct of being a woman and the limits that come along with how you’re perceived or treated—it feels like when I can enter this other version of myself, there aren’t those constraints of being a single body. That feels like something I can channel when I make music: being outside of my body, being outside of the limits of it.”

So, what happens when the person who aches to transform, who builds entire musical worlds to house the multifaceted fullness of being, has to deal with someone else entering the frame? Well, the concerns become more immediate, the sound more propulsive and unmanageable. As the artist herself wrote in the aforementioned song of the decade, the body becomes the law. Cabral found herself writing more directly personal material while making the follow-up to the album on which “Boys at School” appeared, 2021’s The Turning Wheel, which was received rapturously for its fantastical approach to storytelling and its intricate arrangements. After putting together her own band, the Mystery School, for a follow-up project which saw them reimagine a handful of older songs from throughout her career, Cabral assumed the making of her first album of new material in four years, Portrait of My Heart, would be smooth sailing. This did not come to pass.

“I think I anticipated things being a lot easier,” she says of her time writing and recording the record. “I thought, ‘There’s no way that the writing process could be harder than it was with The Turning Wheel,’ because that was just insane—the amount of people involved, it being COVID times, the vision was just so much bigger than the resources I had—but the process is still so unpredictable and abstract. I wrote the songs in the same way I usually do. I still write my demos on this piano right there,” she says, gesturing to it, going on to describe the way she’ll work out how a given guitar solo should sound on the instrument, then record herself singing it note-for-note to bring into a session for someone to replicate. She smiles broadly, as if the nerves resurface just thinking about the words she’s chosen to bolster the sound. “I guess it felt way more vulnerable this time around.”

The thing is, Cabral still sounds like she stands at the precipice of an imagined world to shout down on all who try to ensnare her, even when the lyrical content cuts closer to her lived experience. The finished product of Portrait of My Heart overwhelms with the sheer volume of ideas she can pack into a given song, the thoughtfulness of the arrangements and the way they methodically erupt behind her. It just became a matter of blowing herself up to match the sheer scope of the concepts she found herself writing about. “The songs are like my diary. It’s stuff that feels a lot closer to me and my personal experiences—you know, relationship issues and love and romance.” She pauses for a second. “I’m scared about putting this out and sharing this side of myself. I think about how it came together with this rock palette and how I’m referencing grunge music, how the energy is more aggressive. Maybe it was kind of like my armor. These are really sensitive songs, but at least there’s a rock star attitude.”

The new approach emerged while creating the album’s title track, which also served as the album’s first single, setting the new SPELLLING agenda with its dry opening drum pattern and more straightforward production letting Cabral’s distinctive voice take center stage. In the final version of the track, there’s an ugliness that could only be hinted at before, still expanding to take up as much space as it can muster, but with an almost ostentatious, brash directness which now stands as imperative. It recalls everything from her beloved System of a Down to the towering vocal presence of Ann Wilson, marking a complete rewiring of the creative process—which first came into view when producer Rob Bisel was brought onboard to offer a fresh creative edge to Cabral’s more elaborate inclinations.

“I came to him with [‘Portrait of My Heart’], and it was like ‘Boys at School,’” she remembers. “It had this big intro that I thought was the coolest thing ever, and then I listened to it with Rob, and he’s amazing. He’s worked with SZA recently and has this pop mentality, so he comes in and he’s like, ‘Okay, this is beautiful, but my first instinct is to cut five minutes off of this.’” Cabral laughs. “And I’m like, ‘No, I thought this was gonna be a little mini opera, you know?’ So it was a struggle at first, but then I realized this is exactly what I wanted: to have someone else step into my world with me and hear it from a different perspective. He suggested starting right away with that drum pattern, so the energy would be much more powerful right out the gate. It showed me how much brevity, just going straight to the point, can be as powerful as my instincts. I usually just want to draw you through and really build up a slow burn.”

Even with brevity driving the production process, making the payoff more immediate, Cabral’s own penchant for complex, emotional songwriting, which builds to peaks high enough to escape inside, still shines through. Even through the grungier palette employed on the album’s first tour tracks, the emotionality is propulsive—from “Keep It Alive,” which expands into an maelstrom of orchestration and synths before fizzling out into an outro full of spacey atmosphere, to “Waterfall,” which sees Cabral leaning into the rhythmic grooves of its pre-choruses and yelling out into an echoing void by its close, demanding that the object of her affection “give me something real.”

Perhaps because she found the latter track’s creation to be a “struggle,” it emerged as Cabral’s personal favorite track on the record. “There were lots of little sections that were floating around,” she says. “I would rearrange parts and be like, ‘Maybe this is the verse, and maybe this is the chorus.’ It became a puzzle, so I had to really wrestle with it and try all different styles with the band.” As she speaks about revisiting the song’s earliest versions recorded down the block from her house, you can almost hear her moving disjointed sections of sound around in her head, weaving different parts into each other as if to test how it might affect its impact.

“I listened back to those demo versions recently, and I like them a lot more now. The pace was slowed down. It’s kind of dreamy and romantic, and it feels like you can digest the lyrics more.” She stops herself, as if reorganizing the puzzle in a box that only exists in her mind’s eye. “But then when you get to the build up at the end, it doesn’t sound as impactful. There was a lot of experimenting with just the structure of that song. A lot of times with songs like that, I’ll just end up tossing them, because I know there’s something there but I can’t crack it so I’d rather just give it some space. So I’m really happy that one came through at the last minute.”

Yet, by the time “Waterfall” ends, the energy softens for the following three songs, turning back to a more tender, optimistic view of the world that fans came to expect on previous SPELLLING projects. The album’s third single, “Destiny Arrives,” marks the beginning of what Cabral calls “an emotional resting place” in the running order, swirling in the delirium of thinking you’ve finally found an end to the “unrelenting” path to love, meeting a flash of true kismet—“an oasis moment,” in Cabral’s estimation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this type of song came to her easily. “The synth line was there from the beginning,” she confirms. “I knew that was the main character. I just needed to get in the current of the song, and then I was going to do whatever it takes to prop up this main idea. I felt like I plucked it out of the universe, like it already existed outside of me already. I just needed to enhance it.”

This run of contentment continues through “Ammunition” and “Mount Analogue,” the latter of which features vocals from Chaz Bear of Toro y Moi, whose fuller vocal tone serves as a fascinating contrast to Cabral’s own unmistakable, incisive delivery. Given that the former track takes a few pages from the book of pop-soul legend Minnie Riperton, it’s no surprise that she remains a guiding force for Cabral—even when she’s writing a fuzzy hair metal guitar solo for the same track. “She was somebody whose voice I could hear my own in,” she says, smiling knowingly. “It’s not palatable to everybody at first, so I’ve always appreciated singers like that, who have something a little funky to their vocals, where it can grow on you. I never thought I liked my voice. At first, I was like, ‘I’m just singing because I want to make these songs,’ and now I’ve grown to see the strength in my voice, even if it’s more of an acquired taste for some people.”

Cabral cites her love for Amy Winehouse and Jeff Buckley when she speaks about finding her own vocal personality earlier in her career, as well as the more dynamic, daring melodies she challenged herself to sing on Portrait of My Heart. The most thrilling of these come several times throughout “Drain,” the track which throws the record back into the hard-driving aggression of its initial run. It might emerge as the album’s most ideal marriage between Cabral’s more sprawling tendencies and the harsh tower of guitars she’s cloaked her husky lower register in, cutting in its attempt to ward its subject off for their own good: “Walk away before I lure you close enough to hurt you.” By the time the song breaks itself into two halves and the instrumentation melts into a sludge-filled crawl, before building itself back up to its original, more muscular sound again, Cabral has shown off the full breadth of her impressive range, growing from a deeper warning into a controlled, powerful wail: “Baby, come over, I’m your problem now.”

Even for listeners initially put off by the change in SPELLLING’s sonic direction, it’s difficult to deny the control with which Cabral wields her clear vision for what direction her art should take her next. After all, not everyone’s creative doppelganger they search to destroy is head-banging one minute and summoning the chutzpah to reimagine a My Bloody Valentine classic and make it the album’s closing track the next. With all of that so evident in her music, it’s a wonder that she still finds herself struggling with how she should go about existing as a public-facing artist—a role she often feels at odds with, given her guarded nature.

“I’m still, in real time, trying to figure out how my music should exist, or what the best path is for me with what I do and how I can share it with the world, how to be in the music industry while still feeling like I’m being authentic to myself,” Cabral says when ruminating on her own concern with how the record will be perceived. “The times where I start to think, ‘Is this going to reach people?’ or when I’m getting in my head about the reception of it—they happen now and then. Ultimately, I wouldn’t put stuff out if I didn’t feel like I loved it myself.”

If anything, she sees the release of the title track as the first single as a line drawn in the sand—where the people who could be considered fans quickly got on board with the change in direction—despite initially being worried by “the thought that my fanbase is having a certain experience, where it’s like, ‘Where’s the synth and the whimsy this time around?’” She laughs. “Switching it up with Portrait, I had some moments where I really thought, ‘Am I gonna lose my fans? Is this not going to resonate with people anymore?’ I was really happy to see that people were saying, ‘This is new and this is great,’ where they’re still on board.” Even in the left-of-center world of indie music, there’s an urge to categorize—to place work under a “scene” umbrella, even if the artists included in the group create their art on opposite sides of the world from each other. Yet, the way in which Cabral has further stretched the bounds of what SPELLLING, as a project, can be flies in the face of those urges—defying time or location, only showing an interest in building a more tender and inventive world anew. “I think people who love my music are just fans of music, generally,” she concludes.

So, as we turn back to the second version of me, and the second version of you, and of David Bowie, and of Tia Cabral, and so on, there is the push to continue making work that sees the artist “embodying different aspects of myself,” as Cabral puts it, as if her other version of herself sits beside her and her piano. “I want to have what it takes to perform these songs and be in front of an audience,” she says. “There’s a larger-than-life element to it, this sort of maverick energy that I need to embody right now. Oftentimes, that’s not who I have felt like I am. There are a lot of insecurities I have when it comes to performing and being visible and perceived, so I think I channel that into this other person when I’m writing. The ultimate goal is feeling like you can unite all of these different versions of yourself and accept all the sides.”

At the decades’ end, not all artists working in SPELLLING’s milieu will be able to say they made a potential song of the decade (if my status as a critic carries any weight), but then continued to make music that still punctures something within each of us—the desire to be taken seriously, the curse of wanting and needing to be wanted—if only because they come to us as crafted love letters to the human experience. To be enveloped in something so clearly packed to the gills with consideration, to be overwhelmed by sound just when you think you could never hear something that moves you again, is inspiration enough to transcend your corporeal form. We’ll all talk again in less than five years, maybe feeling meaner and lonelier than anyone wants to feel, but we can only hope we’ll still have the drive to duplicate and destroy ourselves, leaving something softer in its wake. For our tiny, musical corner of the world’s sake, we should hope SPELLLING does the same.

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer. She was a bat in her last life and writes elsewhere too.

The Second Version of SPELLLING

Upon the arrival of Portrait of My Heart, Tia Cabral spoke with Paste about the larger-than-life maverick energy she needed to embody on her first album of original music in four years.