SPELLING’s music isn’t for the faint of heart.
The Oakland-based artist found wider notoriety through her epic, cross-genre breakout, 2021’s The Turning Wheel. Whimsical yet heart-heavy — symphonic yet meticulously detailed, the album created the rare kind of lightning-in-a-bottle moment that allows a member of music’s experimental outskirts to reach a wider audience. After being hailed by Pitchfork and given an exceptional 10/10 review by The Needle Drop’s Anthony Fantano, SPELLLING (Chrystia Cabral) found herself in a surprising sort of rocket ship, but there was a cost to her new elevation.
“I had an identity crisis when I became a full-time artist/musician,” Cabral tells PAPER. “It made me confront all kinds of weird things about myself as a woman, as someone who is in their 30s …” She briefly wanders off, and then: “I thought I had gotten over all that stuff. I know who I am. I’m confident, but having this big life path-turn made me confront everything.”
The urgency of that confrontation led to a greater directness in her musical approach. Whereas The Turning Wheel features songs like the lush, brass and string-laden opener “Little Deer” or the rollicking, seven-minute synth opera “Boys at School,” her new project, Portrait of My Heart is comparatively straightforward. “I was in mad scientist mode and so absorbed,” she says of making The Turning Wheel. “It was fun, but it was very different from Portrait of My Heart, where I tried to simplify and streamline.”
Given her tendency to “throw genres out the window,” Cabral almost surprised herself when she began to work on Portrait of My Heart and zeroed in on a “rock palette.” “That helped me to simplify a little bit,” she shares. “I’m not going to go looking for a bassoon or a whole symphonic background for this stuff. I just gotta get the guitars right. I gotta make the tones right and that’s kind of it, but it was still complicated in its own way,” she adds. “I think of this album and I’m like, Oh, it’s, it’s the closest I’ve flirted with something that feels more accessible or mainstream. But even then, I’ll listen back and be like, Oh, it’s still weird. It’s still through the SPELLLING lens.”
The title track, which doubles as the album opener and lead single, is centered around a chorus that is almost mantra-like. “I don’t belong here,” Cabral sings, her voice soaring over a dense world of guitar, strings and drums. The simplicity of the line, speaks to the emotional immediacy she’s moving towards throughout the album. “With previous work, I deal with romance, but it’s on this cosmic scale. I’m talking about it in a universal sense. This is more about my own heart and my own situations with heartbreak,” says Cabral. “I just let myself go, and it feels really vulnerable, but also fun at the same time.”
Similarly, standout tracks like “Alibi,” move around a central line that speaks to this openess. “And I don’t take it back/ Yeah I won’t take it back,” she sings in a loop as she runs towards a crescendo: “Yeah I won’t take you back this time/ Caught up in your alibi.” Other songs, such as the mythically titled “Destiny Arrives,” have nods to her previous work’s “cosmic scale,” but still engage in emotional minutia of heartbreak, while album closer, “Sometimes,” closes this loop, turning the smallness of pain into something huge: “Turn my head, into sound/ I don’t know, when I lay down on the ground,” she belts, floating atop a sea of guitars and a cresting tide of synths.
A different creative process led to this different outcome. She wrote demos for Portrait of My Heart on her piano, which she would then bring to her band to “jam on it and see what happens.” Her band — composed of Wyatt Overson (guitar), Patrick Shelley (drums), and Giulio Xavier Cetto (bass) — added new layers and possibilities. Their bond was already strong from touring and recording SPELLLING & The Mystery School, an album of new interpretations of old SPELLLING songs, but it was made all the stronger through this album’s boundless exploration. She even brought in outside friends to play like Braxton Marcellous from the band Zulu, Pat Mccrory from Turnstile and the bay area’s own Chaz Bear (Toro y Moi). Cabral, through trust and instinct, could let go of the overwhelming burden of her lone wolf wizardry and lean into kinetic collaboration to craft this record.
Processing her life’s whirlwind transformation through Portrait of My Heart has helped Cabral confront feelings that feel as vast as her music, but that doesn’t mean her life as a touring artist doesn’t still weigh on her life and relationships. “What I’m doing now requires a lot of sacrifice,” she shares. “I’m having to be away from my partnerships or my friendships and my family. It drains a lot of my creative energy and attention. I was questioning things I thought were obvious, like what it means to be in love with someone. How does that endure or change when your circumstances change a lot?”
It’s a profound question — one that is relevant to all of us, no matter if you’re a touring musician or not. But SPELLLING, like any artist, doesn’t come up with a clear answer. Rather her work provokes more questions. This album, after all, isn’t a study, but a portrait — an interpretation of a person at a time and place. It’s an exploration of a heart — one that is breaking, beating, breathing life into the entire body. It feels good to be alive, and to feel feelings that are grand as a soaring hook.
Photography: Sarah Eiseman, Stephanie Pia