![]() ![]() Then she’d joined fellow opener Charli XCX for a girl-power rendition of “Shake It Off” with Swift, whom she befriended through mutual friend Hailee Steinfeld when Cabello was going through her first breakup – classic Swift terrain if there ever were such. She’d gotten to Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium in time to toss her hair dramatically and shimmy around the stage, her dolphin-cry falsetto ringing out as the sun set behind the stands. flight from Miami, where she’d gone to see her 11-year-old sister in a production of Seussical (“My family’s just like that. “Nine-thirty,” Sinuhé Estrabao responds from the other side of the bed, which means that Cabello, who doesn’t like to sleep alone, has slumbered a blessed 10 hours. Yay!” she says to herself before asking her mom what time it is. On a recent Saturday, Cabello wakes up between the crisp white sheets of the Toll House Hotel in Los Gatos, hair mussed, mascara smudged and heart aflutter from a bad dream she can’t remember. And, certainly, she’s lost some others along the way. Meanwhile, like any barely-21-year-old trying to figure shit out, she’s made a lot of friends. If she isn’t yet Generation Z’s biggest pop star, then it seems like a fair bet that she will be. In January, Cabello topped the album and singles charts at the same time, the first solo artist to pull this off since Beyoncé in 2003, in part because she appeals to tweens, their moms and their grandmoms (“Ooh, I actually like this,” pronounced my own mother upon first listen). The ultimate result, four years after she began writing, is Camila, a debut album that hit a billion streams in barely a month, topped the iTunes chart in 100 countries and gave the world “Havana,” a smash single that plays on her Latin heritage and is so catchy that it may be the one Latin thing that even Trump can’t resist (note: “DON’T VOTE FOR TRUMP!!!!!!” she tweeted in 2016). And so, in the bathrooms of hotel rooms (“Acoustics are good in bathrooms”), with her laptop resting on the toilet seat, she began feeling her way toward a form of self-expression far removed from any A&R machine. Cabello doesn’t seem to have balked at sharing the spotlight, but she wanted to share her soul, to be laid bare. The breadth and depth of passion residing in the teenage heart cannot be overstated.īut if that can be said of fans, it can also be said of performers. Fifth Harmony, as the group was named (by viewers), were seen as the sister group to One Direction, which Cowell had formed in precisely the same way. Cabello was chosen as an alternate, then reportedly sent home some weeks later, only – in a fabulous deus ex machina moment ripe for reality TV – to be brought back by Cowell, who re-envisioned her and four other castaways as a girl group that went on to come in third in the competition and, lo and behold, land a record deal. ![]() This hugging seems sincere, not merely the ploy of a pop star who was forged in the popularity contest of Simon Cowell’s The X Factor, as Cabello was back in 2012, when, rather than a quinceañera celebration for her 15th birthday, she asked to be taken to audition for the producers of the show, and mom, dad, kid sister and grandma loaded into the family minivan for the 12-hour ride from Miami to North Carolina. When, during lunch at an Italian joint the day before, a fan had sent over a peach sorbet and a request for a selfie, he got said selfie and a hug as well. When she runs into her drummer on the streets of Los Gatos, California, the idyllic town where she stayed between her two Santa Clara performances opening for Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour, she hugs him and then hugs his lady friend, and then she recommends the shrimp and grits and the apple-cinnamon French toast at a place called Southern Kitchen and (paradoxically) a subsequent visit to a bikini store nearby. The hugs she bestows include, but are in no way limited to: waiters, nail technicians, music managers, daughters of music managers, moms of daughters of music managers, her mom, her choreographer, her dancers, fans who’ve paid to hug her, and fans who haven’t but are deeply desirous of hugging her nonetheless. Suffice it to say that Camila Cabello is a hugger. ![]()
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