Camila Cabello's New Album Romance Comes from Her Heart: 'Songwriting Can Be Therapeutic'
Camila Cabello is one talented señorita and her new album proves it.
The pop star, 22, released her second album Romance on Friday and it’s filled with hits including “Shameless,” “Liar” and “Used to This.” During an intimate playback in the studio ahead of her album’s release, Cabello gave PEOPLE an inside look at the creation of her new music. While she may have denied her feelings for her boyfriend Shawn Mendes for months before the couple became official, in her new album, Cabello opens up about her experience falling in love with Mendes, 21.
As the songstress detailed the making of “Shameless,” she shared that she originally wanted to put a sultry twist on it.
“I just really felt like making my version of a The Weeknd song, a very sensual song,” Cabello said of the track. In it, Cabello sings the lyrics, “It’s been a secret for the longest time, don’t run no, don’t hide.”
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It goes on to say, “Right now, I’m shameless, screamin’ my lungs out for ya. Not afraid to face it, I need you more than I want to, need you more than I want to.”
Rumors of a “secret” relationship began swirling around Cabello and Mendes after the duo dropped the music video for their Grammy-nominated hit “Señorita.” In the steamy visual, the pair couldn’t seem to get enough of each other. The following month — in July — photos surfaced of the couple passionately kissing while vacationing in Miami. Mendes confirmed in October that the two officially started dating on the Fourth of July and sparks have been flying between them ever since.
“Usually when I start an album I have a bunch of lyrics, all the time I’ll just be writing lyrics on my phone,” Cabello said during the playback. “I have 1,219 lyrics on my phone.”
During the eight months it took to create Romance, Cabello says she wrote more than 80 songs and eventually narrowed her album track list to about 20. Ultimately, 14 made her final track list and it’s no surprise that a few of them are seemingly about the singer’s relationship with Mendes.
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“A lot of these songs are kind of about the same situation like ‘Shameless,’ ‘Liar’ and ‘Feel It Twice,'” Cabello said. “A lot of these, you can tell that it’s one big ol’ story.”
“To explain kind of the situation, for both of those songs ‘Liar’ and ‘Shameless,’ I felt like I kept kind of just not wanting to have feelings for this guy. So, every time I would see him, my mom would make fun of me because I would be like, ‘I don’t care that he’s there, I don’t care that he’s gonna be there,'” Cabello jokingly recalled.
“And then I would come home and be like, ‘Oh my God.’ So ‘Liar’ is basically about that,” she concluded.
In writing her song, “Bad Kind of Butterflies” Cabello said she was in anxious state at the time because she knew that she had to make a decision about what she wanted in her love life. The singer said she had to hurt somebody that she really cared about in order to move forward with “this person that I was having feelings for.” (She and relationship coach Matthew Hussey split in June.)
“Songwriting can be really, really therapeutic,” she said. “I think that sonically this song sounds exactly like how I was feeling.”
“I had these butterflies in my stomach but they were not the good kind, which is basically anxiety,” Cabello explained. “It was just a really painful, confusing situation and I think a big part of me getting through that, and even figuring out how I felt, was me writing about it.”
One thing that’s new for the singer in her sophomore album? She uses profanity in one track for the first time, though she purposely says the word inaudibly throughout. The singer admits that it was tough for her to take that step in her music.
