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Apr 10, 2025 Web Exclusive By Mariel Fechik Photography by Koury Angelo (for Under the Radar)

I once described the music of SPELLLING (the moniker of Bay Area singer/songwriter Chrystia Cabral) as what you might imagine the inside of a crystal ball to sound like. I’m not sure if I even knew what I meant by this at the time, though looking back, I think I could only have meant that her music is at once unfathomably mystical and deeply rooted in the Earth. She is someone who is equally inspired by ‘90s pop as she is obscure French surrealist literature, as interested in strange, homemade synth patches as she is arranging a chamber group with bassoon, strings, and harp.

Cabral has always been fascinated by the divine and cycles of incarnation, and her music is a swirling mirage of questions answered only by more questions. Listening to her albums, I’m often reminded of something the late icon David Lynch said about meaning in the book of interviews he did with Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch: “Well, imagine if you did find a book of riddles, and you could start unraveling them, but they were really complicated…. We all find this book of riddles and it’s just what’s going on. And you can figure them out. The problem is, you figure them out inside yourself, and even if you told somebody, they wouldn’t believe you or understand it in the same way you do.”

There will always be those who find Lynch’s attitude to be something of a copout, and will insist that his art is just the result of randomness and doesn’t mean anything. But there are others who cherish their book of riddles for what it is, knowing intrinsically that they have their own answers for everything and don’t need someone else to unravel them.

SPELLLING’s fourth record, Portrait of My Heart (released March 28 via Sacred Bones), is Cabral’s most accessible album from a sonic perspective, and perhaps even a lyrical one. It’s a driving, (nearly) straightforward rock album that prioritizes guitars and drums over more orchestral arrangements, and which puts Cabral’s rich voice front and center—one especially standout track is the brief and grimy “Satisfaction,” where Cabral’s typically velvety tone cracks and breaks over churning nu metal-style guitars (which makes a whole lot of sense when you learn of Cabral’s great love for bands like System of a Down and The Mars Volta).

Of course, that it’s straightforward is what makes it so compelling, but it goes without saying that even a rock album from SPELLLING is still the most mystical thing you’ll hear so far this year. If The Turning Wheel was the inside of a crystal ball, Portrait of My Heart is the kaleidoscopic mural of its pieces after it falls from its perch: sharp, a little jagged, and entirely entrancing.

Read on for a wide-ranging conversation with Cabral about tarot cards, Gwen Stefani, the Rocky Mountains, and killing your darlings.

Mariel Fechik (Under the Radar): I’ve noticed a trend in music releases lately, and I’m curious if it’s something that resonates with you—I feel like people who have previously released like, really high-concept or weighty work, or music that responds to specific socio-political contexts, have become a little exhausted by that process and are releasing really driving, cathartic rock records.

Chrystia Cabral (SPELLLING): When I started working on Portrait, I felt as though there was a voice in my head that was saying I had lost some of my original or spiritual foundations for songwriting. I’d been thinking that I really wanted to get back into some of the routines that I had, the way that my life was orchestrated around my spiritual practices. And there had just been less time for that.

I think it was partly to do with choosing to really pursue my music career and all the time and creative energy and labor that goes into that. And on top of that, entering this political and global landscape where there’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s just this process of disintegration happening, so that’s an extreme amount of energy going into just feeling like, what’s going to happen and what’s next? I love what happened with Portrait of My Heart. And so I don’t know, I’m sitting in a position right now where I think I’m really looking forward to, you know, how it’s going to exist in the world and what it’s going to do for people.

It was cathartic for me, like you’re describing, where I didn’t think about it at the time. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I don’t want to be so heady or go to those places I went with The Turning Wheel.” It was just what I did intuitively. But now I can see where…I don’t know, I’m still kind of piecing those moves together. It’s really mysterious and hard to describe. One thing that’s happened is that it forces me to have kind of a different attitude, or an attitude shift, to be able to perform the songs. I have to be screaming in some of them; I had to train my voice. I couldn’t sing those songs like three years ago. I have to shout and like, there’s no ethereal downtime [laughs] like I had with The Turning Wheel where I can just sing falsetto and be gentle and calm. There are a few moments like that on Portrait, but mostly it’s like, I have to use my body in a different way.

Part of it is toughening up my spirit and dealing with crisis. And for me, there was a crisis around intimacy and love and romance. And in this context right now, there’s global disintegration and crisis. I think that people, like you’re describing, want this more physical connection. And I’m excited to bring that on stage. It’s forcing me to enter this other part of myself that usually wasn’t as loud as a force in my life. And now I have to bring the rock star energy. I think that’s good for my spirit right now, and it’ll help me maintain the ferocity I need to survive this year and survive this future.

This feels like the kind of album that should be playing when you’re running through a field.

[Laughs] I need to pull up this really sweet text from a friend of mine, because it reminds me of what you just said. He’s somebody that I really respect. And every now and then when I start to get insecure about debuting this music and feeling wondering if people are going to be put off by it sounding a lot different than things that I’ve done before, he always gives me really good pep talks.

I was deliberating between putting out “Waterfall” and “Alibi” as singles—“Waterfall” is my favorite track on the whole album, and I really wanted to push that one. But also, I felt like it’d be cool to do something different, like put “Alibi” out there and throw a curveball. He said, “Your vocals are amazing. It’s a galloping heart of a song and sounds like it should be screamed, belted from the top of a cliff of yearning into a sea of oblivion.” [Laughs]

“Waterfall” in particular was inspired from walking around the Canadian Rockies. In June of 2023, I went to play in Alberta, Canada with the band for Sled Island. I went on a solo trip and I was kind of having relationship tensions and just feeling I was at a point in my life where things could drastically change. I needed to do something for myself and totally get away. And I was astounded by the beauty there. It sounds so corny, but I was literally just staring at the waterfalls; it was bewitching, the ethereal activity of a waterfall. It’s so powerful, but also from a distance, it looks like something that’s just a purifying, reassuring visual to rest in and absorb. That helped me crank out all the lyrics for the song. So yeah, even though these are rock songs, it’s still got some of the nature and esoteric qualities imbued in the concept.

I love juxtapositions like that. There’s an author named K. Ancrum whose writing reminds me a lot of yours in a way—you create these similar sorts of tensions. She writes in a vignette format and it’ll be the most beautiful, potent image and sometimes words that are almost overwrought and florid, and then all of a sudden it becomes the most blunt thing. It’s that tension that makes it so good.

I love vignettes and short stories. I’m a big fan of Miranda July, and there’s her book of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You.

The theme of alienation comes up a lot and what people do with their loneliness, and how they can channel it as a superpower in some way. I’ve always latched on to that; the ordinary turned supernatural.

That theme of alienation definitely comes up on this album, especially in the “I don’t belong here” lyric in the chorus of the title track. It sounds so triumphant, but it’s also such an anxious lyric.

I think I was channeling a lot of No Doubt. Gwen Stefani is a person who I can relate to as far as like, a pop figure that can go deep with lyrics and also recall that adolescent spirit or angst. There’s an attitude of defiance, but then the content of it is still spiritual. I think on Return of Saturn, she was probably like late 20s, and the stuff she was talking about was dealing with crisis and like, “What kind of life do I want and what are my values?” I think that was on my mind [for “Portrait of My Heart”] because I was listening to [Return of Saturn] a lot. It came out as a chant-like sort of cadence with the melody and the lyrics.

I’m really proud of how I was able to use more lofty or topical ideas, but still have it come through in this immediate way. I’ve already talked about how we played the song at a festival I curated at Fairyland, which is a children’s theme park in Oakland. They were hearing the song for the first time, and once we got back to the chorus, they’re singing along to “I don’t belong here!” It was so awesome, and it made me feel very much like, “Oh, I hit a chord here. It’s something that people are resonating with.”

And feeling alienated…I think people feel that more than ever. It’s a universal thing that you might not even understand why you feel uncomfortable in certain ways. There’s a lack of outlet for depth and meaningful connection with people in this fast paced world. In our wonderful world of the internet, you can see faces all the time and talk to people at the press of a button. And that’s amazing. But it can also just be so isolating. We all feel that way in our own regard, no matter what circumstance or place you’re in.

And so it’s like a healing little rally cry. The song is talking about my experience as an artist and as a creative person and always having that sensation since I was young that I didn’t really fit in in a particular way. Where does that come from? I don’t know. There are identity factors, of course, like being a brown person in a pretty white suburb growing up. That was always a big source of that sensation.

But I think even outside of my identity, there are a lot of other just feelings of like, “Do I belong in this era or this decade or just this time and place?” It permeates even when I have found my people and I found my sense of purpose. It’s still always there. But I think that’s also a superpower like I was saying: utilizing that to make the art that I make.

When you and I chatted about The Wiz for Under the Radar’s My Favorite Movie issue, you said something that I thought was so cool about how you “always noticed how apparent the hand was in the making of the costumes and the sets for The Wiz. Everything’s kind of inside out and you can see how everything’s patched together.” And that concept of like, here is the imagined world, but we’re also letting you see through the cracks. It’s something that I definitely noticed in the music videos for The Turning Wheel, that kind of homemade quality that also feels very supernatural in a way. Do you think that sense of “here’s the magic, here’s the artifice” has made its way to this album too?

I think it’s a little less pointed here than The Turning Wheel, where I was very much interested in playing with that aesthetic. And even with the sound, I think I went a little bit more straightforward. On The Turning Wheel, there’s a lot of subversion happening with sounds and counterpoints, like with the song “Sweet Talk,” for instance, where I think there are several voices happening at once, like a bassoon happens and it’s taking over and it’s kind of like, there are multiple conversations happening within each song. I feel like there were chapters.

On Portrait of My Heart, things are more singular. It’s one voice. There’s an absolute narrator here that’s consistent. What you were describing will always be something I’m fascinated with and something I definitely want to return to.

Now that I’ve done this like, rock opus moment [laughs], I’ve been working on these other songs that kind of go back toward my Pantheon of Me roots that very much are about showing the hand and about the making of the thing. I really thrive there, and I really am excited to get back into that place and get noisier, and not think about any sort of structure so much.

Structure sometimes feels like the most restricting thing. A lot of times when I write I feel like I have to stick to a structure, even though my brain doesn’t work that way.

I have similar tendencies, and with some of the producers I worked with on this album…I think it was a really positive experience. I worked with Rob Bisel on “Portrait of My Heart” as well as “Destiny Arrives.” Rob is a huge pop guy; he worked on the SZA album and that’s kind of where he blew up, and he’s like this hotshot producer now. But before that, a friend of mine suggested I connect with him because he was a fan of the Turning Wheel stuff. So when it came time to write Portrait of My Heart, I’m like, “Well, this is awesome. He’s already a fan of Turning Wheel and he has that pop sensibility. It could be really awesome to bring stuff to him.”

And when I gave him “Portrait” and we started working on it, it still had that kind of episodic, chapters and conversations feeling from the demo. And he right away was like, “This is amazing. Let’s cut it all out.” [Laughs] You know, like, “Let’s wrangle it in a little bit more.” I was learning about how that didn’t have to be a bad thing and how it can make songs a little more accessible. I think about some of my favorite songs and there’s something about the brevity or just something about cutting the fat off of it that just works really well.

So he gave me a good blueprint for how to go through with the comb and do that with other tracks, because it’s not necessarily my sensibility, but it doesn’t mean it won’t enhance the music. I learned that this is something I always want to do. Whatever is going to enhance the song, and if I can keep my spirit and core in it, I’ll do what it takes to do that, even if it’s kind of hurting my own feelings [laughs]. Cause I’m like, I’m really attached to that weird solo…there was this whole intro to “Portrait of My Heart” that’s no longer there. It had this string counter melody that I love, but it didn’t reappear anywhere else in the song. I’m going to find a way to bring that back to some other version, but when we cut it out, I was like, horrified [laughs]. I was like, “I thought that was like the coolest part of the song.” And then we took it out and I realized, “Oh, you start to just get to the meat.” And so that was an interesting process.

I learned a lot and I also learned that we’re doing the same kinds of things. I’ve dealt with imposter syndrome being a producer that’s self-taught. And I feel like I’m just fiddling around in my studio like, “I’m just trying things, pulling levers and op, that worked out!” [laughs] Like, “Is this how it is for everyone else?”

And not to say that like—Rob is a fantastic producer and he’s super skilled and all that, but it’s also just like, we’re all doing the same things. We’re all experimenting. So that was really cool to get to mix it up with him and learn from his like experience, how to make something that’s a little bit more pop.

I feel like every few years we go through this see-saw of like, is pop cool? Pop is cool! And then it falls away again. And with this new era of BRAT or Beyoncé doing country, people seem to be having such a hard time wrapping their heads around “what is pop?”

Oh God, I was on the BRAT train, like, right away.

It took me a minute. I think it was “Sympathy is a knife” that got me.

Oh, yeah, that’s my favorite one by far on the album. I have definitely cried to that song [laughs]. To me, it was channeling my nostalgia for Madonna’s Ray of Light. In her moment for that album, like late ‘90s, she’s bringing in the fascination of that time with world music, playing with that palette.

But to me, it still endures, that time of the late ‘90s; the sounds, the palettes that were happening. I listened back to Ray of Light and I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s still so relevant. It still sounds like now.” I imagine BRAT holding on and having that endurance too because it’s just beautiful chemistry coming together in the right combinations.

You’re quoted in the press release as talking about a sense of timelessness that you were striving for with both the title track and the whole album—“It could exist like this, or like that, or like this, but this is the one for right now.” It made me think of the way people talk about certain artists from past decades being “ahead of their time,” and this kind of cyclical conversation it leads to. Like, were they ahead of their time or are people kind of time traveling now? You’ve also said before that your first three albums, Pantheon of Me, Mazy Fly, and The Turning Wheel all share the same curiosity about the divine and incarnation—cycles, so to speak. Does Portrait fall somewhere in this cycle?

Yeah, I think that’s just like my whole MO. I can’t just not question the nature of reality at all times; we are living in the matrix [laughs]. No, I think with Portrait of My Heart, I’m actually, for the first time, looking at my body, looking at myself literally as a woman in this time and place, a woman in my 30s.

The music of Pantheon and Mazy and Turning Wheel was dealing with the ideas of incarnation and the divine, but abstract from my literal self, like me as Tia in my body. They’re more like theories and philosophical concepts, translating what I observe and what I feel. And with Portrait of My Heart, it’s much more autobiographical. It’s about real situations in my life regarding romance and intimacy and relationships and my sense of security and myself. To me, it’s still all very spiritual. It’s kind of filtered through the language of the rock star, and the rock attitude. It takes a different shape, of course. So there’s that.

There are still a lot of dramatic moments. There are certain tracks, too, that I feel like go there more than others, like “Destiny Arrives,” which is very much about courage and the idea of divinity as your life purpose being something that’s given to you. What do you do with it and how do you fulfill that? And a track like “Mount Analogue” goes with that previous trend of the soul’s ascension into its optimal place in the world. How do you find that path? What are the signs and how do you become your best self or your truest self?

That song is based on the book of the same name, Mount Analogue [by René Daumal]. There are still things like that that I’m drawing from, other stories, books, and literature that are infused in there. But a lot of stuff is just like, having my heart broken and learning that as I’m kind of in this stage of my life that feels like a second adolescence.

Some people think of those more ethereal, philosophical questions as these flighty, out there things, or just very woo-woo. I’ve been reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron which is very centered on seeing synchronicities in the world and what you do with that, and despite how mystical it sounds, it feels very grounded in reality to me. I know you have a longstanding tarot practice that influenced a lot of The Turning Wheel, and I personally feel like tarot is one of those things that sounds out there but is actually quite grounded in practicality.

I mean, any sort of way you decide to structure your ideas is going to have an outward influence. Like with having a tarot practice, people often assume it’s about trying to predict the future. But it’s more so about aligning your ideas and giving them the best potential to be communicated efficiently or to discover a new way to understand your desires. It’s just like another form of language. People are like, “Why would you learn another language if you already speak one?” Well, you’ll have more ways to say the things you wanted to say. It’s building your language.

I found this deck recently. I don’t know who made it or what it is exactly. The cards are sort of related to tarot, but there are all these themes that are really more abstract, like this one is “beyond illusion,” this one is “coming to the past.” To me it’s an example of what you’re saying, where it’s like, you wouldn’t necessarily think about this concept as slowing down, but once you’re encountering it and you choose to meditate on that….What does that mean for me and how can I relate that to parts of my life right now? What does it mean to slow down and what can I get out of it?

They’re things to meditate on and are a way to structure meditation. I found this in a free pile on my street and I almost didn’t even take it because I thought it looked really cheesy at first. But now that I’m looking back at it, I’m like, these are really awesome.

Were there any albums or books or other pieces of art that acted as companions to you while you made this record?

Did I already talk about No Doubt and how much I was listening to No Doubt? Yeah, that was a big one. Also, all of Gwen Stefani’s solo albums that I remember being so influential at the time they were coming out for me, like Sweet Escape and Love Angel Music Baby. I let myself indulge in a lot of stuff that I was listening to more so in middle school and high school. I returned to a lot of those signature ‘90s pop and alt-rock albums, like Muse. I got back into Muse and was like, “Oh, man.”

I saw the Mars Volta, Deftones, and System of a Down last year at Golden Gate Park. It felt like a dream. That combination was taking me back and was really good fuel for the fire to push through writing the album.

Somebody that I feel like I’ve gotten more into recently and was relating to while working on Portrait of My Heart was Jeff Buckley. I was feeling like, “God, I feel like another sort of connection to this artist.” He’s got that weird outsider thing and what he does with his voice that can be over the top and theatrical but it’s just so sincere.

Grace is…yeah. How can you simultaneously have like, the screaming and the [guitar noises], and then also “Corpus Christi Carol” and the Nina Simone cover? How do you have all of that contained in one?

It’s maverick proportions, the ambition that would go behind that. But then coming through with this hand that doesn’t feel like it needs to be polished or prove anything. With Turning Wheel, it was Kate Bush and Sensual World and Hounds of Love; there was a communication there. I felt that with Grace for Portrait of My Heart; there are conversations happening here.

I like putting it that way—“in conversation with.”

Everything is a conversation.

www.spelllingmusic.com

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