Spellling: Q&A

Throughout Black History Month 2025, WFUV is focusing on artists — both emerging and established — whose music we admire, both on-air with FUV Live alums and online with Q&As. Also read about Kashus Culpepper.

Since the release of her first album, 2017's Pantheon of Me, Oakland musician Chrystia "Tia" Cabral, who records as Spellling, has nurtured her unpredictable, looped landscapes of lush dissonance, punk-lashed rock, and dreamy, baroque art-pop. Her stunning third album, 2021's The Turning Wheel, was an ambitious jigsaw of expansive spirals of synths, guitar, and lyrical depth — a tumble of fable, fact, and history.

For her fourth album, Portrait of My Heart, Cabral has turned her focus inward, frankly delving into isolation, anxiety, and doubt. The arrhythmic longing of the title track and the chunky alt-rock blast of "Alibi" (which features Turnstile guitarist Pat McCrory) touch on toxic relationships and the emotional aftermath of that struggle. Although Portrait of My Heart still possesses the intimacy that Cabral has long brought to her music, she has expanded that collaboration to include three producers: Drew Vandenberg (who mixed The Turning Wheel), Rob Bisel (SZA), and Psymun (Yves Tumor). There is even a first-ever Spellling duet, "Mount Analogue," featuring Toro y Moi's Chaz Bear.

Ahead of Portrait of My Heart's release on March 28 on Sacred Bones, FUV caught up with Cabral to chat about music, anxiety, and her perspective on Black History Month:

Your powerful new single, "Portrait of My Heart," is the title track of your forthcoming fourth album. You sing the refrain "don't belong here," frequently in this song, evoking great vulnerability and doubt. When you consider what it means to "belong," as an artist, a human being, and a Black woman (of Mexican roots) in 2025, what's on your mind?

I flipped back in my journals to some entries around the time I was writing the song. Some of the early lyrics I was playing around with were: "surface in the black," "the strategies won’t work," "I need to clear the way," and "my tired hand won’t make." I was reminded how much I was — and still very much am — experiencing this constant insider-outsider state.

That sensation has always been a part of my nature, and at some moments it did feel highly racialized, especially in my adolescence being a Black-Mexican mixed kid weirdo in a suburb. Finding my sense of belonging with my identity came from gradually growing my outsider-ness as a superpower. If I don’t belong here … well, yeah, maybe that hurts, but also maybe that’s the key. Maybe I’m a maverick.

Playing by the book in the music industry is not my path — deep down, I know that — but it doesn’t mean I don’t have a place in the industry. I am always going to pursue what I am deeply moved and influenced by, never what I feel contrived to make or be.

Your 2021 album, The Turning Wheel, was such a boldly visual and progressive album, a rich collage of sounds and influences, from cinema to production flourishes. Is there any particular visual or production technique on Portrait of My Heart that was an early seed of this album?

I had a really fun challenge with Portrait of My Heart because I wanted to make this cross-genre, raw material feel like a cohesive body of work. I wanted to lean into the pop attitude the songs were dishing out, but also remain authentic to my non-conventional approaches, especially with structure. I believed the '70s soul core of a song like "Ammunition" could work alongside the more pop-punk core of a song like "Alibi," with the right treatment and refinement of style. I think pastiche of sound is kind of my signature thing, but I leaned heavily into the art rock/pop aura more than before.

You have called this new album a more personal mirror of where you are today — shedding allegory for something more intimate. Can you explain what you wanted to achieve that perhaps you'd not done in the past? 

I’ve had my understanding of what defines love and my relationship to romance totally shaken up from the time I wrote the The Turning Wheel up until now. I think my relationship to love and romance had always felt deeply secure and I never waded into any risky or what felt like unsafe territories. On Portrait, I’m reflecting on some brand new and very vulnerable experiences dealing with the rush, as well as the despair of romantic ambiguity and infatuation.

You've called the Bay area your home for a long time — what is an early childhood memory of music that you still carry with you today?

I have such distinct memories of hearing "Closer" by Goapele blasting out of the speakers of old school Chevys. Since the time I moved to Oakland in 2011, and up to this day, it still happens frequently. I’ll be in my house and hear the bass and those reverse symbols from far away and run to my window to try and see who is playing it. The best is that it’s usually the hardest-looking Black guy just fully immersed and luxuriating in the song.

I’ve literally cried witnessing this play out because it's a beautiful thing to see and feel the purity of that song just reverberating out on a beautiful day. To me, it’s Oakland’s national anthem and Goapele [Mohlabane] is an Oakland native. "Sometimes it feels like I'll never go past here/Sometimes it feels like I'm stuck forever ... But I'm going higher, closer to my dreams." Chills.

You've been very open about your struggles with anxiety — especially tackling live performances. What's one thing you'd recommend for anyone dealing with anxiety right now?

If I’m not mindful, I can enter this place where I view the choices I have to make day to day as these threats to my freedom and peace rather than evidence that I am free and that it is a wonderful thing to have access to peace. This really helps to calm me down, when I feel utterly overwhelmed thinking about all the ways various decisions could play out and shape my life path.

My advice would be to not have this approach of "I need to eradicate my anxiety" or eliminate it, but just listen to your body, listen to your anxiety. Don’t resent it, but figure out how to have a conversation with it.

Has Black History Month, as a designation or celebration, ever had any meaning for you, whether in the past or presently? What does it mean to you in 2025?

I attribute my ingenuity to my Blackness and it is a big source of pride and empowerment. I recently saw an interview clip between Pharrell [Williams] and Dave Grohl, where Dave talks about pulling breaks from the Gap Band — Tony Thompson, Cameo and all this disco stuff — on [Nirvana's] Nevermind.

It made me excited for Black History Month because lots of these really cool music history facts resurface online and there are just infinite amounts of mind-blowing accounts like these where you realize just how influential Black music and Black ingenuity is.

- Tia Cabral, a.k.a Spellling
February 2025