On a clear, chilly Sunday evening in January, Tia Cabral is leading a seance. Her performance at San Francisco rock club the Rickshaw Stop feels less like a typical show and more like something you might stumble upon in a wooded clearing, perhaps after receiving directions on a weathered scroll. Wearing a black leotard and a ruffled white collar, with rhinestones affixed beneath her eyebrows and exaggerated fuschia cheeks, Cabral—better known as the Berkeley artist SPELLLING—moves deliberately as she sings, like a vaguely sinister jewelry box ballerina.
She emerges from behind her Roland synthesizer, her voice unfurling over an ominous beat punctuated by a sonar-like keyboard riff. This track is an epic, gothy one called “Haunted Water,” and that’s exactly what it sounds like: It swells and retreats, reveals new depths and layers, leaves you wondering when Cabral will unleash its full power.
Less than 48 hours later, Cabral is dressed in bright orange and green, cheerfully talking about ducks. She’s wondering whether the “basic” sandwich bread she’s brought to feed the ducks today will be acceptable. “I almost bought this really nice bread, but then I was like, ‘I can’t get fancier food for ducks than I do for myself,’” she explains, semi-apologetically, when we meet at Oakland’s Lake Merritt on a sunny afternoon.
We’re standing in front of Children’s Fairyland, a quirky, fairy tale-themed amusement park built in 1950, whose mythology is a point of Oakland pride: Walt Disney toured it while seeking inspiration for Disneyland. Inside, the place is full of trippy, Alice in Wonderland-style children’s tales come to life, like Captain Hook’s pirate ship, or an oversized, climbable shoe.
“I used to come here all the time when I was nannying,” says Cabral wistfully, gazing at the park entrance, as her beloved dog Cooper—a sweet, nervous Border Collie that Cabral and her partner got from a rescue last year—strains at her leash. “Now it’s just my dream to play a show here.”
A visit today, unfortunately, isn’t in the cards: Fairyland is closed and, perhaps more importantly, a child is required for entrance. So after musing briefly on dressing Cooper up as a kid, we instead set up on some rocks by the lake for some duck-feeding.
She tosses the first bit of bread into the water, aiming for a lone brown duck. Instead, a dozen aggressive seagulls swarm it. She frowns. “Seagulls are the frat bros of the bird world,” says Cabral, as she aims another piece pointedly in the duck’s direction. “I always try to get, like, the loner, disadvantaged duck.”
The word “loner” comes up a lot in conversations with Cabral. Growing up biracial and an only child in the suburbs of Sacramento, she says she never quite fit in, describing herself as an introverted late bloomer. “And then, as a queer person...” She pauses. “Of course, I didn’t have the language or knowledge to understand why I felt oppressed in my body at the time.” Going away to college in 2011 helped spark a shift: She built a community of artists in the East Bay while studying literature as an undergrad at UC Berkeley, a degree she’s now following up with an MFA in art practice.
A lifelong poet and visual artist, Cabral grew up singing, but didn’t really consider making music until 2015. That’s when she saw an open-mic poet perform with a loop pedal, and a lightbulb went off. “The way words could overlap and sound could change within the loop—how something so finite could still be moveable—was pure magic,” she recalls. “I went home and ordered a pedal that night.”
From there, she dipped a toe into songwriting. She revisited a favorite album from her childhood, Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, and set out to make a concept album. “I took a box of crayons and said, ‘OK, I’m going to write a song for every color,” she recalls. “So I made a record in one day, just one take for each song, and it opened up all these possibilities for me and what I could do with my voice as an instrument.” She spent much of the next year making music just for herself.
In 2017, she released her debut, Pantheon of Me, an ambitious record that announced her experimental, dark, electronic-pop sound. She quickly made waves that reverberated beyond the Bay Area using her voice, guitar, synthesizer, and that trusty loop pedal, and her live shows soon drew comparisons to Kate Bush and Solange.
But her upcoming second album, Mazy Fly, represents a clear expansion for SPELLLING in every possible way. Written while Cabral immersed herself in Motown, Parliament/Funkadelic, and Kraftwerk, the record has swagger where Pantheon was languid—it’s the sound of an artist’s vision sharpening, pointing outward. If Pantheon was about the self, says Cabral, Mazy Fly “lives in the sky.”
Marching band-style drums and violins round out Cabral’s more spacey synth tendencies with a warm, human feel on songs like “Secret Thread,” while saxophones and goofy samples of old-fashioned carnival sounds from cartoons and video games lend a playful element to others. The result is narrative and cinematic, like the score for a psychedelic, Tim Burton-esque adventure that doesn’t quite exist yet: one with alien visitations, chase scenes, romance, laughter.
Mazy Fly is also the work of an artist who’s simply trying to figure out how to live life as a musician—Cabral says a goal for the next year is to start performing more regularly with a live band—while finishing up her last semester of grad school. She’s also still teaching art sporadically at the elementary school where she used to work in East Oakland.
“As a working musician you’re constantly thinking about yourself and what you’re going to do next, but when I step into the classroom I get to be completely present in a communal way,” she says, as Cooper lets her know it’s long past time to get up and run around before they have to head back to Berkeley. “I’m at my most comfortable self with children. I think most kids can see that I’m just a giant kid too.”
In a thoughtful tone, she adds, “And if I start nannying again, I could go to Fairyland.”
Pitchfork: How do you think about your identity as SPELLLING versus your everyday life as Tia? Are you in character when you’re performing?
SPELLLING: As a project, SPELLLING is about showing people that there’s magic in every moment, and that you can experience it with just your body and voice and senses. I dress up at shows to evoke magical characters jesters, witches, or wizards, but I become them a little bit too, which invites other people to tap into these entities that are so ancient and universal. Everyone has a little bit of a witch inside them.
There’s definitely a creepy thread running through Mazy Fly that reminded me of all those “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” episodes where they get trapped at, like, a haunted circus.
[laughs] I love carnival life—I love the music and the sounds, and this idea of creating a world where you can believe in magic happening, and there’s a facade that it’s just about bringing people together for a thrill. One of my favorite Goosebumps stories is about a haunted carnival, where it’s choose-your-own-adventure, and one of the options is a never-ending slide: If you choose that, you’re just going down a slide forever.
Are you into horror movies too?
I like psychological thrillers. The Shining is one of my favorite movies of all time. But I can’t do body harm. I tried to watch the original Suspiria and I couldn’t do it. I’m such a baby. I remember being at a middle school party where they were watching The Exorcist and I was totally traumatized. I had to call my mom to come pick me up.
You’ve mentioned being inspired by literature. What were you reading while writing Mazy Fly?
The song “Under the Sun” came together because I was reading this poetry book by Ursula K. Le Guin called Wild Angels, and one of the lines talks about sunlight hitting a planet in a way that made me go, “Oh my god…” I was just trying to imagine that small, everyday moment of glory: being on a planet with the sun in your face.
And then “Falling Asleep” was inspired by another Berkeley writer, Miranda July. One of her stories is about this woman who shows up to her own surprise party, and everyone she’s ever known in her whole life is there. But instead of being happy she decides to go home and take a bath. I was thinking about what happens when everything you want comes true: What if you reach what’s supposed to be heaven and you don’t actually want it, or it’s just not for you? I think about that kind of stuff all the time.
Several of your songs touch on an idea of the afterlife. Is that something you believe in?
I don’t know about an afterlife, but I believe in parallel lives. I’m constantly questioning and looking for signs of life outside of this one: What is the possibility of your spirit or your love for someone persisting after life is over? I read a book by Zora Neale Hurston where there are all these rituals you can do to make sure a loved one passes on peacefully, and “Night of Nights,” from Pantheon, was from the perspective of someone who’s not trying to leave, because they still love someone and want to stay on earth.
Maybe it all goes back to that Stevie Wonder song “Come Back as a Flower” [off Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants]. I just could not get that out of my head as a kid. I remember thinking, “Why would you want to come back as a flower? That’d be so lame.” But it’d also be so beautiful, to live fragiley and breathe like a flower.
Did you grow up in a musical family?
My dad’s always been into obscure music, supporting underground stuff, and he has a wild collection of tapes—a lot of Bay Area rap, all the original E-40 and Too Short. And then, later in life, he got into violins. He was always collecting and refurbishing objects, but now all he does is violins, and he talks about certain ones making certain colors; he has synesthesia and all that.
I’ve always loved singing. I had this little Bugs Bunny karaoke machine that I would carry around at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I’d sing Space Jam songs. But no one played music when I was growing up, and I didn’t take music classes. I’ve never particularly thought I had a special voice. I’ve learned to love it, but I still struggle with not having any formal training. I’m still practicing, learning, teaching myself to play instruments all the time. On Mazy Fly, collaborating with other musicians—I prefer to work with other people of color, especially women—really opened up a whole new stream of ideas for me.
You’ve mentioned wanting to continue being an educator even as your music career takes off. Is it hard to straddle those worlds?
Well, I used to just not talk about my music—it was this other self that I turned off when I was in the classroom. But now a lot of the kids know about it, and it’s really funny. I was visiting [my old school] recently, and I read this math book to a third grade class and then asked, “Does anyone have any questions?” And all of their hands go up, and this kid is like, “How did you go from being a teacher to being a pop star?”
That’s a good question!
I am not a pop star! But it’s cute, very flattering. I felt like a true celebrity.