Camila Cabello knows what she wants.It's October 2017, and the singer is walking the red carpet at Radio 1's Teen Awards in London.
She stops to answer a few questions: What was it like working with Pharrell ("nerve-wracking"). Would you ever record a Spanish-language album ("definitely"). Then, as tradition dictates, we request a photo for the BBC's social media accounts.
Cabello blinks, then asks: "Do you mind if I take a selfie?"
Next thing you know, she's grabbed our phone and snapped four flawless portraits before being whisked away to her next interview. => Listen to free mp3 music at
Nhac.vn It made an instant and lasting impression. Cabello had taken a throwaway moment and turned it to her advantage: The photo became our most-shared post from the awards, even after Gemma Collins
fell through a trap door in the stage.
Image caption"Do you mind if I take a selfie?"
Fast forward to 2019, and Cabello is one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. She's sold five million copies of her debut album, Camila; opened this year's Grammy Awards with a Technicolor performance of her breakout hit Havana; and, alongside her boyfriend Shawn Mendes, released 2019's most-streamed single, Señorita.
Not bad for someone who, just seven years ago, was beset by crippling shyness.
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here"I was just kinda scared when I was little," says the 22-year-old. "I was super-shy. Easily overwhelmed. I didn't want people to look at me singing. I didn't want people to ask me to sing."
The story of her transformation is encapsulated in that Teen Awards moment. Cabello willed this version of herself into existence through hard work and self-belief, without surrendering her humanity.
"I see her as an absolute force of nature," says the star's manager, Roger Gold. "She worked on herself so much and so hard - as a singer, and a dancer and a songwriter. She knew she could make herself excellent in every category, and she knew what she had to do.
"That vision and that desire to get there... what it makes me think of is Madonna."
Across the borderKarla Camila Cabello comes from a family of strivers.
Born in Havana to a Cuban mother and Mexican father, she moved between the two countries until she was six, when her mother announced they were going on a trip to Disney World. Instead, they travelled from Cojímar to Mexico, where they caught a bus to an immigration centre on the US border.
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hereAfter crossing into Texas, they made a 36-hour journey to Miami, arriving with just $300 and a backpack of possessions, including Cabello's Winnie the Pooh journal and her favourite doll.
For 18 months, they scraped by on the modest salary her mother, who'd been an architect in Cuba, made in the footwear concession of a department store.
Eventually, her father swam the Rio Grande to join his family, earning money by washing cars "in the blistering Miami heat", and saving up until the family had enough money to start a construction company.
Her principles and her tenacity all originate at home, says Gold.
"Her parents have been a huge influence on her and are miraculous people themselves," he says. "They share a scrappiness and a point of view about the world - that there's challenges, but you know what you want, and you don't let anything stand in your way."
Cabello puts it differently.
"Every day I'm trying to think, 'What's the most authentic I can be?' That way, I can't really go wrong, because I'm just being myself.
"And if people think that's not cool enough, or not serious enough, it's like, 'Well, we wouldn't be friends in real life anyway. Who cares?'"
