Fifth Harmony’s Camila Cabello Denies Solo Single Was ‘A Career Move’
Fifth Harmony’s Camila Cabello is denying that her recent solo venture with Shawn Mendes was a calculated “career move.”
In a new interview with Seventeen magazine, Cabello denied that releasing the duet, “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” was part of a calculated plan to carve out a solo career for herself and admitted that the backlash she received from Fifth Harmony fans after the song’s release was “s****y.”
The admission came after the magazine, which features all five Fifth Harmony girls on the March, 2016, cover, directly quizzed Cabello on how she handled the reaction from fans over her recent solo venture.
“After you released [“I Know What You Did Last Summer”] with Shawn Mendes, there was some online backlash. How have you dealt with it?” Seventeen asked Cabello according to a snapshot of the interview posted on Twitter by @Projecto5HFHelp.
Fifth Harmony for @seventeen's March 2016 issue pic.twitter.com/KJ30kFjXYP
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) January 28, 2016
Camila then confessed to the magazine that the backlash the track created was “very frustrating” for her before adding, “It’s been very difficult to watch people criticize me & my intentions.”
“It’s been s****y,” Cabello continued in the March issue of the magazine, “They turned me (doing the song) into a conspiracy theory. We literally just wrote a song backstage & it ended up becoming something awesome. It wasn’t a career move that I carefully planned out.”
Following the release of the song in November, a number of Fifth Harmony fans took to social media to accuse Camila of preparing to embark on a solo career and, according to Seventeen, even accused Cabello of “betraying her Fifth Harmony bandmates” by releasing the song.
“Camila needs to choose whether she wants to be in 5h or be solo bc her doing this ikwydls promo and performing with her group isn’t working [sic]” @gomezpinnocks wrote on Twitter, while @GodD**nGrande said on the social media site “I HOPE #IKWYDLS F***ING FLOPS SO CAMILA DOESN’T DO SOLO S*** ANYMORE BYEEE.”
But despite some fans’ hesitation to support Camila Cabello’s first release away from the group, other fans took to the social media site to defend Cabello and her decision to release music away from Fifth Harmony.
“IKWYDLS is shawn’s song. On his album. Camila is a feature. u act like she released it herself & quit the group. both things she did not do [sic],” @sparksflytori wrote on Twitter on January 22, while @5hlovs added, “camila never said ikwydls was her way of going solo. it was her way of expressing herself through music. she just wanted to create music [sic].”
at least they said 'camila cabello of fifth harmony' ?? pic.twitter.com/8XzBJ15q1f
— claudia (@complexwiley) January 28, 2016
At the time, Camila Cabello also took to Twitter to fire back at the solo rumors, tweeting out in November, “there is not enough time in the world to explain yourself to people that already think they know ur intentions… so let it go.”
Camila and Shawn previously revealed in a video uploaded to Shawn’s official YouTube page that the song was not created during a planned writing session, admitting that chorus and pre-chorus were actually written in just 30 minutes while Mendes and Cabello and her Fifth Harmony band mates were all on tour with Taylor Swift.
“[Camila Cabello and I] were just backstage. There were like 100 people in my dressing room at the time, and it was madness back there, but I had this guitar and I was just jamming out, and we basically wrote a pre-chorus and a chorus in like 30 minutes,” Shawn said of his duet with Cabello in behind-the-scenes video. “We planned to go into the studio, and it was like an 11-hour studio session where we finished writing the song.”
What do you think of the backlash surrounding Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer” duet?
[Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for The People’s Choice Awards]
