Vine tendrils frame a large window that floods light into Camila Meza’s rehearsal space. On opposite sides of the room, the sun catches the vinyl of her drum kit and casts shadows on the collage artwork propped on her keyboard. The New York-based singer, guitarist, and composer from Santiago, Chile, shrugs at the comfortable chaos behind her, the kind familiar to sleep-deprived parents across hemispheres.
This past May, she issued ‘Portal’ — her first release since the birth of her son in 2022 — and her only release to feature an entire track listing of original songs, signaling a bold new era of her artistry. “I never thought I was going to call myself a composer,” Meza tells HuffPost via Zoom. “But at this stage of my life, it really is part of my voice as a musician.”
Since her 2007 debut album ‘Skylark,’ comprising Meza’s treatment of 10 standards from legendary composers like Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin, Meza has found her own voice as a writer. Having garnered multiple Independent Music Awards wins and top honors from the DownBeat Critics Poll, she now records lyrical songs in Spanish and English, embracing elements of folk storytelling and pop forms, plus Afro-Cuban, Brazilian and other Latin American traditions — with plenty of blistering guitar solos.
“This is Jungian vibes,” says Meza, priming the moment for a psychoanalytical tangent. “For me, the process of writing and the process of not writing are part of the same journey.” She adds that becoming a parent has intensified her sense of responsibility as an artist who champions societal change, saying: “I feel like [Portal] really needed to come out at this moment … Now more than ever, that message is so urgent.”
But this is not a motherhood story. And “Portal” is not a motherhood record. Bringing visibility to working artists who are mothers is critical, but equally critical is acknowledging them as complete artists away from the motherhood identity — and, at this moment in particular, the motherhood trope of virtuous femininity.
Meza conceived and composed this album years before releasing it, creating a soundscape for transcendental love long before she planned her pregnancy. What motherhood did give her was a renewed sense of urgency to record and release, and, frankly, a collateral boldness by virtue of a need for labor resources. “There’s no time for bullshit,” she says.
When she received her composer’s commission from The Jazz Gallery in 2018, Meza spent eight months feverishly writing songs that would become “Portal.” She created an hour of music for listeners to “confront — or witness — the darkness,” while imagining unconventional solutions to systemic problems: “How can we, collectively, move on to the world that this system keeps pushing down?”
And those solutions arrived in the form of archetypes. “The Nurturer” and “The Wise Woman,” two songs on the album, became vessels of liberation. “For ‘The Nurturer,’ I wanted to channel that particular love that is non-transactional,” says Meza, citing that brand of love as the key to effecting change in all realms: relationships, politics, and how we develop this society, she says.
Meza fans have come to expect beauty, complexity and honest self-reflection in her music. Portal’s songs sway and pulse with layered rhythm and a motivic women’s chorus. Their melodies move from lyrical and grounded to ethereal and unexpected. But the words are Meza’s poetry: floral, imaginative, and truth-confronting.
Over the years, her songwriting identity has courted a literary tradition integral to the expansive history of Latin American arts. “A listener once said that my music reminded her of magical realism, which is like the best compliment ever,” Meza says, laughing. Weighing the term’s legacy of resistance, she adds, “Beneath [a] crazy amount of beauty, there’s a political statement of radical thinking.”
During the height of the pandemic, that call to action intensified, but for several years, the music languished unrecorded. In 2022, urgency reached a boiling point after she gave birth; instead of sleeping when the baby slept, an exhausted Meza would put him down for a nap, swapping places with her partner and then she would start recording. “It would have been so healthy to say, ‘I’m not going to do this right now,’” she says. “But there was something so deep within me that was like, ‘I need to do it now. This is it.’”
As they do for so many women, Meza’s creative tenacity and resilience emerged a lifetime before she became a mom. For years, the bilingual songwriter separated her Spanish lyrics from her English ones, typically letting the rhythm or melody set the song’s language. Then, while writing Portal’s title track in English, she experienced something extraordinary: “I start singing in Spanish, ‘Siento el río del portal.’
Meza found the moment liberating. Especially now, as the U.S. Supreme Court ratifies racism and the president attempts to erase Spanish-speaking as part of American identity, she finds combining her languages to be its own act of resistance. “I’ve always struggled with all these ideas that I have to be a certain way … because I’m playing in this particular style or in this particular place,” she says. “That search, musically and lyrically, is never-ending. It took me, what, 20 years of career to realize that I could just go for it.”
The true magic and realism of Meza’s creative development is an unshakable hope that springs from her identity as an artist, a mother, and the compassionate thinker she’s always been. “Everything that’s happening [in the world], it’s in someone’s head,” she says. “So why can’t we, collectively, bring more of a balance? … With my music, I have that kind of mission. I know it can sound very idealistic and naive. I just believe in it.”