Camila Cabello, former member of the all-female band Fifth Harmony, surprised fans by announcing her departure from the band on December 18, 2016. Prior to this sudden announcement, the band released one EP, along with two studio albums. As the lead artist, Cabello released two singles on her own, “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” written with Canadian singer Shawn Mendes, and “Bad Things” with rapper Machine Gun Kelly. Both songs reached the top 20 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.

In May of 2017, Cabello released her first single as a solo artist, “Crying in the Club” as the lead single in her upcoming album, The Hurting, the Healing, the Loving, along with three other songs. However, her song, “I Have Questions” inspired the album because of the emotional meaning behind it, hence the hurting.

“The story behind the album starts with the second song that you’ll hear called ‘I Have Questions’ which I started writing in a hotel bathroom on tour a little over a year ago,” Cabello said in an interview with Genius.

Cabello also talks about how she felt completely broken over a relationship that did not end well while writing songs for her album.

“I had a friend and we were so close, then it was like literally a day after we didn’t even know each other anymore, it was weird; it felt like what the song sounds like now,” Cabello revealed in her interview with Genius.

Cabello explained that after writing “I Have Questions,” she could not write another song for six months, and when she did eventually pick up the pen, she found herself only writing sad songs.

“As I got happier and happier, I realized the songs were getting happier and happier, and I realized I wasn’t making music just to make an album anymore; I was making this to heal,” Cabello said. Then goes on and talks about how writing these songs helped Cabello forget about the relationship with her friend that suddenly ended. “It wasn’t until I had made enough songs to listen back to and realized that I could hear myself coming back through these songs,” Cabello said.

The two songs Cabello released, “I Have Questions” and “Crying in the Club,” reflect her feelings well.

“It felt like (“I Have Questions”) what the song sounds like now. Before I was like, ‘How did we let it all get this far, I don’t even know who you are,’ I rewrote this song four times before it finally felt real,” Cabello said.

Her other songs “OMG” and “Havana” chart the Top 20 hits with over 75 million views on YouTube combined, along with a video that released the 24th of October 2017 for her song “Havana.” In this song, Cabello incorporated Spanish beats, bringing in a piece of her own culture into the music.

“It was really the defiant song. It was the song no one believed in other than me and my team,” Camila Cabello said on the Twitter hashtag, #Havana. Cabello also discusses how this album is truly her and what she feels as a human being, not just as a marketing tool that you can use to sell music and albums. “Making my own music now, it truly is my voice, I’m able to actually talk about who I am, and a big part of that is my culture and my family,” Cabello said in an interview with RollaCoaster Magazine.

Cabello does not yet have a set release date for her album, but the album should come out in 2018. Fans all around excitedly await the release of Cabello’s first solo album.