She was well-prepared for careful assembly by the COVID pandemic – because judging from its 2021 release date, the mastery of The Turning Wheel was built through having to coordinate performances from those aforementioned 31 musicians over Zoom calls. While Cabral might have once said that her shyness made these digital one-on-one sessions preferable, experience has made her a lot more confident stepping into the conductor’s role in person and she doesn’t look back on the gruelling process fondly.

“I was working on all twelve songs simultaneously, like ‘That one needs the bassoon, that one needs the harp,’ and I don’t want it to go down like that again because it almost broke me,” she says. “I think having myself be in the driver’s seat 100 per cent, I’m thinking whatever’s next to come, it can’t be as complicated as that. No matter what your background, skill level or techniques are, it’s part of the process to have the challenge of communicating what’s in your heart and what’s in your ear to someone else, but I feel more okay with things being a little awkward, or to sound really silly singing something.”

Instead of sounding silly on the record, the drama-laden bed of instruments that come in to support her trademark vibrato give her the space to deliver each one of her existentialist lyrics with firm conviction: there’s something about the way she describes the birth of a star on the new version of “Under the Sun” that makes it sound like she was a first-hand witness.

“I’m not trying to top the originals, I just think it’s awesome to have a version with a different character to it, but I didn’t know that they could get more dramatic than they already were. And they definitely did,” she says.

Another way that Cabral’s sugary-sweet yet urgent vocals have often been described is that of a fairy or Disney princess cast into some kind of a dark dimension – although Cabral often gets surprised by commentary ascribing childlike innocence to her sound (“Um, did you read the lyrics?”). Actually, Cabral has a long history behind her fascination with fairy tales, one that she intends to continue applying to her aesthetic throughout her career as she prepares to play a gig at her hometown’s Children’s Fairyland, a whimsical, figurine-filled theme park that her mother frequented as a youth. The park is even said to have inspired Walt Disney.

“It feels like full circle because in one of my early interviews with Pitchfork, we were walking around Fairyland and I was like ‘I would love to play a show here!’ It was just spitballing, but it’s actually going down and I still feel like I’m going to wake up and it isn’t,” she says.

“I think fairy tales are good at getting right to the heart and soul of difficult and scary aspects of the world. It’s not like they’re always about following your dreams – those are always elements, but they’re also giving you subconscious tools for grappling with uncertainty and processing it in a really sincere and pure way. That’s what I strive for with my lyricism too: I want to be boiling down big emotions into their most pure forms. A digestible, synthesized version of a larger, abstract concept.”

“I think fairy tales are good at getting right to the heart and soul of difficult and scary aspects of the world.”

Raised in the Catholic Church, the religious themes that often appear in her work intersect with the fairy tales – both offer stories as ways to form an understanding of the world and how to deal with the things in them. Even the title of her latest came from a discussion with her father, who told her about “mystery schools” founded by early Christian mythics intending to spread their own ideas about religion to students.

Speaking of schools, however, much of Cabral’s work has actually been created as part of final projects while studying at Berkeley’s art program, which she graduated from in 2019. Seeing music as more of a hobby – sometimes even a distraction as she focused on her academic studies – she only started pursuing it after the sudden death of a college roommate who dabbled in creative disciplines all over the spectrum inspired her to follow her artistic whims. Looking back on it now, however, Cabral is grateful for the unique approach she took.

“In some ways being in school was the validation I needed to justify what I was doing, because I didn’t perceive music as a viable career path or calling for myself. There’s a part of me that has a need ingrained in me to be working towards achievable goals, and I was like ‘If I’m literally in grad school, this is as legitimate as I can get, right?’” she says. “I took the scenic route to reshaping my perception of what labour is. I still do work at a really slow pace, and that’s okay – there’s this culture of ‘what’s next,’ but I feel like all my favourite songs have come from doing the work slowly and waiting until it comes to you in a random conversation like this one.”

As she continues to push forward south of the border, Cabral will always have a Canadian icon in mind – Buffy Sainte-Marie, an artist that she’s said is “like God” to her and whose “Little Wheel Spin and Spin” contributed heavily to the concepts behind The Turning Wheel. When asked what makes Sainte-Marie so special to her, Cabral once again drew on the idea of making music that lives on not as a possession of one artist, but as its own entity, free for the entire world to draw upon.

“She was a pioneering figure in many different situations when it comes to music and technology, the first person to utilize synthesizers in certain ways in her genre of music,” she says. “All of these things that she was a trailblazer about, but she never ceased to carry humility and have an open heart. It’s easy to become bitter or jaded when you’re giving a lot and maybe people aren’t receptive to it. It gives me inspiration to be like ‘This belongs to the world; my art belongs to everybody.’”

As Cabral continues to blaze trails of her own, having the kind of creative spirit to reinvent herself while drawing even further wonder out of tracks that were already seen as perfect by many should keep her wheel turning for quite a long time.