Music
Interview
Alessia Cara: “Life is about learning how to work with contrast”
Ten years on from her debut album, Alessia Cara reflects on her fourth record and what it means to begin your career in music as a teenager
It’s been over two months now since Alessia Cara released her fourth studio album, Love & Hyperbole. Thoughtful, introspective and so sonically smooth you could spread it on toast, the record achieves what every artist strives for: a shift forward, whilst still honouring what first drew listeners to your music. It’s a balance that Cara self-confessedly has turned over in her mind for many years. The past three years spent writing Love & Hyperbole have been an exercise in self-discovery for the singer – now she’s looking forward to touring the album.
“It’s always interesting,” she says, “because you sit on this music for so long without anyone hearing it, and it’s kind of wild to think about the fact that everybody can hear it now and they know it. I think it’ll be even more interesting to play these songs live and hear people singing the lyrics back to me after it’s been something that I’ve kept secret for a while.”
Ahead of Cara’s UK shows this June, we caught up with the singer to talk about the new record and how she reflects on the last decade of her career.
Alessia Cara - (Isn’t It) Obvious
I want to talk about the title, Love & Hyperbole. Where do those two things connect for you?
I made this album over the course of three years, and there was a lot going on. I think those three years were very transformative for me. When I was trying to think of what the thesis statement is for this album, I was looking at all the songs, and I’d put them in a track list that felt chronological, and I realized there were two sort of juxtaposing themes. There was this element of drama, hyperbole, and things feeling like the end of the world sometimes, and then through sorting those things out, I landed on really letting joy into my life and true, real love in so many different facets. It just felt like the right title for it, because there are those two main themes, and it’s also about how those two things can work together. I realized that contrast in life is super important, and I think that’s what life is about, ultimately, is finding contrast and learning how to work with contrast. Those two words contrast each other, but they also kind of work together, at least for me.
I feel like that idea of learning to live with contrast and live in extremes is something we’ve all been experiencing in the last five years, since COVID.
Yes, exactly. I feel like we definitely were exercising contrast more than ever before as a collective. I think that had something to do with it too, just being thrust into that. Then having the complete opposite experience once we were allowed to be out in the world – just wanting to be out so much more than usual. It taught me a lot.
You’ve got a lovely spread of genres in this album. Could you tell me a little bit about what it was like putting the record together sonically?
I think for me, it’s always been a little challenging and difficult to tether myself to one genre, just because I listen to so much different music from different eras and different genres. I always like to play with genre. I find it really fun to bounce around. But for this album, I wanted to find the most cohesive sound possible, while still incorporating different influences, which hopefully we did. It does feel very versatile. But at the same time, I feel like this is my first album that feels like every song belongs in the same universe, rather than just like trying a bunch of different things. I really wanted it to sort of live together in one cohesive space. I think it was just a matter of pulling from different genres that I love and different influences, and trying to find one thread between all of them.
Why was that sonic cohesion such a priority for you on this project in particular?
Just because I think I’d never really done that before. Again, I love to bend genre. I found that in my past albums, the thing that sort of tied each song together was the lyrics and the storyline, but the sonic bed underneath each of my songs is very different. I just wanted to try something a little different and see if I could find this common thread sonically as well. I think each song is still very versatile, and they all have a different vibe, but they do feel like they’re part of the same sonic landscape, which felt like new for me, and exciting.
Do you have a favourite song on the album?
There’s so many songs that I love. I wrote almost 50 songs for this album, so each song, all 14 of them, are my favourites of the favourites. So it’s hard to pick one, but I do love ‘Obvious’. I think that’s a really fun one. I don’t know why I love that song. It just feels like a really easy listen, and I feel like you can loop that over and over. But I love ‘Fire’ as well. That one feels extra special to me too, but I mean, it’s hard to pick, because they’re all my favourites.
Alessia Cara - Fire (Lyric Video)
Could you tell me a little more about the writing of ‘Fire’?
That song was written in a way that I don’t typically work, which I think is why it feels special. I tend to be very shy writer. I often go into the studio with something already done, or with a concept in mind. But this time it was me, John Levine and Jake Torrey, and we just decided to put a mic in the middle of the room and each get on a different instrument and just loop some chords over and over and over until we had a song, and that’s exactly what we did. The song just literally fell out of me and the chords fell out of them, and it just really worked. Even the vocals are the same vocals from that demo. I didn’t really change anything, because I wanted to capture that feeling of being in the room together. It just felt like very natural, very easy. It’s something that I don’t really do – I tend to over analyse. I think that song was the impetus of me learning how to be freer lyrically and emotionally and write from a more intuitive place, which was really nice, and I’ve done that ever since. I’ve been a lot more free with my writing after that song.
When abouts in the process of writing that album as a whole did that shift happen?
It was pretty early on, thankfully, because I feel like it informed the way that I wrote after that. When I started writing the album, I was in a little bit of a writer’s block stage. I was feeling a little bit uninspired, and so I think that song was really helpful in my process, because I think it shook things up for me, and it allowed me to explore a different realm of writing – even thematically, it felt very different for me. I don’t really tend to write love songs like that, that feel that naked and open and, for lack of a better word, positive. I feel like there’s always some sort of fear or negativity attached to my love songs. But this is the first song that is just strictly about love without inhibitions, which felt very fresh to me.
I wanted to talk as well about the album opener, ‘Go Outside!’, and the closer, ‘Clearly’. When did you decide they were going to be the start and end point of the record?
Well, I actually wrote ‘Go Outside!’ super early on in the process, and I wrote ‘Clearly’ near the end, so it really was like they were these bookends of the writing process. You can really hear the shift in my mentality, which is why I felt like they were perfect openers and closers, not only because chronologically, that’s how I wrote them, but I think it really was a great display of my mindset going into this album and coming out of this album. I think when I started, like I said, I was very uninspired and feeling really stuck in so many areas of my life, which is what ‘Go Outside!’ is about. It’s not only not being able to go outside physically, just because I was kind of depressed and being a bit of a recluse, but I think I wasn’t able to jump out of that mentality and jump out of myself. I was super in my head. I didn’t really know how to get out of that, so the songs also, in a metaphorical sense, about not being able to go outside of that.
Then I think ‘Clearly’ is the complete opposite. It’s about finally having escaped that frame of mind, and just expanding my horizons in so many ways and being able to see things a lot clearer and look at things from a more hindsight 20/20 perspective and understanding how to embrace the parts of myself that I didn’t really like, or that I didn’t understand. I learned, and have come to realize, that you need all those parts of yourself. I think we are ultimately a product of everything about us, everything that’s happened to us, good and bad. I really learned to appreciate them and understand why they needed to happen rather than pushing them away. It just felt like a good contrast, which is exactly what the album is about.
Alessia Cara - Go Outside! (Lyric Video)
Do you always write from a very personal place?
For sure. It feels like the most intuitive way to write for me. I always tend to write autobiographically. It’s not great in my personal life to always be going through tumultuous, emotional times, but I think as a songwriter, it definitely helps with inspiration, because there’s always something going on in my life or in my mind that I’m grappling with or dealing with.
When you’re going through those times, are you able to hold onto the fact that you’ll be able to make art from them later?
I wish that was the case. I wish I would be able to see those moments as they’re happening as good inspiration. It’s not something that I’m conscious about. I’m just going through it, and then I feel the need to vent, and then out of that venting comes the music. I wish I was more forward thinking about it.
This year it’ll be ten years since the release of your debut album Know-It-All is released. How are you celebrating the anniversary?
Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know where I’m going to be. I think I’m going to be touring parts of the US, I believe, by that time, so I’ll probably just be traveling, performing, hopefully with family and friends. That would be really fun if I could actually make a little celebration out of it. But I guess, what better way to celebrate than on stage with new music?
How do you reflect back on that record now and that time of writing it?
I think I’m able to really appreciate it now more than ever, now that it’s been 10 years. I feel like I’m so far removed from that person that I was and from that music that now it’s become something that I hold very close to me. I think for a while, the first few years, I was still very much in the thick of it, so it wasn’t something that I could look at in like an endearing way. It was more just like, “This is my music. This is my life.” Then with your second and third album, you’re trying to prove that you’ve changed and that you can be better. So then some of that music was… I was trying to get away from it a little bit, so as not to put myself in a box. I think now enough time has passed, that I can look back on it with a new appreciation and really embrace it and embrace that version of myself more than ever. It feels really nice. I just can’t believe it’s been 10 years. It’s very strange.
Alessia Cara - Clearly (Lyric Video)
Do you think your pressure to show you could change and grow was exacerbated by the fact that you started in the industry at such a young age, or do you think what you felt is typical for any artist?
I think a bit of both. I think it’s definitely typical of any artist to feel this need to evolve and prove yourself over and over, especially as a young woman in the industry. But definitely because I started so young, and I had all that success super young… I think people, whether they do it on purpose or not, I think they just keep you there, and it’s almost like you’re living in a time capsule of who you were at a certain moment in your life, and people expect you to be that all the time. For me, my instinct is when people expect something of me, I just naturally want to do something else. Because I felt like I was sort of in that box of who I was at 16 when we made those songs, I really just wanted to keep going and keep moving forward and prove that I could be better than that in a way. Now I’ve just sort of let go of that, and I’m able to just appreciate what that was. But I think it’s natural when you’re getting older, you’re just like, “Oh my God, I wish I would have sang that better.” Or, “Oh, I was so young, that was so cringe.” You cringe at yourself, right? But then you get to a point where it becomes endearing again.
Are there things you would change about your early music now?
If you would have asked me a couple years back, I would have been like, “I definitely would change so much.” There’s still parts that I of course would. Music wise, my taste has changed, and I think I’m a better singer and writer now, so I would maybe change some things there. But I’ve learned to appreciate it for what it was, and it has given me my life now. I just appreciate it now. I try not to cringe too much at it and just love it for what it was.
