Brampton teen finds her own voice
Musician’s soulful new song about being lone a wolf becomes viral hit on Spotify
Few songs move with the easy saunter of Alessia Cara’s debut single, “Here.” Shimmery and springlike, it’s elegant lounge soul, but its glow masks a tension at the core.
Cara begins her first verse defiantly: “I’m sorry if I seem uninterested/or I’m not listening/or I’m indifferent.”
She’s young, she’s at a party and she hates everyone there: the guy blowing weed smoke, the gossiping girl, the kid throwing up “cause he can’t take what’s in his cup no more.” A roomful of teenage abandon is her misery: “Really I would rather be at home all by myself.”
Cara sings deeply in the pocket, landing heavy on syllables as if she were shifting her weight from one hip to the other and delivering the hook — “I’ll be over here” — with sass and cool, emphasizing that final word in a manner both rebellious and cocksure.
That “here” is a flag planted for the outsiders, the shy kids, the loners. And it makes the stunning “Here” (Def Jam) part of a proud and stubborn lineage of outcast pop by young women. In recent years, songs such as Lorde’s “Royals” or Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” have argued their case for outsiderness so stylishly that they helped catapult their singers from the margins to pop’s centre.
“Here,” which in the three or so weeks since its release has become a genuine viral smash, could place Cara, an 18-year-old unknown, in that company.
Last week, Cara was in New York for a label showcase and a performance at the TEDxTeen conference. In her first extensive interview, she was opinionated, warm and also a little shy. The party in “Here” was real, she said, as was her discomfort: “I called my mom to come pick me up. It was awful.”
But Cara, who was 16 at the time, had an outlet for that anxiety. She’d recently begun recording demos in a Toronto studio; feeling left out gave her something to write about. “What about me?” Cara said. “What about the people who are in the corners? There’s not enough light shed on these people.”
Cara, Alessia Caracciolo by birth, grew up in Brampton. In school, she gravitated toward choir and theatre but, at home, she would sit in front of her computer and record herself singing. She began posting her cover versions to YouTube, but to little effect.
Eventually, one clip was seen by the daughter of the founder of EP Entertainment, a production company with a joint venture with Universal Music Group. The company introduced her to the brother team of Kuya Productions and a songwriter, Sebastian Kole, and set her up in a studio to write songs.
Though she had written poetry and short stories, she didn’t write songs until her first studio sessions with Kole in 2013. As part of the collaboration, he asked her to write down her feelings as if she were committing them to her journal but email them to him.
Those exercises led to savvy, sleek lyrics about the power of being a teenage lone wolf, a recurring theme of her debut album, which will be released this year. It will include production by the pop-R&B savants Pop & Oak and the Frank Ocean collaborator Malay. The casual wordplay crackles: “Oh I used to be so used to boys just using me, for you to be you to me feels new to me.”
Cara’s voice is sweet but deceptive and bristles with nervy energy. She’s not a power singer, but she’s flexible, comfortable with gleaming pop-rock and acoustic Lilith Fair soul.
Compared with the cybernetic pop of the day, Cara is practically rustic, but her producers have built a sound for her that’s sufficiently modern while still allowing her voice room to roam.
Some songs on her debut album will be updated versions of her demos; “Here” is one of them. (The single version is produced by Pop & Oak.) The more time she spent in the studio, Cara said, the better she understood the way pop songs worked and the more insistent she became about using the form for good.
“You don’t have to say the same things everyone else is saying,” she said. “Make the formula. Then say cool things.”
It’s important to note, though, that things almost didn’t turn out this way. Initially, Cara said, her label wanted to release a different, less oppositional song as her introduction. Quietly, she entertained it.
“They want to make sure you do well, and a good radio song will do well,” she conceded. But still, she pressed “Here” forward.
“The other song that we had, I feel like it wouldn’t separate me from the crowd as much,” she said. “As a new artist and as a teen girl, I didn’t want to be compared. I wanted people to be, like, ‘Who is this girl?’ They might have said, ‘Beautiful song,’ but not, ‘Who is the girl?’ ”
Eventually, she prevailed. The result: “Here” has been a mainstay on Spotify’s viral chart and streamed more than a million times.