Everyone remembers the wild parties of their adolescent years with blue-WKD-tinted glasses. But for every one night where you actually got to snog the person you wanted to, there were many where you just felt awkward and out of place, where you wandered from room to room, not wanting to talk to anyone, wondering when an acceptable hour to leave was.
The breakout hit from 19-year-old Canadian singer Alessia Cara, Here, is an anthem for the teen “antisocial pessimist” who would rather be at home than out with friends of friends. Over a dramatic Isaac Hayes sample, Cara complains, in the phrasing of someone twice her age, of “clouds of marijuana” and that she can “hardly hear over this music”. The track relays a truth about teenage life that is rarely heard in doe-eyed pop music.
In just the past month, Cara has performed the song on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, been photographed hanging out with fellow Toronto native Drake and, after performing a cover of Bad Blood, had support tweeted by Taylor Swift.
You might think that this combination of house-party misanthropy and early fame would make for a surly, unimpressed personality. But when I first met Cara a few months ago while she was on a promo junket to UK, just before her star had shot through the roof, she was flanked by a one-man entourage – her dad – and all she wanted to do was visit Buckingham Palace and ride on a double-decker bus, giddy with enthusiasm.
Aside from annual family trips to Italy, where her mother’s family still lives, this was one of Cara’s first trips away from the Toronto suburbs. For most of her life, she has been writing songs and performing acoustic covers of recent hits on her YouTube channel. She worked so hard at a young age that by the time she had signed with Def Jam, at 17, she’d already written most of her album.
She says her lack of life experience can pose challenges – how do you write about relationships when you’ve never really felt heartbreak? – but one of her best tracks slated for her forthcoming album, Over, is giddy with the bumps of first love. “I just had to put myself in the brain of someone who was feeling those things,” she says over the phone, adding that, anyway, young people don’t just feel one way about what’s going on. “I think all teenagers feel a lot of things at once, everything’s going crazy in our brain. Take everything that’s happening to me right now. I feel like I’m in my own head a lot; it just feels amazing, but scary, weird and confusing. There’s always those little things in the back of your head. Everything that’s going on is so positive, but my brain takes a while to catch up to what’s happened.”
Cara has no game face; she writes songs about emotions as she’s experiencing them and answers questions like she’s thinking about them for the first time. But you might say there’s never been a worse time to be a pop star who isn’t sure of themselves, as every lyric, quote or tweet gets latched on by a thinkpiece-hungry media. Is she concerned that she will soon have to clearly take a stance on misogyny, cultural appropriation and the other big issues currently facing pop?
She thinks about it. “I think a lot of times, these thing aren’t done intentionally, I don’t think Taylor Swift sat down one day saying, ‘I’m going to culturally appropriate this,’ but because [artists are] in the spotlight, things get picked apart. Sometimes, people have a point – there’s a lot of social issues going on and sometimes people take offence, rightfully so, but other times it’s just really difficult to say things or do things because you feel like you have to walk on eggshells. It’s definitely difficult.”
In a quickly changing pop landscape, Here has propelled Cara to fame in a rather old-fashioned way – the way …Baby One More Time did for Britney Spears or Pon de Replay did for Rihanna: one debut single creating apparent overnight success. But unlike those stars, she seems both a more honest and less certain representation of herself, still the girl not sure how to act at the party. Just as the unfiltered My So-Called Life has more truth about the teenage experience than the glossy Gossip Girl, so Cara might find a more truthful way to be a teen superstar.
Alessia Cara’s debut single, Here, is out now on Def Jam
