If you think about it, nothing really matters. This simple mantra sits at the heart of Alessia Cara’s new album, ‘Love & Hyperbole’. But fear not, Dear Reader, this isn’t a maudlin, droll outing. Instead, this is all about letting the heft of worrying go and opting instead to seize the day has resulted in something that radiates positivity.
“Like, nothing matters in a good way,” she cackles, clarifying the inherent notion. “None of these pressures are real. Everything is made up at the end of the day.” It’s this bluntness that freed Alessia not only as an artist but also breathed life into her fourth album. “Jumping into things and just being like, who cares?” she gestures.
“Just try things. Why do you have to limit yourself?”
“In the last few years, and partly because of writing this album, I learned how to harness that in a good way,” she continues. Although, lassoing this new way of thinking has been a learning curve for Alessia. Throughout her last three albums – 2015’s ‘Know-It-All’, 2018’s ‘The Pains of Growing’, and 2021’s ‘In The Meantime’ – the Canadian singer has often focused on the sadder elements of loving and losing. But from the jolt of opener ‘Outside’ to the playful tones of single ‘Dead Man’, those days are no longer an overbearing majority. Or, as Alessia succinctly puts it, “This project definitely encapsulates a very transformative time for me.”
‘Love & Hyperbole’ is certainly an appropriate title for this version of Alessia. It’s chock-filled with Big Feelings, which careen or caress the music depending on the mood. While there is indeed a newfound positivity throughout, there’s still a littering of the other end of the emotional spectrum. She chuckles, “But I feel like even throughout the fears and confusion, the songs still stand firm in themselves and… I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t even know what I’m trying to say. Does that make sense?” She laughs again. It’s fair to say this is new territory Alessia’s getting to grips with in the best way possible. She professes, “I’m nervous, but I’m also extremely excited. This is my favorite album I think I’ve ever made.”
The battle between the two versions of Alessia is evident from the get-go. The album artwork features a literal push-and-pull battle between the two sides of herself. Showcasing the contrasting elements of her internal workings, she explains, “There’s a lot of duality, like love and hyperbole, happy-sad, light-dark. But learning how they work in tandem and how you can’t have one without the other. That’s something that I took out of the project that I hope people can take out of it too.”
Perhaps the biggest and most unexpected change she had to go through to bring ‘Love & Hyperbole’ to life was relearning how to enjoy what it is she does. After the release of ‘In The Meantime’, Alessia found herself in a fog.
“I honestly was in a place where I was trying to rebuild my understanding of who I wanted to be as an artist,” she explains. “Or if I wanted to even continue doing it at all.”
“I’ve been in this industry for so long that it becomes your life”
It was a long six months of uncertainty, unsure when it would all lift – or if it ever would at all. It was a period worryingly marred with no writing or even listening to music.
“I wasn’t playing music, to the point that my family and friends were like, we haven’t heard you singing in so long, or we miss hearing you play guitar,” she sighs. Making her way through the thickness was a process that involved returning to her purest self.
“When you’re an artist, it is your default to listen to other music with a different ear,” she says. “You’re kind of studying, in a sense. But there was something I missed about just listening to music because I loved it, and allowing it to help me with my life the same way that a music lover does, or the people who listen to my music do. I just had to get out of the overly analytical thing that I was dealing with and the insecurities that I was feeling as an artist.”
She began with the tentative steps of getting back to grips with the music she loves. Sounds from the 50s to the 70s, as well as music from all over the world, she cites Brazilian, African funk, and Italian genres as playing a key role. This key element helped her understand her place in the bigger picture.
“When you expand your horizons to different parts of the world in different times, you feel smaller – in a good way – where you realise people have been doing this for millions of years. There’s a reason why music is so powerful. A lot of my favourite artists did it because they loved it. They were honest and didn’t care about anything else.”
Having been active in the industry for a decade now, Alessia found herself fraught with the changing landscape. This was a major factor in this quietude. “The resentment that I was starting to build for the music industry,” she pauses. “It’s very flawed in a lot of ways.”
Alessia is someone whose purest form is art. Ever since being a youngster in the Canadian suburbs, she’s dabbled in music. Growing up in bands she formed with her cousins, she eventually found the guitar at ten. By the time she hit her teens, upon discovering Amy Winehouse, Lauryn Hill, and Carole King, she began uploading tracks to YouTube. Here, she garnered the attention of Def Jam Recordings and, after three albums, a whole host of award nods and wins (including a 2018 Best New Artist Grammy), Alessia has plenty of experience under her belt for someone in their late twenties. So, a changing landscape was bound to blindside.
“I’ve been in this industry for so long that it becomes your life and your bubble of other artists and people in the industry, you forget that that’s such a small percentage of the world,” she explains.
Which brings things back to that freeing notion. “Taking time away from that just reminds you that that’s not the end-all, be-all… it’s not reality at all, actually. You shouldn’t place your value on numbers, statistics, and made-up things that just have no real value at the end of the day.”
This last point is something she stresses. “It doesn’t make sense. Anything creative is taste and subjective, and you can’t place a ranking on that to me because everybody has a different opinion and loves different things – that’s the very beauty of any type of art. You can’t place something so concrete on something so subjective.”
“You shouldn’t place your value on numbers, statistics, and made-up things”
This era of Alessia Cara, it would seem, sets her off in good stead for the future. She’s picked everything apart and built it back up, either through necessity or as a natural evolution. The artist she is now, as well as the person, is a blossomed, softly moulded version of who she once was.
That doesn’t mean she’s still not followed by the eternal questions that plague the creative type.
“I always wonder if I’ll ever really figure it out because, if we’re talking strictly as an artist, I love so many different genres and so many different artists and eras of music that I don’t know if I’ll ever find the sound and be like, this is what I want to be forever. For every album, I’ll be trying something different. So, in a sense, the shapes are always changing.”
Most importantly, her output remains speaking for the truest person she could hope to be.
What Alessia hopes people take from her newly bolstered catalogue is rather simple.
“I just hope they take anything, honestly,” she shrugs with a grin. “It’s hard to tell people what to feel because people might pick up different things than I intended or take something a different way than I originally meant for it to be taken.”
As she has done all her life as a passionate music listener, the canvas is ready for whatever the listener may want – or, more importantly, need – to splash across it.
“I just hope they take anything I put out and see themselves in it. I hope that my music can work as a mirror for people; rather than my songs making them think of my life, I hope that it makes them think of theirs. In whatever capacity, I think that’s always the goal.”
This new era for Alessia Cara is another step on the way to building that eternal gift for people to experience. Now she’s uncovered this new facet to herself; as a person, she’s better for it, and as an artist, she’s closer than ever to the truth.
“I feel like my job as an artist is to do that. It’s to tap into things that I’m feeling in order to tap into things that other people are feeling,” she ends joyfully. “That’s the job.”
Alessia Cara’s album ‘Love & Hyperbole’ is out now.
Got opinions on this? Got fingers to type them with? Spare your group chat. Our Discord is ready.
Open the discussion thread