Alessia Cara has been living in the limelight for a long time. With her latest album, In the Meantime, she’s finally starting to process what that means.
The new project might be Cara’s most vulnerable work yet. Songs like “Best Days” and “Shapeshifter” dig into the singer’s feelings around the subjects of anxiety, exhaustion, and romantic fallout, often juxtaposed with her signature upbeat music and jazzy vocals. Cara’s latest offering is also her most creative visually; she’s been experimenting with more eclectic music videos to accompany the songs her fans are surely belting out at home.
“I think there’s kind of an arc of healing that is told throughout the whole album,” Cara tells BAZAAR.com. “The creative process was just that—experiencing a bunch of different things, going through a lot of really hard times and a lot of heavy introspection and a lot of hard work to just navigate life. [This album is what] came out on the other side.”
Below, we speak with Cara about tapping into creativity, learning to stay in the now, and what she wants fans to take away from her new album.
There’s a lot of juxtaposition on this project—within your lyrics and the musicality, and the topics that you’re talking about. What was the creative process and putting this album together like?
There’s a really big sense of duality on this album, and a big sense of dissonance between different themes—like feeling super sad, and then really happy, and wanting a relationship and not wanting a relationship, or letting something go and not letting something go. There was a mess of emotions. That’s just how I was feeling during the year. I was going through a ton of different things and would go through waves of feeling good and feeling really bad, and back and forth. It just came out in the project.
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Your recent music videos are so adventurous, and you’re showcasing your music in a very new way. What did you want this new era of yours to look like visually?
I’m definitely going for super-bright and saturated visuals. I love adding hints of surrealism in my music in general, and this album is really heavily rooted in that. In the last year, we all relied on our creativity and escapism to get us through. You kind of had to imagine being in other places and escape your own mind in order to get through, or at least for me, [that was the case]. I wanted to incorporate elements of that in this project, whether it was with what I was wearing or my hair or my makeup—just doing things that feel really dreamy and vibrant. It also goes back to that juxtaposition theme—juxtaposing a lot of the darker themes with more colorful elements.
You’ve mentioned before that with this project, you really wanted to express your creativity, especially through the crazy almost two years now that we’ve had in this pandemic. What kept you inspired?
I don’t write as often as a lot of artists I know. I save [my songwriting] for a period of time, so I bank up a lot of ideas and a lot of feelings, and then, not even necessarily on purpose, it becomes an album. In the last three years, since I’ve released my last album, I’ve been on tour and traveling, and have not had the time to just truly hunker down. I write sometimes on the road, but I like to do certain things at certain times. What kept me inspired was just all of these emotions that I was feeling that I didn’t really get to process or that I didn’t really get to write about in the last three years. It was a lot of hindsight processing and healing, but I’m glad, ’cause I had a lot to talk about.
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How have you managed to balance being on the road and promoting one project while also creatively planning ahead for the next?
That’s always been a tough thing. I’ve always struggled with staying present and not worrying too much about the future or the past. I’m always either dwelling on the past, or missing the past, or worrying about the future. So that’s been a big challenge, because this type of lifestyle goes extremely fast. As cheesy as it sounds, I’ve worked to just really focus on today and find joy and purpose in, like, the smallest, most mundane moments. When you look at things in the grand scheme, that can get very scary, but focusing on the day-to-day has really helped.
You’ve always been refreshingly open and honest in your songwriting. Why has it always been important to open yourself up in that way for your fans?
I think it just comes down to how I cope. A lot of people rely on, like I said, escapism to get them through things. So I feel like the artists who write the bops and the fun stuff use that as their way to overcome sad times. But I feel like for me, the way that I cope is just getting it out of my system. I don’t really think too much about the repercussions or about the fact that people are gonna hear. Later on is when I’m like, “Oh yeah, like, this is going to be heard by people.” But I think ultimately those feelings are the ones that are worth sharing. I feel like artists are the vessels that connect people. I try to look at this as a larger gift outside of myself, outside of the selfish ways that I enjoy it—it’s also for other people.
How would you describe the overarching story of this new album? When your fans listen to it for the first time, what do you want them to take away from it?
There are a bunch of little sub-stories within the larger story, but the overall story here is just about finding some sort of calm at the end of a storm, whether that’s an emotional storm, mental storm, or even the collective storm that we all went through the last year and a half, two years. It’s about finding that solace or joy or acceptance or hope after feeling really stuck and lost. [The album is a] little journey of healing and learning, and unlearning and relearning. I hope that people can see parts of themselves in it too.
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You’ve done so much reflection about this journey you’ve been on since you were a teenager first recording music. Now that you’re in your 20s, what is something you wish you could tell teenage Alessia that you know now?
Oh, wow. I would tell her so many things, but I guess I would just say, “Relax, it’s going to be okay! But at the same time, hold on as tight as you can, because these days go by so fast. These years go by so fast, the older you get, and you can miss it, and you will miss it. Take the time to look over your shoulder and look around and take it all in.”
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Alessia Cara Is Trying to Understand What It All Means
Source: Filipino Journal Articles
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