For the past three years, Alessia Cara has been working on herself and rediscovering her love for an industry that has both given and taken so much from her.
Today, Cara has released her brand new album Love & Hyperbole and announced her debut headlining tour, including stops in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
The Grammy-winning artist is officially back on the scene, after skyrocketing to fame back in 2014 with her hit Here, but Cara tells 9honey Celebrity she wasn’t always sure she would come back to music.
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“If I’m being honest, there was a period where I did kind of lose my love for it a little bit, not so much my love of music but my love of contributing to this industry,” she says.
“It’s such a fleeting industry, it’s so ever-changing, it can be a little strange.
“I think sometimes a lot of artists, or at least me, can feel like you’re giving so much to an industry that might not give much back to you, or, you know, that kind of just like chews you up and spits you out as it pleases, especially as you get older as a woman.
“I don’t even know if I’ve made that clear to anyone before… But that’s what I was feeling internally, I just had to, like, come to it on my own terms.”
But Cara seems to have rediscovered her voice in the best way, releasing a 14-song album full of energetic and powerful pop hits.
“So this album is pretty much about the last three years of my life, which felt very eventful. I mean, as probably any three-year span is pretty eventful, usually,” she laughs.
The Scars To Your Beautiful singer says she’s gone through somewhat of a transformation over the past three years, “shedding” the parts of her life that no longer felt important and “reshaping” her voice as a writer.
Grammy winning artist announces Aussie tour dates
“I was finding myself writing from different places, from a different perspective,” she says.
“I kind of went from stages of, like, feeling a lot of pain and sadness and melancholy to then starting to learn how to open myself up to different areas of love and nourishing parts of myself that I had maybe neglected in the past and finding myself in a place of joy.”
Although it really is was what all of us are searching for, Cara says finding herself in that place of joy almost made writing the album trickier in a way, adding that it was something she’d never done before.
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“I think a lot of writers can understand the fact that, you know, you don’t necessarily need to vent or complain or get something out when things are good, right? You don’t, you kind of want to hold on to that rather than expel it,” she shares.
“So it’s challenging to like find inspiration in within joy and not have it feel kind of corny or cheesy, like, still have it feel like still like meaningful and fun.”
After listening to Love & Hyperbole it’s easy to see Cara has achieved exactly what she set out to do, creating an album full of uplifting, powerful ballads that feel worlds away from the idea of a cheesy hit.
In particular, the song Fire, placed towards the end of the album, is one Cara says she has a strong connection to as it’s one the “very few love songs” of hers that doesn’t have “any fear or insecurity attached to it”.
Watch the video above.
“I feel like Fire is one that I always feel in my chest and I feel my emotions come up here when I sing that song,” she says, signalling to her throat.
She says the process behind writing the song was to simply put a microphone in the middle of the room, pick up an instrument and just let the lyrics “fall out”.
“We just left it recording for, like, over an hour until the song was done… I feel like that was a really cool way to write that song, because I feel like writing something like that has to be intuitive,” Cara explains.
“You can’t really think too much when you’re digging that deep into your feelings, I think you kind of have to just let it pour out of you, and I love that the song feels that way, at least to me.”
Cara was last in Australia in 2018, and is “so excited” to return for her debut headlining tour and her first time performing here.
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“I always say Australia is one of my favorite places to go. I tell everybody that because everything about it is amazing,” she says, beaming with excitement.
“Like, the people are so kind, the weather is amazing every time I’ve been, the food is great. It’s just so beautiful, and I’ve never had the chance to actually do a show there.”
Cara will hit Aussie shores at the beginning of March, kicking things off in Brisbane on March 6, before heading to Sydney on March 7 and wrapping it up in Melbourne on March 10.
Artist pre-sale and the Mastercard and CommBank Yello presale will open at 10am on Tuesday February 18, followed by the Secret Sounds presale on Thursday February 20 at 9am.
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Tickets will go on sale to the general public at 10am on Friday, February 21.
“I don’t know what to expect with the crowds,” she says, leading us to believe she hasn’t yet been warned of the Aussie tradition of a shooey.
“But I know the people are wonderful, so I’m very, very excited. It’s gonna be really fun.”
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