Justin Bieber and One Direction are both quite successful. If you’re a new artist, you would probably love to be mentioned in the same conversation as those artists.
With perhaps maybe one exception: sharing an album release date.
Alessia Cara, a soulful 19 year-old singer/songwriter who like Bieber hails from the Toronto, Canada-area, dropped her debut LP Know It All last Friday. In addition to it being “Friday The 13th,” it was also the day that Bieber and 1D released Purpose and Made In The A.M. respectively.
“I know! It was like, ‘Excellent date, guys! Thanks!’” Cara joked when I brought this up to her Monday. “I just try to see it as three great albums on the same date.”
Cara purchased and enjoys both; her and Bieber share a record label home in addition to the release date. The teenager is not only a fan of Bieber’s music; she is happy that he and other artists like The Weeknd and Drake are changing the perception of Canadian music.
“I feel like Canadians are such underdogs most of the time, especially in music at first,” Cara explained. “You would never think that you should go to Toronto or like, Ontario, to find artists. That was never the cool place to go to look for music.”
The aforementioned artists, along with Cara and Shawn Mendes are changing that. The Canadian teens have known each other for quite some time but met for the first time recently backstage at Taylor Swift’s 1989 World Tour; Mendes was a supporting act and Cara was tapped for a cameo to perform her hit “Here” with Taylor.
“(Mendes) was like one of the first people to ever tweet out anything of mine and it was before I was signed, before I had a song. He tweeted one of my covers,” she recalled. “It was two-ish years ago, and he always updates me on where my song is at (on the charts).”
The short answer to that update: high. The track has spent the past two weeks in the top 10 most played at pop radio nationally. But as Cara later told me, there can be one down side to the airplay.
“All my friends hate (‘Here’) now! They keep messaging me like, ‘I’m sorry Alessia, I hate ‘Here.’”
Thankfully for them Cara has a whole album of material that they will love just as much, if not more, than the big radio hit.
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