Alessia Cara’s Love & Hyperbole -°1824 Press Conference
Canadian singer-songwriter Alessia Cara paints an entirely new universe with the release of her fourth album, Love & Hyperbole. At a recent press conference hosted by °1824, Alessia sat down and discussed her experience creating this new album.
With the release of Love & Hyperbole, Alessia invites listeners to explore and immerse themselves in the intensity and overlapping phases that come with love. While writing this album, Alessia wanted to approach love in both a positive and negative light.
We dove straight into discussing how Alessia began the process of creating these visuals for her album. Alessia has always related colors and shapes when creating her new project. She mentioned that synesthesia played a part when she was creating the foundations of her new album.
This new universe that Alessia illustrates is more rich and sophisticated. Using the red wine tone creates a contrast throughout the album's art. Whenever people see the color red, our minds usually think of love, one of the themes explored in this album. Looking at the album cover, we can see that Alessia is pulling herself to both sides of the cover, creating this heart shape. It also can make the audience think that Alessia is searching for balance.
Songs like "Dead Man," "(Isn't It) Obvious," and "Slow Motion" all share a similarity with their sound tonality as the rhythm of the bass guitar creates a profound melody. With "Slow Motion" already racking over 2 billion streams, it's telling that listeners are excited to hear more.
For many artists, the ability to create music in a person's space changes the experience and process of the album. Alessia enjoyed "the chance to record 90% of this album with live musicians in the room" while creating this album.
During the writing process, Alessia was able to draw deeper connections by acknowledging love in a euphoric feeling. She allowed storytelling to become an essential part of her creative process. "In a couple of ways, on one side of it I was definitely humorously using hyperbole, allowing it to pacify the heavier emotions," said Alessia.
"Run Run" describes the anxious feeling that you might ruin something beautiful. The humorous lyrics are written to balance out that hard feeling that comes with coping and dealing with falling in love. Love for her can feel super dramatic, depending on how she sees it.
The closed-off elements in this album aren't as present since she has grown so much over the years. Her album The Growing of Pains, released in 2018, was written about the challenges she faced growing up. Those feelings of stubbornness are still present throughout this album, but they are more settled and balanced out with good feelings.
The transition into creating a new, softer sound was something different for Alessia. The challenge was pushing herself out of her comfort zone to vocalize something lyrically different than what she was used to writing. She had to teach herself, but she quickly grasped it.
Alessia Cara's outcome with this album shows that no matter how successful you are as an artist, continuing and looking toward the future is essential. Those concrete successes have allowed her to continue creating fantastic music. For her, creating music is important because it allows her to keep setting new goals through her music.