Singer Alessia Cara backs Chappell Roan’s Grammys speech: ‘People really do feel entitled to tell you who you are’
Singer Alessia Cara has spoken out about Chappell Roan’s Grammys speech, saying it reignited a ‘necessary’ conversation about the treatment of musicians.
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Everything, and nothing, has changed since Alessia Cara made her mark on the global pop charts a decade ago.
The Canadian singer/songwriter, then a teenager, connected with millions of fans in the mid 2010s thanks to her angsty anthems about struggling with social anxiety and body dysmorphia, and for calling out toxicity from online trolls, the beauty myth, and the youth mental health crisis.
The music industry fell for her, too: in 2018, she would leave the annual Grammys ceremony with a Best New Artist gong in her hands.
Fast forward to 2025, as she releases her fourth record Love & Hyperbole, and Cara applauds the bravery of pop superstar of the moment Chappell Roan for her incendiary Grammys speech about the industry’s duty of care to young artists, and the abusive behaviour of fandoms.
She says Roan – who, like her, won Best New Artist – reignited a “necessary” conversation that opened people’s eyes to the treatment of musicians.
Since launching her recording career when she was just 18, Cara tells Stellar, she has watched with fear as “the internet has gotten completely out of hand”.
“There are things that exist now that didn’t exist even when I started, and the more you see of people, especially young women, the more there is to pick apart.
“People really do feel entitled to tell you who you are and what you should be, and that’s really damaging.
“It’s really, really challenging to navigate. I don’t think the human mind is equipped to process it. It’s like we’re running old software.”
Cara didn’t know if she wanted to continue making music after the release of her critically acclaimed third album In The Meantime in 2021.
She found herself in a fog: not singing, not playing the guitar around the house, not even listening to music.
After six months of stasis, she tentatively began playing the music she has always loved, from African funk to the nostalgic Italian songs she grew up with, and found her groove again.
With the spotlight on a new clutch of female pop voices commanding the Zeitgeist, Cara was exempt from pressure to come up with a hit, and free to make the album she wanted.
“I think there’s definitely this ease when the pressure is off, because you don’t have those expectations,” she says.
“It’s a beautiful thing. If things come from it, you’re pleasantly surprised. But if they don’t, you didn’t really do it for that reason anyway. It’s a win-win.
“Regardless, whether there are eyes on you or not, I don’t think it’s a great idea to go into a project with that expectation, because it’s going to sabotage the creative process. I think you’re going to create for outcome, rather than just to emote.”
And emote she does on Love & Hyperbole. Cara, 28, says she feels a “softness” in her writing now, compared to the angst of the “stubborn, defiant teenager” behind her debut.
But there’s a shadow of melancholy, notably on ‘Subside’, which wrestles with grief over losing loved ones, or the end of relationships.
“The fear of death, as I’ve got older, is like a door that I opened that I didn’t know how to close … it’s something that looms over me all the time,” she admits.
“You see your parents getting older, family members have passed on and it just becomes a bigger cloud, and there’s not much you can really do with that sense of grief. You can’t put it anywhere. It’s not something you can kind of talk yourself down from or solve.
“You just have to sit in it and build around it. That’s the kind of thing I’ve been struggling with, and you kind of hear it on the album.”
As for the romantic tracks, Cara says that despite “being scared to be the one who writes it”, she believes all singers adore a “cheesy” love song.
On that note, she points out, “I’m writing about love from a different standpoint these days, and it took me a second to step into those shoes because I’m someone who writes from a place of sadness. You don’t really need to vent when things are good, so it was a challenge.”
And while she has been a regular visitor to Australia to promote her previous projects, Cara is now set to tour here in May – a first in her career.
“The people there are always amazing,” she says. “I’ve been so many times and never performed a proper show, so that’s going to be so fun.”
Love & Hyperbole is out now. For details of Cara’s tour, visit secretsounds.com. Read the full interview with Alessia Cara inside Stellar today, via The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD) and Sunday Mail (SA).
For more from Stellar and the podcast Something To Talk About, click here.
Originally published as Singer Alessia Cara backs Chappell Roan’s Grammys speech: ‘People really do feel entitled to tell you who you are’
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