Alessia Cara

Alessia Caracciolo, known professionally as Alessia Cara, is a Canadian singer and songwriter born on July 11, 1996, in Mississauga, Ontario. She grew up in Brampton and attended Cardinal Ambrozic Catholic Secondary School. Her family roots are in Calabria, Italy: her father was born in Canada to Italian parents, and her mother is an Italian immigrant. Cara speaks Italian fluently, and her early life mixed music, language, and performance. As a child she wrote poetry and performed in theatre, then began playing guitar at age 10, teaching herself songs.

By age 13, Cara had started posting covers on her own YouTube channel. She saw Justin Bieber as a career model at the time, and like him, used online videos as an early stage. After uploading acoustic covers of songs such as “Love Yourself” and “Sweater Weather,” she signed with EP Entertainment and Def Jam Recordings in 2014. That year, accompanied by her father, she went to New York, signed a management deal with EP Entertainment, and began work on her debut studio album. She briefly used the professional name Alessia before adding a shortened form of her surname to become Alessia Cara.

Her official debut single, “Here,” arrived through Def Jam in April 2015. Produced by Pop & Oak and Sebastian Kole, it was based on her own experience of going to a party and feeling uncomfortable there. MTV described it as “a song for everyone who secretly hates parties.” The song became a sleeper hit in the United States, reaching number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, and peaked at number 19 on the Canadian Hot 100. Cara made her television debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in July 2015, released the EP Four Pink Walls, and followed with her debut album, Know-It-All, on November 13, 2015.

Know-It-All reached number eight on the Canadian Albums Chart and number nine on the Billboard 200. Its third single, “Scars to Your Beautiful,” reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2016. Cara toured North America on the “Know-It-All Tour,” won Breakthrough Artist of the Year at the 2016 Juno Awards, supported Coldplay on parts of the A Head Full of Dreams Tour, performed at Glastonbury, and recorded her version of “How Far I’ll Go” from Disney’s Moana. In 2017, she appeared on Zedd’s “Stay,” certified seven-times platinum in Canada, and on Logic’s “1-800-273-8255” with Khalid.

In 2018, Cara won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, becoming the first Canadian artist ever to win that award. The reaction was not only celebratory: she received hateful messages and death threats from angry fans of SZA, and briefly deactivated her social media accounts. That same year she released “Growing Pains,” “A Little More,” and her second album, The Pains of Growing. The album brought moderate commercial success and later won Juno Awards for Album of the Year and Pop Album of the Year, while Cara won Songwriter of the Year.

Cara’s work continued with In the Meantime in 2021, which received generally positive reviews from critics, and Love & Hyperbole, released on February 14, 2025, to positive reviews from critics and listeners alike. What gives her words their staying power on a quotes site is the direct path they seem to take from lived experience to song: a teenager teaching herself guitar, a young artist posting covers online, a writer turning discomfort, growth, and solitude into music heard far beyond her hometown.