Alessia Cara Reveals What Each Song On 'Know-It-All' Is About

After her smash hit "Here" made us fall in love, Alessia Cara released her debut album, Know-It-All, on November 13th. This is the Canadian singer/songwriter's first full-length album, and a follow-up to her EP Four Pink Walls.

According to Alessia, the album began two years ago when she was still in high school. Alessia tells us, "A lot of the album was done like two years ago, so it's been a long process for me. It seems like it's been a long process to get it all together, and to figure out where I wanted it to go, and a lot of it was done before I was even signed, so I was in school. I was 17 when we started it, and it ended up, over time, turning into this album about youth and teenage life. It's about my teenage life, but I think it's general enough it could be about anything. I really wanted to make it general so that other people can understand and relate to it. I think it's just the story of what a teenager's life is like and with that comes themes of rebellions, confusion, and vulnerability. I think that that comes through in in all of the songs."

Alessia broke down the meaning of each song on Know-It-All and what inspired them. Read on below.

Track 1: "Seventeen"

"I wrote that when I was 17 with Sebastian Kole — I wrote the whole album with Sebastian Kole. But we did that song in Jersey, and it was around the time where I was just really feeling like I didn't want to grow up at all. I didn't feel like I was ready to to become an adult, even though I still don't feel like I'm an adult. I wanted to stay 17 forever, and I started thinking about when I was a kid, it was actually the complete opposite of that. I always wanted to grow up so fast, and I just kept thinking, I don't want to be a kid, I just want to be older so I can do more things. Now that we get older, it's the complete opposite. So I thought that was kind of funny how life works like that, and how when we're younger we want to be older, and how when we're older we want to be younger. I wanted to make a song about it, and talk about the advice my parents would give me when I was a kid. [It's] just really a nostalgic song about my childhood, pretty much."

Track 2: "Here"

"'Here' is about a party I went to, two years ago, and I hated it. I felt so uncomfortable because it was just awkward, and it was just not my kind of scene at all. So I just made a rant song about it, and it turned into this huge thing that people are relating to. Which is amazing, because I never thought people would relate to that because it's so specific to my life. But, people really resonated with it, and it's an anti-party, but not really anti because I don't really want to say anti-party ... I'm not anti-party. But it's the opposite perspective of what you would hear on the radio of a party song. Usually when you think of party song you think positive, let's have fun, but it's the complete opposite."

Track 3: "Outlaws"

"'Outlaws' is about a love relationship that you may have with someone, and it's about loving that person so much that you're willing to do anything for them. And anything could mean getting into as much trouble as possible, even [if] it's like, committing crimes, or doing things together. You're saying, 'I would gladly spend jail time with you. I would gladly do anything for you because I love you.'"

Track 4: "I'm Yours"

"'I'm Yours' is a humorous/sassy/layered song. And it's about being reluctant to fall for somebody, because you're so happy with yourself initially, and things are fine, and then somebody comes along, and they're so perfect, and you just hate it. You hate everything about them, and they gross you out even though they're so nice, and they're perfect, but you hate them. You realize as the song goes on that the reason why you're like this, and the reason why you feel like this, is because you've been hurt before, and you don't even want to bother letting anyone else in. But then because this person is so nice to you, you finally at the [end], are like, 'Fine, I'll let them in.'"

Track 5: "Four Pink Walls"

"'Four Pink Walls' is probably the most, not personal, but probably the most specific song on there. The least general, so very specific to what happened to me, and all the specifics about my room, and my childhood. It's about me when I was a kid, and what I would do as a kid in my room constantly. I was constantly in my room, I wouldn't do much else. I was pretty much a loner as a child, and I always aspired to do all these amazing things with my life, and I had all these big dreams, but my dreams were way bigger than what I was doing, and they were way bigger than my life at the time. So I was so oblivious and ignorant to the life outside of my four pink walls.

Then, once my dreams came true, and everything that I wanted came true, like right now, it's happening slowly. I'm starting to realize how I'm seeing those walls less, and less, and less, and that can be a very contradicting feeling. Because it can be happy, obviously it's a great thing, but then also I start to realize how much I miss them now. So it's just about that, and about me wanting to live my dream."

Track 6: "Wild Things"

"'Wild Things' is an anthem. It's written like an anthem, the production is very anthem-like, and the lyrics are very anthem-like, and I wanted it to be like that. I wanted it to be something that people could really sing along to and believe in, because it's such an important message, and it's really about accepting yourself. Whether you're young, or old, or whatever your circumstances are. Oftentimes, people constantly tell us that we are not good enough for that, and we're not going to do anything with ourselves. And that's not true obviously, and this is a song about saying, 'I don't care what you say, and I don't care what you do to try to stop me from being happy. I'm going to be happy, and we're gonna just do whatever we want.'" 

Track 7: "Stone" featuring Sebastian Kole

"We did 'Stone' in Los Angeles, and we didn't really realize what was happening when we wrote it. It was one of those things where we wrote, but we weren't sure what it was [or] what we were gonna do with it. And then once we finished, we were like, 'this has to go on the album, we're keeping it.' It's another love song, but I think this is a very general love song. It doesn't have to be about a love relationship. It could be about parents, or best friends. It's about having that one person who's your rock, or your stone in this case. The world can sometimes get overwhelming, and you might overthink, and we over analyze things as people, and there's always that one kind of person that makes you forget about all those things. And that person is your rock, and your gravity that holds you down."

Track 8: "Overdose"

"'Overdose' is a song, again, about love, but this one is kind of a negative a view on love, and how you know love be great. But it also has these negative effects, and it can make you stay when you don't want to stay sometimes, and it can make you do things that you don't want to do. And no matter how bad it is in a relationship, you just stay ... and you don't even know why, and that's because of love. Often times we compare -- as people, and you see in a lot of songs -- you compare love to a drug. And it's so true because love is like a drug. It's addicting, it makes you want to stay, so I wanted to to play off of that. There's allusions to drugs, there's allusions to like hallucinating, and all these things that drugs make you do that love similarly does. That's why it's called 'Overdose,' because you're overdosing on this relationship, this toxic relationship that you don't want to be in."

Track 9: "Stars"

"'Stars' is the most simple song on the album. Simple sonically, it's simple conceptually, it's just simple lyrically even. It's just really really simple, and I wanted it to be like that because the song is about simplicity. And it's about simplicity and love. In life there's this whole facade that we have to put on, and we have such pride, and that can be so toxic in relationships. And it can cause people to break up for no reason because they have this pride, or this whole confusion about things, and sometimes you don't have to have that confusion. In this song I'm saying, 'Why do we have to be so confusing? Why does things have to be so about ego? And why does all this superficiality have to be involved? Why can't we just like be simply in love, and let go of our pride, and let go of all the things? To shed all of that negativity, and let's just be together. Why does it have to be so difficult?'"

Track 10: "Scars To Your Beautiful"

"'Scars to Your Beautiful' is another anthem-like song. And it's about body image for young women. So it's aimed at young women ... or women in general, but I think guys can relate as well, I hope anyways. It's about the standards that women have to deal with all the time. Whether it's in media, or in just regular life. We're just expected to do, and to look like so many different things, and it's so hard to keep up with sometimes. And these things that we're being told, whether it's indirectly or directly, they get into our heads and it got to the point where now girls can't look at themselves and just feel happy anymore. We have to find something that we don't like, or something that we have to compare ourselves too. And that can get so tiring. It's just such a wrong message to send to people, and it's just a bad thing to put in our heads. So I wanted to make a song that was saying to block out all that noise, and to just appreciate yourself, and not go to these extremes to love yourself."

Photos: Rachel Kaplan