Alessia Cara broke into the limelight in 2015 with her anti-party anthem, “Here.” In a new interview, the singer revealed there was “a extreme battle” to get her single to see the light of day.
Alessia told Mood her label, Def Jam, didn’t want to release it because they thought it would flop. Alessia said she fought back and insisted “it was the right thing for me… I really believed in it.”
“I knew that it was going to help me in some way, or at least change. I just knew that my life was going to be different for some reason,” she recalled. “It was like an extreme battle getting that song out there. I remember the label finally compromised with me and just kind of threw it out on SoundCloud. They were like, ‘We’re not going to push this, we’re just going to put it out to shut you up.’ I’m glad that they did because it really did change my life.”
“Here” turned out to be a sleeper hit, debuting at number 95 on the Billboard Hot 100 before soaring into the top five. The song is RIAA-certified Platinum after selling over four million copies, has been streamed over 480 million times on Spotify, and its video has racked up over 216 million views. Alessia also later became the first Canadian artist to win the Best New Artist Grammy.
Alessia is thankful she followed “an instinctual gut feeling” to release “Here,” and remarked, “It was the first time I really led with my intuition and it ended up working out… I definitely didn’t expect it to be as big as it was or to give me the career that it did.”
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