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Alessia Cara Reveals Personal Struggle Behind “Growing Pains”

Alessia Cara has come far since debuting 2015 single “Here.” After earning her first Grammy this past year — and facing backlash for beating out noms including newcomers SZA and Khalid — she’s back with a candid new track appropriately titled “Growing Pains.”

During an interview with Ryan Seacrest on Friday, June 15, on On Air With Ryan Seacrest the “Scars to Your Beautiful” songstress shared that “internal dissonance” is what inspired “Growing Pains.”

“As usual the song is really wordy so there’s a lot to digest so I understand if you can’t digest it the first time around,” Alessia told Ryan after playing the new track. … “It’s basically a song that I wrote during a time when I was really alone, or felt really alone, and didn’t understand myself at all and didn’t understand why I was feeling sad for no reason and just really down for no reason.”

In the pre-chorus of the new track, Alessia sings: “And I guess the bad can get better/ Gotta be wrong before it's right/ Every happy phrase engraved in my mind/ I've always been a go-getter/ There's truth in every word I write/ But still the growing pains, growing pains/ They're keeping me up at night."

She added to Ryan that she was experiencing "a cloud" she just couldn’t shake.

“I thought I’d just face it instead of try to run from it and write a song about it,” she explained.

The 21-year-old Canadian added that the song came after securing a major life accomplishment — winning that Grammy

“Which is the strangest thing,” she continued to Ryan. “I kind of had this internal dissonance about that because I felt almost that I was being ungrateful if I were sad all the time because this is everything I’ve always wanted in my career and I’ve been fulfilling all my dreams. But at the same time, there was this void that had nothing to do with that that I couldn’t fill.”

At the end of the day, Alessia is still learning who she is and about the world around her, and she wants fans to know it’s OK to feel sad sometimes. 

“I still deal with it somedays,” she concluded. “But I think it's important to understand it’s OK to feel things even if things aren’t going tragically — even if things are going well — it’s OK. It doesn’t mean that you’re wrong for it or that you’re ungrateful, it just means that you’re human.” 

Watch back their interview above for more, including her secret obsession with murder mysteries!