walking upstream…
Alessia Cara
photo: ted eytan · cc by-sa 2.0 ↗Alessia Cara
Alessia Cara turned Mississauga bedroom YouTube covers into a smoky-voiced, Grammy-winning strain of confessional pop, breaking through in 2015 with the wallflower's-eye-view single 'Here' and the global body-positivity anthem 'Scars to Your Beautiful.' Her writing pairs hip-hop-cadenced verses with soul-singer phrasing, a lineage she traces back to the raw, unpolished honesty of Amy Winehouse and Lauryn Hill and, more recently, to the live-band, Laurel Canyon-indebted songcraft of 2025's Love & Hyperbole. She won the Grammy for Best New Artist in 2018 and has kept the diaristic vulnerability that got her there.
the sound in question
2016
Scars to Your BeautifulAlessia Cara
walk the tributaries ↓
Amy Winehouse2000s · Soul / R&B / Jazz
Cara has called Winehouse 'the reason I started writing music in the first place' — seeing the 'Rehab' video at age ten showed her a woman who looked and sang unlike anyone else on the radio, unpolished and utterly herself, which shaped Cara's own conversational, un-oversung vocal delivery. The link became literal on 2021's 'Shapeshifter,' written in the same studio with Salaam Remi — Winehouse's own Back to Black producer — an experience Cara has described as writing 'from a place of thinking of the way that she would have done it.'
listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — Alessia Cara on Amy Winehouse, Lauryn Hill, and finding her sound ↗
2006
RehabAmy Winehouse
2021
ShapeshifterAlessia Cara
listen forListen for the unforced, slightly-behind-the-beat phrasing and the way both singers let a rasp or crack sit in the mix instead of smoothing it out — the same conversational, barely-trying cool that made 'Rehab' feel like eavesdropping carries into the sway and restraint of 'Shapeshifter.'
Lauryn Hill1990s · Hip hop soul / Neo soul / R&B / Reggae
Cara says she's 'listened to the Fugees and Lauryn Hill for as long as I can remember,' crediting Hill's rap-singing hybrid with shaping her own instinct for cramming rhythmic, conversational runs of words into a bar rather than singing everything straight. That flow is most audible on breakout single 'Here,' whose talk-sung verses narrate a party from the sidelines in a cadence closer to hip-hop storytelling than pop balladry.
listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — Alessia Cara on Amy Winehouse, Lauryn Hill, and finding her sound ↗
1998
Doo Wop (That Thing)Lauryn Hill
2015
HereAlessia Cara
listen forCompare the tumbling, syncopated verse delivery on Hill's 'Doo Wop (That Thing)' — packing extra syllables into the pocket without losing the groove — to the wry, rapid-fire verses of 'Here,' where Cara narrates the room around her in almost the same speak-sing cadence.
Joni Mitchell1970s · Folk / Folk rock / Jazz / Pop
For 2025's Love & Hyperbole, Cara has said she dug into the '60s and '70s records she loves — Joni Mitchell and Fleetwood Mac chief among them — chasing a freer, more live-sounding feel after three albums of glossier pop-R&B production. Reviewers heard that lineage land most directly on 'Subside,' whose hushed verses and swelling string arrangements were tied explicitly to Mitchell's (and Billy Joel's) influence on the record.
listen: upstream & heresource: Gen Admission — Love & Hyperbole album review (Joni Mitchell/Billy Joel influence on 'Subside') ↗
1969
Both Sides, NowJoni Mitchell
2025
SubsideAlessia Cara
listen forListen for how both songs let the voice sit nearly bare over open space before strings gradually swell underneath it — the hushed-confession-into-orchestral-swell arc that recalls Mitchell's early ballads like 'Both Sides Now' rather than the compressed, beat-forward pop of Cara's earlier records.