At Home With Alessia Cara: The Playlist

“First of all, anyone who knows me at all knows like how huge of an Amy Winehouse fan I am,” Alessia Cara tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “So growing up, I had all the booklets and I would, like, look into who she made her music with. And Salaam Remi was always one of the names, it felt like some like weird Wizard of Oz character: I was like, ‘I wanna meet this Salaam person, right?’ Fast-forward to 2019, I had a day off on tour, and I got the chance to work with him in his home in Miami, which is where Amy wrote a lot of Back to Black.” Cara’s At Home With playlist on Apple Music features other compelling singers she adores, like Yebba (with “Louie Bag” featuring Smino), who she’s admired for years. “She's not only one of the kindest, most beautiful people, but her story is so powerful,” she said. “She's one of those people where you can hear so much of who she is and her pain and everything that she's gone through in the way that she sings. She emotes so much that you feel it so viscerally.” Another favourite, Lorde, represented by her Solar Power track “Secrets From a Girl (Who's Seen It All)”, has been an influential, affirming role model for her. “I've never had a voice like a pop diva,” she said. “So I always equated that lack of skill as a lack of skill. And after she came out, because I saw so much of my own voice in her, I realised, like, okay: There is a space for success for girls like me, who sing like me. She was from a small town; she was making songs about her and her friends, and, I don't know, I think the fact that the world made space for her just really gave me the hope that maybe they could make space for me.”