Watch Alessia Cara’s Heartbreak Malaise in New ‘Not Today’ Video
Alessia Cara isn’t quite over a break up, but she’s working on it, in her new video for “Not Today.” The song will appear on The Pains of Growing, which is due out on Friday. In the clip, a mascara-tear-stain-faced Cara forlornly looks into the camera as she sings about heartache and hoping to move past it. “Someday I won’t be afraid of my head/ Someday I will not be chained to my bed,” she sings alone, looking deflated, in a bedroom. “Someday I’ll forget the day he left/ But surely not today.”
While she sings, she lethargically moves about a house doing mundane things to keep herself occupied, such as watching TV, taking a shower (but with her clothes on) and putting together a puzzle. Yet, within all the absent-minded motions, she gives glimpses of hope: she tries for a smile after brushing her teeth, playfully draws a mustache on her face and the pain can’t stop the singer from dancing to some music on vinyl.
“One day the thought of him won’t hurt the same/ Won’t need distractions to get through the day,” she concludes on a hopeful note, while acknowledging it’s OK to feel all the emotions. “I guess I hope I’m gonna be OK, ’cause I’m not today.”
Cara wrote the autobiographical The Pains of Growing entirely herself and it spans personal material about relationships that are both romantic (she experienced a breakup during the album process) and between family and friends.
“I just thought, there’s no better person to write this than me. It was so personal to me. It was a really sacred thing; I didn’t want anyone to know exactly what I was going through,” Cara told Rolling Stone of her decision to write the LP herself. “When you have full control, you can give away as much as you want to give away, and be as honest as you want and you know what it means and no one understands you better than you.
“Also, I really thought it’d be cool to have a nice challenge to see if I can write something, like a whole project, on my own,” she added. “It’s something that I wanted to see if I could do.”