Alessia Cara gushes about opening for Coldplay, calling the band members “the sweetest” as well as “hospitable.” The 19-year-old singer of “Here” and “Wild Things” released her debut album, Know-It-All, in 2015, so she hasn’t had much experience playing arenas and stadiums with one of the world’s biggest acts — until now.
She recently opened for Coldplay on a half-dozen dates European/U.K. dates and will soon join their entire U.S. tour behind their album A Head Full of Dreams. On June 29, she picks up again with the British band in Berlin, and the U.S. leg starts July 16 in New Jersey and runs through Sept. 3 in San Francisco, before heading out on her own again.
“I’ve been a fan of theirs for the longest time and when you have a tour of that caliber, it’s always really scary, but then to have headliners that are really welcoming and make you feel comfortable it’s always s lot easier,” she told Billboard backstage at the iHeartRadio Much Music Video Awards in Toronto on Sunday night.
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“They’re just so nice. They’re the sweetest and they’re hospitable and they’re amazing. It’s just perfect. Everything is going really, really well.”
Cara, who won best new Canadian artist at the iHeartRadio MMVAs, is a sweetheart herself. A few months ago, she linked up with H&M Canada for a custom charity T-shirt benefiting the SickKids Foundation in Toronto.
“I just went onstage with the logo,” she said of her MMVA performance. “I have a logo of a beanie girl that I drew a while back, so that’s my logo and I’m selling shirts at H&M with that logo — black and white shirts and 25 percent of the profits go to SickKids Hospital, where I was a patient many years ago when I was a kid and my brother was.”
What happened that landed her at SickKids? “I had this really bad bacterial infection and I had to have a serious surgery, and my brother had whooping cough and he was in intensive care for a really long time. So that hospital has been really close to us because they’ve really helped us through some tough times.”
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Cara also had strong words about the massacre in Orlando that killed 49 people and injured 53.
“It definitely comes down to gun control,” she told Billboard. “It’s scary. The statistics, if you look at what’s happening in America, it’s absolutely sickening and scary and terrifying and my heart is broken for the LGBTQ community because you feel like they’re making so much progress and then something like that happens. It just comes down to gun control. We have to control who has possession of these guns and how they’re using them because it’s causing innocent people to die and it’s scary. I’m terrified for us. It’s so shocking to hear that and my prayers go out to all the families and the people that are affected.”
Watch Alessia perform at iHeartRadio’s MMVAs below: