Not-So-Glittery:
In a review on Fader.com, Naomi Zeichner breaks down the song “Here” by up -and-coming artist Alessia Caracciolo from Canada. According to Alessia, she wrote this the day after she went to a party. While she was at the party, she realized she hated being there and that she had hated every other party she had 
ever gone to. “Here” is a song that describes every socially awkward introvert who has ever been dragged to a party by her friends and then left to stand quietly in the corner with her arms crossed and her eyes fixed on the floor. While Alessia sounds completely confident and sure of herself, her words describe the experience of the quiet kid who just wants to go home. She’d rather just sit at home with her friends and listen to music. She doesn’t want to talk to anybody and she’s considering going to sit in the car. I think that the reason this song works so well is that it connects with the average person. The person who isn’t so sure of himself and sometimes doesn’t know what to say. The one who would rather be at a small party with a group of his friends than at a big, crazy rave. A lot of music 
expresses things that, while we may enjoy hearing about it, the shy quiet kid just can’t relate to. We listen to a song by Taylor Swift describing her lost love and we empathize so strongly with it, but we don’t know what that feels like because we’ve never even had somebody to love, let alone lose. We listen to a song by Eminem about how he rose from the bottom and now he has everything he could ever want and we love the feeling, but it isn’t ours. We didn’t rise to the top. We didn’t gain everything from nothing. We listen to the otherworldly sounds by Nightwish and we’re transported to another world, but it isn’t ours. Our world is the one where we’re afraid to talk to people and we don’t have many friends. Ours is where our friends spend days convincing us to go to a party and then the entire time we’re there, we ask ourselves why we even bothered to come. Alessia’s song captures that reality. We can relate to that because we’ve been there and we hated it just as much as she did.
Naomi Says:
Naomi says that this is a song that every introvert needs to hear, and I hope that they do. Maybe then, they wouldn’t feel that they have to go to this party just because all their friends are going. She writes that 
she is eager to group artists like Alessia with other “candid powerhouses” and I have to say, I agree with her. Alessia is an artist that the lower tier of the high school hierarchy can connect to and maybe gain some confidence in knowing that they’re not alone. I’m glad there is an artist writing about real life experiences, rather than far-off versions of a glittery “reality.”
Musical Minds 