Seventeen

Alessia Cara penned this song with singer-songwriter Sebastian Kole, whose other credits include Jennifer Lopez and Flo Rida's 2012 cut "Goin' In." "I was about to turn 18, and it was a whole bunch of feelings. We got to talking in the studio with my dad and Sebastian - we all came up with this thing, like, let's write about how life goes by really fast," Cara recalled to MTV News. "My dad brought up that idea, and that's why the first line is, 'My daddy says that life comes at you fast.'" "I didn't want to grow up and I started thinking about all the things my parents used to tell me," she continued. "It's a nostalgic song about my childhood and wishing I could stop growing. As a kid I wished I could grow up so fast, and now you want to stop the time. It's weird how things change when you get older."

The song finds Cara wishing to stay young forever. "When you're a little kid you think that there's this magic in being an adult," she explained in an annotation for the song on Genius. "But as you get older, I feel like the magic goes away a little bit." "The innocence goes away," she continued. "Christmas is a good example. When I was a kid I would be so excited for Christmas - it was the most magical thing. As I've gotten older, it has become a stressful holiday. Now it's just like 'Oh I have to do this and that.' I have to help cook and all these people are coming over! I see my mindset changing and it sucks."

This is also the opening track of Alessia Cara's debut long-player Know-It-All.. She told HMV.com how the song became a turning point for the album. "We were at this halfway point and I didn't really know what I wanted to talk about anymore or where I wanted the album to go," Cara explained. "I think once we figured out what that song was going to be I realised 'OK, this is what I want to talk about, I want to write about my life, about real things that people can understand', so that's when I figured out the direction the rest of the project would take."