Music
There's much more than "Call Me Maybe" to this indie-pop hitmaker.
There is no visceral difference between someone like Taylor Swift and someone like Carly Rae Jepsen. They both write bright, sparkling pop music, predominantly focused on romance and the crater it leaves on ordinary lives. But Swift, of course, is one of the biggest stars in the world. Her record releases are industry-moving events. Her boyfriends are some of the most scrutinized people in the world.
Instead, Carly Rae Jepsen has fostered an underdog career playing the same venues as, like, LCD Soundsystem. The transcendental “Call Me Maybe” positioned her as a precarious "next big thing," but that never happened. Jepsen enjoys the same producers and songwriters as artists like The Weeknd and Justin Timberlake. She is very much a part of the machine, but her stardom has always felt more personal and intimate. It has been five years since she became famous, and frankly, her rebirth into a quasi-hipster goddess (while still retaining the same core pop sensibilities) is one of the most surprising storylines in the music industry.
It also helps that Carly Rae Jepsen has written some of the best hooks in modern music history. With her fourth studio album on the horizon, we collected the 10 best songs from her remarkable career.
10. “Good Time”
“Good Time” will never happen again. Released in the aftershocks of the titanic “Call Me Maybe,” Jepsen joined forces with sub-Postal Service peon Owl City (most famous for penning “Fireflies”). It is the exact sort of befuddled mashup between two up-and-comers trying to transcend their one-hit-wonder doom — the writers’ room couldn’t come up with much better than “whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.” Owl City died a slow death, and Jepsen reinvented herself as the people’s pop star, but “Good Time” still kinda bangs. Today, it sounds like our last dance with the version of Carly Rae that first seduced us.
9. “Gimmie Love”
If you could drill Carly Rae Jepsen down to her fundamental ethos, it would probably sound a lot like “Gimmie Love.” She wants love, she wants touch, she wants a panoramic bath of fuzzy, felt-tipped synths and crackling drum machines. It is affectionate, delicate and tasteful — the half-asleep murmurs of being next to someone you adore brought to life in a pop song. “The way we are together, wanna feel like this forever.”
8. “I Really Like You”
Carly Rae Jepsen is in love most of the time. Romantic love, sexual love, long-distance love, the fragments of a beleaguered, rapidly disappearing love. It is her M.O. She’s named records “Kiss” and “Emotion.” But on “I Really Like You” we catch Jepsen in a rare moment of temperance. “It’s way too soon, I know this isn’t love,” she teased, right before she expressed everything she’s feeling up to the brink of saying that dreaded word. “I Really Like You” served as the first single for "Emotion," which quickly revealed itself as an album with few sentimental restraints. It was the calm before the storm, complete with a fantastic Tom Hanks-starring music video.
7. “Tonight I’m Getting Over You”
Nobody gets over someone in a night. But sometimes you really feel like trying. The fifth single from Carly Rae Jepsen’s breakout sophomore record “Kiss” carries all the trademark textures of 2012 — complete with a seasick dubstep breakdown in the chorus — but it’s also an empathetic tribute to all sorts of bad decisions you make when you’re out of your head. We both know you’re ending this night as sad as you started it, but at least you’re trying.
6. “Fever”
“I wrote some things I didn’t send, three words to say that meant a lot to me.” “Fever,” in its wide-focus tender sprawl, did not make it onto "Emotion" proper. Instead, it’s one of the standouts on the remix album that punctuated Jepsen’s success in March of 2016. It’s bad advice; a tribute to the delirious moments of forsaken denial in the clean newness of a breakup. She steals his bike, rides it back to his place and collapses in a heap when she realizes his car is missing. Sometimes we are wrong, sometimes we don’t want to be right.
5. “Your Type”
“I still love you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you, I didn’t mean to say what I said.” “Your Type” might be the saddest Carly Rae Jepsen song in her discography. But there’s something almost reassuring that someone who’s so obsessed with love, in all of its wondrous forms, also occasionally feels a hard, unwelcome hangover. The shuttering quicksilver beat borrows from Robyn’s seminal “Dancing On My Own,” and the disorienting effect is almost exactly the same.
4. “Boy Problems”
In which Jepsen trades in her usual frosted pop melodies for something resembling an early '80s disco-funk banger. “Boy Problems” is a moment of levity on the very dramatic "Emotion," but lyrically it deals with the worst part of the breakup process. You’re tired of each other, tired of being sad, tired of dragging down the conversation with your friends — and yet you still end up in the same bed every weekend. But Jepsen takes control of her destiny with big blasts of magenta bass. No better revenge than an unshakeable beat.
3. “Call Me Maybe”
Carly Rae Jepsen is a failed pop star. A girl from the Washington/British Columbia border, an inauspicious third-place finish on “Canadian Idol.” She walked into a record deal and recorded a brief flash of pure light with “Call Me Maybe” — where blots of overjoyed strings match her scintillating voice yip for yip. It immediately went viral; a ready-made one-hit wonder infiltrating the Billboard 100 as YouTube links bounced across a newly ubiquitous network of social media. Carly Rae was positioned as a brunette Swift, but that never happened. She enticed her own following of skeptical hipsters with her own incomparable weirdness. But ground zero will always be “Call Me Maybe,” it flattened all prejudices and saved the world for a few moments. Never doubt the power of sublimity.
2. “Cut To The Feeling”
The tacit message of “Cut To The Feeling” was a smug, JAY-Z-style flex. Carly Rae Jepsen, still gearing up for her third album, drops an all-time smash under the banner of a French computer-animated film soundtrack. In a moment where she couldn’t be less incentivized to give us her best, she ratchets up to a million. So many people have sung about dancing on rooftops, cuddling in beds or cutting to the feeling more broadly. But Jepsen always manages to take you a little bit higher.
1. “Run Away With Me”
There is nothing subversive about “Run Away With Me.” It doesn’t worm its way into your skull with a hidden left hook of existential nervousness. No, this is a love song. It targets the same feelings Carly Rae always targets when she writes about love. Desperation, deliverance, fealty, liberation. A crystal-strewn wad of saxophone fills the middle, because of course Jepsen appropriates North America’s cheesiest fixture for a song about throwing off any pretenses and laying it all on the line. “Run Away With Me” is her trademark. She’ll be closing and opening sets with it for the rest of her life. For three minutes, Carly Rae Jepsen reminds the world that for all of our past traumas, we’re still capable of feeling like this.
