I ask Carly Rae Jepsen to make a choice: pick a favorite song on her new album, Dedicated. First, she says “I’ll Be Your Girl,” a bass-driven strut with a vaguely ‘90s alt-rock-y hook. But she admits that yesterday, her pick was “The Sound,” mostly because it was rainy out, and that song is “kind of melancholy feeling.” Previously, in a Rolling Stone profile, she’d chosen album-opener “Julien,” an intimate groove that’s generously coated in synth hits. Basically, what Jepsen likes depends on the day.
This kind of indecision is probably what makes it difficult to pick what songs go on the album. That and the fact there were a lot of tracks to choose from. In the making of her last record, E•MO•TION, it was rumored she wrote over 200 songs—a figure that is downright mythical in pop forums at this point. The same is supposedly true of Dedicated.
Which means the process is a process, one that, when laid out in Jepsen’s living room, doesn’t sound unlike a high school science project. There are poster boards. There are sticky notes. Behind the scenes, a spreadsheet is involved. Her assistant, Jenna, even devised a scoring system, which she explains to me, is “not an exact science” but does involve charts and graphs.
Over the course of four years, Jepsen’s shared music with collaborators, friends, family, and her A&R of course. There are late-night texts, emails, phone calls—lots of voicemails, too. Everyone has an opinion. Dedicated was almost a double album (though don’t count out the possibility of another release of B-sides, like she did with E•MO•TION).
Jepsen describes one big listening session at her house. People flew in from all over. They pool partied, ate lots of pizza, drank even more wine. And then it was time. Out came the voting cards, followed by the arguments. That’s when Jepsen knows it was working: when her songs are divisive.
“Everyone got tipsy and passionately angry at each other in like the loveliest way,” she says. But little did the Dedicated voting caucus know, Jepsen had already made a list of her dozen favorites before they arrived.
The popular vote didn’t end up mattering. She stuck mostly to her original list. The data and the graphs couldn’t trump the newfound confidence of pop’s most unassuming figure. This is Carly Rae Jepsen in 2019, a woman who can be indecisive and still know exactly what she wants.
The Internet is massive and mercurial, but on New Year’s Day of 2018, it had a clear and simple demand: arm Carly Rae Jepsen. At least one very specific part of the Internet (read: Tumblr) felt that way. “petition to give carly rae jepsen a sword,” the post says. “i like her and think she should have one”
Since then, some 70,000 users have reblogged that Tumblr post. Then people tweeted about it. And not long after, Photoshop-savvy teens were replacing her mic with a sword, making fan art, inserting her as a character into Smash Bros. The message was clear: this 33-year-old Canadian pop star must be weaponized.
The joke was brought to Jepsen’s attention by somebody, though she can’t remember who exactly asked her, “Have you seen this campaign to give you a sword?” Her response: “Why?”
The band theorized that maybe it had to do with her nickname, Carly Slay Jepsen. “I am like, I don't know man,” Jepsen says to me on a muggy New York afternoon. “But it's funny. And I didn't think of it twice, because it just was one of those quick passing things.” Which is often true of Internet memes—they come and they go.
But the sword thing returned. It finally happened IRL eight months later. There’s video of it, which also went viral. Jepsen is on stage at Lollapalooza, hitting the chorus of “Cut to the Feeling,” when a fan from the audience hands her an inflatable sword. Suddenly armed with an instrument with which she can literally cut to the feeling, Jepsen shouts, “Ho yeah, a sword!” sounding equal parts surprised, enthusiastic, and bewildered.
“I was so shocked,” Jepsen recalls. “I am looking at my band and they are just dying. They were like, Yeah, let's go with it.”
Jepsen’s windy career has bestowed her a number of labels: Canadian Idol contestant, "one-hit wonder," Broadway performer, hipster’s pop darling, Internet meme, folk hero. None of these reputations are ones she’d chosen for herself, but things she’d found herself inhabiting happily, even if not deliberately.
On stage, in front of thousands of people, Jepsen dances, sword in hand, like it is the most ordinary thing in the world. More to the point, she goes with it.
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Let’s recount Jepsen’s origin story super quick: You know the British Columbia-born singer for her ubiquitous 2011 earworm “Call Me Maybe.” Jepsen’s rise was meteoric in that it hit hard—enough to immediately obliterate every other song-of-the-summer contender—but it hit only once. Despite its critical recognition, the album that followed, Kiss, cratered, swallowed in a “Call Me Maybe”-sized hole of expectations. Four years later, she released the extraordinary (and even more critically celebrated) E•MO•TION, a poptimist’s dream of a record, equal parts anthemic and intimate, topped with a dollop of ‘80s pastiche.
Now, another four years later, she re-emerges from hibernation with Dedicated, a record with a wider range of influences. (“It's like ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and more!” she jokes, mimicking a radio liner.) If E•MO•TION was for the club, Dedicated is for the home.
“I'm 33,” she says. “I wanted to make an album that was an album that I would listen to when I listen to music.” Like when she’s driving, or vacuuming. Everyday things that could, at any point, turn into a dance party. Dedicated is full of what Jepsen calls “understated disco,” which might sound like a contradiction if we didn’t already live in the era in which YouTube videos titled “cute songs to help you cope with anxiety” get millions of views.
I ask Jepsen who she’s making songs for. She explains that she’s “writing for the feeling of connection,” from the place where things are authentic to her. She gets more specific. Also more vague. Take, for example, the experience of love at first sight. Then Jepsen backtracks. “I don't know that I believe in falling automatically in love.”
It sorta sounds like you do.
“But I have thought that I have fallen automatically in love before,” she clarifies. (Track 10 of Dedicated is titled “Automatically in Love,” after all.) “Songwriting is like indulging that feeling and hoping that you’re not alone in it. I believe that other people have felt the same way before.”
Her music gathers people into communities. Some might just call that fandom, but Jepsen’s stans are noticeably younger, often people who identify as LGBTQ or POC. I ask her why she thinks that is, and Jepsen says she’s not sure how to answer that. Then a second later, it becomes clear she’s actually thought about her answer to this question a lot.
“There have been times that I have felt too shy to express what I am feeling, or the emotions that I experience are too much and make people uncomfortable. That is a pretty universally felt thing that isn't talked about too much,” she says. “People often say to me, ‘You talk so much about love—how scary is that?’ And I am like, ‘Well, it shouldn't be that scary, it's kind of the most important thing in the whole world.’”
Pop music, when it works, does a couple things. First, it drills itself into your brain, to the point where the only thing more painful than hearing that hook for the millionth time is the thought of not hearing it one more time. But an enduring pop song achieves something else: it’s a blank slate, one that the listener can impose their own life onto—especially if that life has been lived in the margins. Jepsen’s best work often does this. It’s feelings-first music, ready to embrace you back.
“I think a lot of music can shy away and almost want to be a little too cool.” With a hint of pride, she declares: “I am unabashedly uncool.”
During her GQ shoot, Jepsen looks cool. She sports baggy high-waisted pants, then a long blazer, and later, a lot of black leather. The only constant across each outfit is her spiky blonde hair, a cut that looks like something Debbie Harry would sport if she were in a Final Fantasy game.
But later, during our interview, Jepsen is extremely chatty and very earnest, talkative in the way someone is when they spend a lot of time indoors. Her stories are winding. She talks about her friends and boyfriend constantly. She laughs at her own jokes. The whole thing is endearing, refreshing. In a world where musicians want to portray themselves as sexy, chilly, and largely apathetic, Carly Rae Jepsen is unafraid of being a big dork.
It’s why she writes dance songs for introverts. And she writes a lot of them, many of which you’ll never hear. Like E•MO•TION, the making of Dedicated involved a lot of songwriting, except this time, Jepsen was literally all over the place. For someone who admittedly spends a lot of time at their house in LA, she did quite a bit of traveling. She and producer Jack Antonoff met across three different cities. “The fun is chasing the song and chiseling until it feels right. And when it does, it's the best feeling in the world,” she says. The two of them wrote an entire record’s worth of material, which resulted in only one album cut, “I Want You in My Room.” (She’s hopeful those sessions with Antonoff might be released one day.)
Whereas Taylor Swift will lock the industry’s most expensive Swedes in a studio for a few months, Jepsen’s process is more chaotic and expansive. Sure, she did her stint in Sweden too, but she also wrote in Nicaragua, where the songs sounded a little Brian Wilson, like “stoner beach music.” It’s also not just about the sound. In Italy, which was mostly for post-break-up wine, Jepsen found herself feeling isolated. “That loneliness forced me to say hello to strangers, and no one gave two shits if I was a singer or not,” she says. Vulnerability (and pasta), it seems, are good for figuring yourself out.
Jepsen assures me she’s most comfortable in her grubby studio, a place where she feels safe, confident. But her surprisingly long career has taken its strange turns, and things like this GQ shoot, for instance, are getting more fun for her. Partly, she used to just let people dress her up and snap pictures. Now she’s less willing to let people tell her what to do.
“In these situations, I’m learning to be more vocal,” Jepsen says, which is a funny thing to hear from a singer.
Even four albums in, Jepsen doesn’t know what other people will like. For example, fan favorite “Cut to the Feeling” was a track that was deemed unworthy of E•MO•TION and B-Sides, but made its way onto the soundtrack of a Canadian-French animated movie called Ballerina. It dropped, unassumingly, one day on streaming services. Jepsen was in Italy at the time.
“I remember getting a call from label being like, ‘It's kind of taking off. Do you want to come home and do promo and we'll send you to London.’ I was, like, in Positano with my wine on the balcony like, ‘No, I'm good.’” Currently, “Cut to the Feeling” is Jepsen’s fourth-most streamed song on Spotify.
Then there are the songs that feel like they’ll be hits and don’t take off, at least not immediately. Jepsen and her band felt that way about E•MO•TION’s lead single, “Run Away with Me.” They put a lot behind it, felt good about it, and watched it stumble out of the gate. The song never charted meaningfully. But it found a home in the long tail of the Internet, a frequent selection on critics’ year-end “best song” lists, its siren-call saxophone eventually immortalized as a meme. It’s her third-most streamed song now.
If there’s a lesson, it’s that pop music is a crapshoot. If all that careful decision making is for naught, why not just release everything? I pose a scary hypothetical to Jepsen: How would you feel if all your demos leaked right now? After all, a similar thing happened to her pal Charli XCX two years ago.
“I mean, I can't imagine someone listening to all 200 songs,” she says.
The Internet will Photoshop you with swords. They will listen to 200 songs.
“The perfectionist in me would be sad because I would want to still do some workshopping on them,” she says. But maybe it should happen. “At some point I'm sure I'll be like an old grandma and I'll just be like, ‘There's everything.’”
I imagine Grandma Jepsen, on the balcony of an Italian villa, a glass of wine in hand, staring at the Tyrrhenian Sea, finally retired from a long career and having, likely by this point, written a million songs. It’s quite a vision, a lifetime of doing the hard work of being a pop artist and putting it all out there. There’s everything!
Jepsen does not leave her L.A. home very often, but when she does, she’ll sometimes get recognized at a restaurant. A fan might approach, tell her how much they like her music, and then Jepsen gets to thank them. A perfect interaction.
This is not true in Japan, Jepsen’s biggest market. (E•MO•TION was released there two months before it hit the U.S. where it immediately charted at the top spot.) She’s popular enough to do commercials for something called Moist Diane. When she arrives at the Tokyo airport, there is inevitably a party of fans waiting to greet her. The last time, a fan ran up to her, kissed her shoe, then fled the scene in tears. She appreciates the support, but it’s a lot.
Jepsen’s ex-boyfriend used to say that the dream is to be big in Japan, and then be able to come home and escape fame and just chill out. "You know what? There's something true about that," she admits.
In some ways, Jepsen has achieved the ideal level of fame: it’s just enough to do what she wants, to be at the level just before it becomes a bear trap. She can take four years to make an album. It can sound the way she wants. Hell, she can focus on making a whole album, rather than pursuing singles.
You can see that on Dedicated, which sounds like E•MO•TION, but as a record plays very differently. The songs are softer, subtler. The production is decidedly more understated. Even the single Jepsen released late last year, “Party for One,” is only included at the end as a bonus track, an obligation as if to say, This doesn’t really have a place on the album. These decisions feel like Jepsen at work, making choices for herself rather than anyone else’s expectations.
With Dedicated out in a matter of weeks, Jepsen is currently putting together the set list for her tour, which starts stateside before going international. I ask how she performs an album that was made for vacuuming to. That’s the fun part. “I'm really excited,” she says. “I hope people come with like their party pants on and we don't dust or vacuum, but we full on dance together.” Which is quite a journey for a record that was originally conceived as the soundtrack to house chores.
“Half of my life on stage has the feeling of when you walk out of being the most uncomfortable that you've ever been ever, and then a song or two in, being the most comfortable that you've ever felt ever in such like a vulnerable place.”
Jepsen has the ability to move in and out of her comfort zone, and as a performer, she grants that superpower to her listeners. It’s why people—young, queer, brown, and all of the above—gravitate so much to her music. Carly Rae Jepsen is someone who genuinely believes love is the most important thing in the whole world. She writes songs about her e•mo•tions, about how unwieldy they are, and then wields them in hundreds and hundreds of pop songs. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we get to hear a few.
Styling by Trayn Bensky.
