Listening to Carly Rae Jepsen

I listen to a lot of Carly. You should listen to her more, too + a brief playlist to get you started.

Every year, there is a discussion on what The Song of The Summer is. (For a pop girl like me, I think I'd have to give it to Charli xcx’s Everything’s Romantic or Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso.) And while I love this summer’s pop renaissance, every year I will always return to Carly Rae Jepsen, because Carly’s music is summer—It’ll always be August inside of a Carly song.

A fun fact about Canada: A minimum of 35% of music on the radio needs to be what is called CanCon (Canadian Content) So if you grew up here, a lot of the radio hits we thought were absolutely everywhere, were actually hits specifically on Canadian radio. Artists like Justin Bieber, Drake, The Weeknd are, yes, global stars today, but ten years ago, their ubiquity was more amplified here.

There are a lot of Canada Top 40’s singles I remember from being a teenager, but one that I’m sure will cause smiles and eye-rolls in equal measure is Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen. The song was a Canadian hit that was also a global one. Call Me Maybe was the best-selling single of 2012 and is the seventh best-selling single of all time. It went number one in fifteen countries, by all metrics, a once-in-a-lifetime success. I remember when this song came out and how you could not escape it. I was also a moody teenager who was obsessed with being “unique” and “not like other girls”, (I have since healed (mostly) from this internalised misogyny) and despised the track for its apparent girlishness and vapidity.

Over a decade later, I realise that Call Me Maybe is a sweet homage to first love, naive crushes and the inconvenience of intense feelings. I very unironically love Call Me Maybe. Carly’s ability to distill the quintessential teenage experience into a song with genuine empathy, humour and fun makes for the kind of summer song that brings me right back to riding bikes along suburban sidewalks, hands sticky with Freezie residue, laughter bubbling over gossip around sometimes boys, but also everything else. Because trust me, when you’re fourteen everything is a big deal. Everything feels like it needs a pop anthem to scream along to.

Carly released E•MO•TION in 2015 and nobody knew at the time, but it would shake up the pop music landscape forever. Initially a commercial failure, E•MO•TION captured the hearts of fans and nascent artists like Maggie Rogers and Rina Sawayama despite its lack of a hit single on the level of Call Me Maybe. Today, an album that’s nearly a decade old sounds fresh and totally effervescent. It sounds like 2020's music because this album showed everyone else that pop could be a bit different, while still sounding very much like pop. You can see how the 80s revival in chart hits was predicated by this album (Dua Lipa, The Weeknd, Taylor’s Reputation) but you can also see how pop music was made better by non-pop producers. E•MO•TION was co-written and produced by a line-up of indie artists from all over the world (From Dev Hynes to Rostam Batmanglij previously of Vampire Weekend), blurring the lines between industry genres and showing the world that pop music can be made better by serving a sonic vision over a trendy sensibility.

Carly writes dozens and dozens of songs for every album. She wrote over 200 for E•MO•TION. There were another sixty left from The Loneliest Time. It’s why she releases a Side B with every main album release. This element of her process is not only fascinating, but it’s also incredibly charming. She’s constantly honing her craft for every album, is unprecious about her music, and it shows us just how much fucking work writing good pop music is, and should be.

Great pop music has never been lazy or pandering. At its best, pop music is the art of emotionally connecting with millions of people. Of making millions of people feel understood in the span of a three to five-minute song. If that makes it sound like an impossible task, that’s because it nearly is. Most people fail at it. (Think back to every factory-made mindless song you don’t really remember the lyrics to but vaguely remember the melodies of *cough cough* Peaches *cough cough*)

It’s more than making something that sounds fun and scratches an aural itch during a promotional season. There are thousands of pop songs that just come and go. They’re easy listening that’s also easily forgotten. Great pop music is about crafting a sound that’s not only appealing, but distinct. Something that serves as an earworm on the surface but has a genuine depth of feeling that resonates with you beyond that initial dopamine high.

Pop music makes you want to dance, but it also makes you want to cry. It makes you think about your past and your first crush, but also your future and what you could become. It encapsulates the complexity of the universal human experience in a way that makes your personal experiences easier to face. They are the songs that make you feel like you’re not alone—that you never have been.

Carly’s music is just that. Yes, she writes about love. She writes about heartbreak in all its varying permutations and stages. She also writes about friendship, existentialism, purpose, freedom, and fame. She captures these feelings like lightning strikes in bottles. She shakes them up, drops in beads of colour and swirls them all around until they shimmer and sparkle. Sometimes they shock you as you touch them, but that’s the nature of it. It burns you but warms you in a way nothing else can. Her songs are the shock of first love, the fizzle of first loss, the burn of first betrayal. They’re all there to hold in your hands, just for a moment, giving you the freedom to let go, but also to return to them whenever you need.

The best thing about Carly is that she makes songs that approach life with abandon. That’s what I mean when I say her music brings the summer. It’s full of opportunity; like there’s so much more coming down a clear highway stretched out under an infinite blue sky. It’s music that feels open. That fearless vulnerability is what makes her so cool. Carly doesn't hide behind anything in her writing, any production is only there to enhance the honesty of the emotions she's laying out for us. There is purity of intention in every song, a refreshing earnestness, and a frank comedic sensibility that makes life feel more buoyant than it often deserves to be.

That's why you should listen to more Carly Rae Jepsen. Her music adds something sparkly to nights that feel starless. To get you started, here is what I believe to be an informative playlist of some of her discography. (This was so hard to decide upon, but these are staples and faves!)

So go on your phone, crank up the volume, and forget about what you think. Just feel. I promise you’ll be smiling, feeling like the sun is shining right onto your face, orange warmth blooming on the backs of your eyelids. (And if Party for One makes you cry a little bit upon more careful examination, know that you’re not alone.)