Carly Rae Jepsen, With a New Album, Is Definitely Changing Her NumberCarly Rae Jepsen pushes into more adventurous songwriting on her new album, “Emotion.”
Credit Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times
Gliding through a party for marriage equality at Cipriani Wall Street recently, an international pop star, sticking close to her bodyguard and multiple handlers, was not immediately recognizable despite being slated as the night’s headlining entertainment.
“Who’s that?” gawkers asked repeatedly, cellphones at the ready in case the opportunity for a selfie with someone of note presented itself. Upon being whispered her name, a man replied, “Oh, that’s ‘Call Me Maybe?’ ” He turned to his companion: “That’s ‘Call Me Maybe.’ ” The pair requested a selfie.
Carly Rae Jepsen is used to it. First released in her native Canada in 2011, Ms. Jepsen’s song “Call Me Maybe” spent the next year burrowing its way into brains all over, from Justin Bieber, who connected the singer with his manager and record label, to American troops in Afghanistan and even Colin Powell, all of whom performed their own renditions. The single has been purchased more than 18 million times worldwide, and its official video has more than 700 million views on YouTube.
There was also an album, “Kiss” (2012), which could only be overshadowed, selling fewer than 300,000 copies, even though it contained more flavors of Ms. Jepsen’s slyly enduring bubble-gum pop.
This month, she returns with an even stronger collection, “Emotion,” out Aug. 21. It’s the result of a long, slow and deliberate build — with a detour to Broadway — by Ms. Jepsen, and patience from her diverse songwriting collaborators and corporate label backers. Borne of more than 200 songs and a few attempted and aborted styles, the album manages to be cohesive in sound (’80s-influenced synth pop) and message (it’s possible to be coy, grown and sexy all at once). It is also brimming with potential radio singles ripe for group singalongs.
That’s not to say there’s a “Call Me Maybe” among the 12 gleaming tracks — and, insomuch as manufacturing a global sensation is possible, it may be by design. “We had the biggest single in the world last time and didn’t have the biggest album,” said Scooter Braun, Ms. Jepsen’s manager and the co-executive producer (along with Mr. Bieber) of “Emotion,” which will be released by Mr. Braun’s Schoolboy Records and Interscope. “This time we wanted to stop worrying about singles and focus on having a critically acclaimed album.” Such consistency has been essentially nonexistent in following up novelty singles that went beyond viral — Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” “Gangnam Style” by Psy, another act of Mr. Braun’s — and so Ms. Jepsen also serves as a test case for the Internet’s star-making abilities. While she had ideas for making a quality return, Ms. Jepsen, 29, insisted on taking her time after rushing to deliver “Kiss” in about two months to catch the jet stream of “Call Me Maybe.” “I didn’t really understand that you could say, ‘No, that’s too fast,’ ” she recalled at a Brooklyn bar over sloppy nachos the day after her performance at Cipriani. “There’s such a gratitude when people are paying attention to you after so long busking on the street.”
After “Kiss,” knowing she might never top her first single commercially, Ms. Jepsen, who maintains the innocent grin and sprite-like energy of a performative teenager, took the role of Cinderella on Broadway for four months. She gained valuable perspective, if not rave reviews. “I’m aware that I am defined” by ‘Call Me Maybe’ “to other people,” she said. “Part of why I took so long with this album was seriously taking time to change my thinking, so it wasn’t about proving anything.” Being in New York for “Cinderella” “helped me shake that off,” said Ms. Jepsen, who was raised in the small mountain town of Mission, British Columbia.
Throughout her stage run, Ms. Jepsen never stopped writing music, tasking John Ehmann, her artistic development representative at Interscope, with tracking down dream collaborators, including some he had never heard of. “I was obsessed with Solange’s ‘Losing You,’ and I was like, who made this?” Ms. Jepsen said of a track by Beyoncé’s indie-leaning younger sister. “That same thing happened with Sky Ferreira’s ‘You’re Not the One.’ ”
Those songs led her to their co-writers and producers, Dev Hynes and Ariel Rechtshaid, frequent collaborators who have spun their deeply textured work with hook-conscious underground darlings (Jessie Ware, Vampire Weekend, Haim) into pop gold, and earned them studio time with Beyoncé, Florence and the Machine, Madonna, and Britney Spears.
“She got in touch through management and said she was a fan, but I didn’t really believe it — people just say that,” Mr. Hynes said. “I didn’t know how involved she was with things.”
But at a series of studio dates in New York, Ms. Jepsen won over Mr. Hynes with her vocal ability and work ethic as she put in time before or after performances of “Cinderella.”
Ms. Jepsen said her first session with Mr. Hynes was “nerve-racking, because I was so desperate to prove myself,” although not in the one-hit-wonder sense. “There’s a stigma attached to being a pop artist that you don’t write or you’re in the room and get credit but you didn’t do anything,” she said.
But they quickly found a groove, building a song from the sketch of a slow jam by Mr. Hynes that would soon become Ms. Jepsen’s lane-changing reintroduction to the pop world. “All That,” their Prince-like power ballad, with later contributions from Mr. Rechtshaid, is not only downtempo but also convincingly seductive, trading the passive coquettishness of “Call Me Maybe” and “Kiss” for (still PG-13) demands: “Show me if you want me/If I’m all that.”
It’s a thread that runs through “Emotion.” “Baby, take me to the feeling/I’ll be your sinner in secret/When the lights go out,” she sings on the album opener and second single, “Run Away With Me.” On the album’s title track, she begins, “Be tormented by me, babe,” adding later, “Drink tequila for me.”
Yet before Ms. Jepsen could introduce her more age-appropriate side to her many tween, Bieber-oriented fans, the market required a transition. “ ‘Kiss’ was steered in a young direction, but knowingly so,” she said.
Mr. Braun, who had been having monthly meetings with Ms. Jepsen to gauge her writing progress, said he had been enjoying her new, Cyndi Lauper-ish vibe but told her “we needed something that could get us over that bridge,” he recalled. “Something that could satisfy the expectations of ‘Call Me Maybe’ but open us up to the rest of what you want to do.”
It came in the form of “I Really Like You,” which was released in March as the album’s first single, accompanied by a video starring Tom Hanks, a buddy of Mr. Braun’s, who lip-syncs the innocent earworm and is joined in a cameo by Mr. Bieber (good enough for 85 million views so far).
Sharon Datsur, senior vice president for programming at the broadcaster iHeartMedia, said the song was Ms. Jepsen “dipping her toe back into familiar waters for the audience, to get them excited.” That “slight familiarity” is also important for radio programmers, she said.
While the song only hit No. 39 on the Billboard Hot 100, Ms. Jepsen was able to pair it with “All That” for a performance on “Saturday Night Live” in April, putting her dualities on display. (Even “I Really Like You” hints at something offbeat, with the so-creepy-it’s-romantic lyric, “Who gave you eyes like that/said you could keep them?”)
Steve Berman, the vice chairman of Interscope/Geffen/A&M and an industry marketing guru, said Ms. Jepsen’s “S.N.L.” performance was “an opportunity for her to say, ‘Look, I’m going to play my single,’ but I’m also going to say, ‘This is a new side of me that I want you to see and that I’m really proud of.’ ”
Recorded mostly in New York and Los Angeles, where Ms. Jepsen lives now, the rest of “Emotion” finds a balance between those two poles, with contributions from the Swedish hitmakers Shellback and Mattman & Robin, who worked on Taylor Swift’s similarly retro “1989”; Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij (“Warm Blood”); and Sia Furler, who splits the difference on the sugary “Boy Problems” and “Making the Most of the Night.”
Mr. Rechtshaid, who is credited on “All That” and “When I Needed You,” said that pop music and indie sensibilities were moving closer together, giving an act like Ms. Jepsen new space to explore. “We were so far outside of what is considered the mainstream, doing our thing, and those lines have just started to fade over the past five years,” he said. “Getting me and Dev in the room sort of implied what she was after.”
Mr. Hynes credits Ms. Jepsen with truly wanting to develop a new aesthetic, rather than just collecting the cachet that comes with working alongside Pitchfork-approved artists. “I can tell when that’s happening because people will ask me to do one thing and then want it changed,” he said. “Whenever that happens, I know you don’t actually want what my songs sound like, you just want how people reacted to them.”
For Ms. Jepsen, who scrapped an entire folkier pop album on the way to the buzzing electronics of “Emotion,” pushing into more adventurous songwriting is becoming as addictive as one of her songs. “I want to go even weirder on the next album,” she said. “My desire now is to see how far I can stretch pop.”
Her team just might let her. “I have to give kudos to Scooter, because he’s got a lot of different artists on his roster” and unlike many of them “I write my songs,” she said. While Mr. Braun used to send Ms. Jepsen complete tracks, encouraging her to record work by others without co-writing, his trust in her is growing.
“To my delight, one day he accidentally sent my own song to me — he said, ‘I think this would really suit you,’ ” Ms. Jepsen said of an unreleased demo. “He didn’t know I’d written it.”
Her response? “I was like: ‘Scoots, I wrote “Call Me Maybe”! That’s why you signed me.’ ”
www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/arts/music/carly-rae-jepsen-with-a-new-album-is-definitely-changing-her-number.html