Carly Rae Jepsen: ‘I sound gritty because I was vaping for a week’
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Version 0 of 1. Last month, appearing on US television at the beginning of the promotional campaign for her ludicrously catchy new single I Really Like You, Carly Rae Jepsen did something genuinely shocking; she forgot the lyrics to a song so embedded in popular culture it has been sung by everyone from former US secretary of state Colin Powell to the Cookie Monster and adopted by cheerleaders from Miami to Crystal Palace. Even US soldiers deployed in Afghanistan made their own tribute video for Call Me Maybe. “We did Good Morning America and they wanted a verse and chorus of Call Me Maybe,” she explains, almost giddy at her own recklessness, “and basically I ended up flubbing it. I never thought I’d get the words wrong to that song.” We’re sitting outside her local coffee shop (Grilled Cheese Invitational Winner three years in a row, no less), a short walk from her apartment in the studied bohemia of LA’s Franklin Village. Looming opposite is the faux French-Normandy castle of the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre. Even with this strange mix of free-thinking latte drinkers and gullible sci-fi fans with too much money, you get the impression you could walk up to anyone here and they would be able to recite all of Call Me Maybe word for word. Released originally in her native Canada towards the end of 2011, Call Me Maybe – a song with more hooks than a Peter Pan-themed fishing convention – became a global phenomenon after fellow Canadian Justin Bieber made an apparently off-the-cuff viral video for the song featuring his then girlfriend Selena Gomez (current view count 70m). With startling serendipity, Jepsen was quickly signed by Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun and the song was released globally in March the following year, suddenly propelling Jepsen into the limelight. Related: The best song of 2012: Carly Rae Jepsen – Call Me Maybe Its success reads like a pre-performance X Factor montage: No 1 in 15 countries, 13m sales globally, the biggest-selling single of 2012, 669m views on YouTube, nine weeks at the top of the Billboard 100. Not forgetting it being voted the best song of 2012 by the Guardian’s music writers. A radio mainstay (in a recent Jepsen interview, a DJ referred to it more than once as “a virus”), it also dominated Tumblr like a ready-made meme, while if you type in “Call Me Maybe parody” into YouTube, you’ll get more than 325,000 results. Celebrated by everyone from Popjustice to Pitchfork to the indie world’s chosen pop musicologist Owen Pallett, it became that rare thing; a pop juggernaut that seemed to transcend criticism, uniting fans of all genres through sheer force of melody. Unfortunately for Jepsen, it also steamrollered its way through the accompanying album, Kiss. Littered with sugary-sweet pop confections, the album melted in the reflected glory of Call Me Maybe, with only one other single making a dent.In a pop world dominated by bold, highly sexualised characters whose lives are displayed in glorious technicolour via social media, Carly Rae Jepsen felt like an old-fashioned throwback to a much more innocent time; a twentysomething, teen-acting Tumblr Tiffany, almost. That assumes people noticed Jepsen at all. Such was the all-encompassing power of Call Me Maybe, it felt like it was almost irrelevant as to who was singing it, which poses a slight problem ahead of her forthcoming new album, Emotion. “It didn’t really feel like I was in the centre of it,” she says of Maybemania. “It felt like something that took off and I was running to catch up with it.” Putting a more positive spin on it, she adds: “It was separate from me, but in a really lovely way. I like that it became its own little thing. It didn’t feel like it was just my song, it belonged to other people and that’s the best thing about music.” If she’d have had her way it wouldn’t have been the first single at all. “I was fighting tooth and nail for another song to be on the radio,” she says. “Even with I Really Like You, I had been sending in songs every week to my label and I had no idea that was going to be the one that would work. I have zero ear for the radio, apparently.” With a few year’s distance, she is relatively sanguine about the success or not of Kiss, an album she had just two months to record. “I look back and I’m proud of the album but clearly nothing did as well as that song and it was a challenge to get attention on the rest of the B-side tracks,” she says, laughing. “But it was a happy challenge and a problem you can go at two ways; you can either be really pissed off or you can be grateful that you had some attention at all. I did the latter. I saw it as an amazing gift that has allowed me to take my time with this new record and make sure that I have a really strong body of work and not just one song.” Having already tried various routes to a record deal, Jepsen, 29, was probably better prepared than most for the glare of the limelight – she was a veteran of talent shows by the time she finished high school. She enrolled at the Canadian College of Performing Arts in Victoria – a school Jepsen describes as “like Fame: no math, all ballet” – but grew bored of all the tap dancing and stage fighting. “I had this little songwriting bug and I wanted to go and live this bohemian lifestyle in the city and be an artist, so I somehow convinced my parents that’s what I was going to do and so I moved back to Vancouver.” After singing in coffee shops she also worked in, and performing in a swing band for a couple of years, she auditioned for Canadian Idol, eventually finishing third. This was followed by the release of her debut album, Tug of War, in 2008, a cutesy, heart-on-sleeve collection of diary-entries-turned-into-songs. That emotional naivety and refreshing innocence found its way into the massive pop songs that followed. Both Call Me Maybe and I Really Like You – which comes with a video featuring a lip-synching Tom Hanks – feel like sonic time capsules, taking the listener back to a time of intense school crushes, clammy fumbles in the park and a pervading sense of teenage longing. In Jepsen’s songs, relationships never seem to make it past third base. “I think I Really Like You is about [sex],” she says. “It’s basically saying, ‘It’s not love yet, but I like you, so what do you think?’ It’s a bit of a hook-up.” To be fair, there is a bit of hand holding in it, I say. “I mean, there’s no spanking going on if that’s what you’re asking. You’re barking up the wrong tree!” How about this sense that you represent the girl next door in comparison to the otherworldly appeal of a Rihanna or a Lady Gaga. “I can’t imagine anyone’s comfortable being pigeonholed into one stereotype of who they are and who they’re supposed to be for ever,” she says. “That sounds like some sort of hell, actually. I’m constantly fighting and it’s an uphill battle because, in the world of pop, people are trying to put you in a hole and label you and I’m constantly trying to be as authentic as I can.” There’s a pause for a slurp of coffee. “I would love to wear a meat dress at some point! Who wouldn’t?” Related: US marines parody Call Me Maybe spoof Plus, I say, if they’re off making sweary songs with Kanye or sporting a flowerpot on their head, then it leaves space for a different kind of pop star. “Which is like a non-pop star; a regular, really boring person,” she says with a raised eyebrow and a laugh. “I think I’m a little bit of a romantic at heart, for sure. Is that terrible? Does that make me a big old geek.” With the album campaign for Kiss winding down last year, Jepsen returned to her acting roots, spending most of 2014 playing the lead in a Broadway production of Cinderella. It felt to outsiders like the beginning of the end. For Jepsen, however, it was the perfect way to step out of the limelight and reassess what she wanted to do with her music. “I knew I wanted to take that break and I knew that, with this album, I wanted it to be a little to the left of where Kiss was and the only way to do that was with some significant time off,” she says. “Not just to write songs, but for the public to adjust to that idea.” She quickly drew up a checklist of people she wanted to collaborate with (“I’d be like, ‘I love that Solange song. Who did that? Oh, Dev Hynes did that,’ and so I’d email him”), eventually recording more than 200 songs split between alt-pop practitioners such as Hynes (on the devastatingly lovely slow jam All That), Ariel Rechtshaid, Tegan and Sara and Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij (the lyrically dark Warm Blood), and gold-plated hit-makers such as Sia (the 90s-referencing Boy Problems), Max Martin and Greg Kurstin. One other new song, the Robynesque Your Type, was penned with Swedish legends Rami Yacoub and Carl Falk in one debauched night in Stockholm. “That was written at four in the morning when I was losing my mind,” she says. What? During a drug-fuelled out-of-body experience? “They got me hooked for a week on those little fake cigarettes that taste of strawberries. You can hear it in my voice, I sound all gritty. It’s because I was vaping for a week.” Emotion – which is due in the summer and is currently being whittled down to its final tracklisting – feels like the work of someone more relaxed with who they are and more in control of what they do. “I have been in studios where people aren’t familiar with me or my writing and they think I’m just decoration. But I’m not just there to sing the song and pretend that I wrote it.” While Meghan Trainor followed up her own Call Me Maybe in the shape of All About That Bass with an ever-decreasing succession of facsimiles, Jepsen is keen to create some distance, choosing to debut the low-slung groove of All That alongside I Really Like You’s hyper-charged pop on a recent episode of Saturday Night Live. “I’m trying to think of the success of this album as me feeling confident about my choices – if they do well, then great. If they get shat on, well, as long as I’ve felt good about them, then that’s the success for me. Even with I Really Like You I was like, ‘I hope it works but I hope it doesn’t work too well because I want to move on.’ I really want to learn from that and shine attention on to these other songs.” I Really Like You is released on 26 April on Polydor. |