On the first day of 2018, a Tumblr user published a brief, modest proposal: “petition to give carly rae jepsen a sword.” Why, you ask? Simple: “i like her and think she should have one.” (The suggestion would have seemed random only if you did not follow this particular user, @swordlesbianopinions; “i’m a lesbian who loves swords and i have opinions, and this blog is mostly about my love of girls and swords.”) A year and a half later, at least 70,492 people agree that Carly Rae Jepsen should have a sword—and probably many more than that, because that’s only the number of people who reblogged that post on Tumblr. The “petition” soon took off in an even wider sense. Fans began photoshopping images of the unassuming “Call Me Maybe” artist brandishing her blade. Later, someone drew her singing the chorus of one of her best songs—I wanna cut to the feeling, oh yeah!—with a mic in one hand and a sword in the other, wielding them both like a swashbuckling warrior of the heart.
Carly Rae Jepsen makes operatically playful pop music that invites the listener to connect with their inner child—or more precisely, their inner crush-struck 16-year-old. She told The Guardian recently that when she wrote the chorus of her breakthrough megahit, “Call Me Maybe,” she was trying to re-create a feeling of “childish excitement.” Mission accomplished. Inescapable in the summer of 2012, the song was a modern masterpiece of giddy teen-pop, even though Jepsen was 26 when it came out—damn near late middle age in the youth-obsessed realm of pop music. Still, she’d always been a little out of step with her biological age; during her fateful audition for Canadian Idol in 2007, one of the judges told her she seemed like she was “21 going on 14.”
But Jepsen’s forever-young attitude never seems like a pose or a marketing strategy. What makes her so much more endearing than cloying is that she’s never trying to be anything she’s not. Some might dismiss her music as anachronistically chaste and childlike, but as she has matured over the past decade she’s come to see it as a way to fuse youthful open-heartedness and the wisdom of adulthood. “The butterflies stage doesn’t stop happening as you get older,” she told The Guardian. “In fact, it intensifies as you realize how present you should be, because it’s not going to last. You are more awake for it. Which makes it bittersweet.”
Jepsen’s moment as mainstream pop’s It Girl was similarly fleeting. “Call Me Maybe” was a global phenomenon in 2012: It was the year’s best-selling single worldwide and Vevo’s most-watched music video. Its appeal seemed universal. It got the seal of approval from Justin Bieber, the 2012 U.S. Olympic swim team, and a former secretary of state. And then … no one really bought the album. Kiss debuted at no. 6 on the Billboard chart when it was released that September, selling only 46,000 copies in its first week—not exactly a disastrous figure, but also not what you’d expect from the artist with the best-selling blockbuster single of the year. Had “Call Me Maybe” fatigue set in as summer aged into fall? Did people prefer Jepsen’s sugar-rush enthusiasm in snack-sized three-minute bites? Was the pop music industry in general moving away from the album format? Probably a bit of all these things. But regardless of the reason, Kiss’s fate set up a puzzling pattern for the rest of Jepsen’s career.
To her credit, she didn’t try to tailor her music to what was selling, but instead leaned even heavier into what wasn’t—namely, immaculate, mature no-filler pop albums. (“A hit gives you artistic freedom,” she said recently, and her career has definitely proved that true.) In 2015 she released Emotion, one of the best pop records of the decade. But pop, in Jepsen’s case, wasn’t exactly short for “popular.” It says something that the album’s weakest and most divisive track was the Big Radio Single, “I Really Like You,” a chirpy synth-pop confection that seemed explicitly designed to become “Call Me Maybe 2.0.”
It didn’t. Instead it peaked at no. 39 on the Billboard chart, and Emotion sold even worse than Kiss. At least publicly, that didn’t seem to faze Jepsen; she told BuzzFeed at the end of 2015 that her aspiration was never to be the next Katy Perry or Taylor Swift. “I’m a human being and there’s many sides to me,” she said, “but I’m not about creating this larger-than-life image so that it sells better. I find that idea like a prison. It sounds exhausting.” Though Emotion didn’t find mainstream success, it eventually became a kind of internet-fueled cult sensation, winning her a devoted audience of pop aficionados and leftist-meme lords. By 2015 she’d officially become an alternative, or maybe she always was. Even during the “Call Me Maybe” days there was something incongruously normal about Jepsen; she stuck out in a pop world used to crafting “weirdness” and exaggerated personas into marketing materials. But that also meant that, in her own way, she was subversive—and the relatively modest number of people who adored Emotion got to feel like they were in on a secret. While the rest of the pop world was DGAFing and numbing feelings, Jepsen gave a fuck, constitutionally. She felt.
Carly Rae Jepsen has no chill, in the very best way. “Gimme love,” she pleads on one song from Emotion, “gimme love gimme love gimme love gimme love gimme touch—’cause I want what I want, do you think that I want too much?” Impossible! I mean, the album was called E-MO-TION, stylized just like that, a typographical shout, emphasis on all the syllables. Her songs create for the listener a private, cavernous haven where no one is going to judge you for being a little bit extra. There’s something old-school and even against the grain about her brand of fairy tale romanticism in this age of thank-u-next; the character Jepsen voices in most of her songs is not OK with “keeping things casual.” If catching feelings is a disease, Carly Rae Jepsen is like, “INFECT ME.” She is Googling wedding dresses immediately after right-swiping on Tinder and she is not going to apologize for it. An electric connection between two people is something timeless and holy in her songs. And her songs are always about two people; even when it seems like they are about three (“I Know You Have a Girlfriend”) or one (“Party for One”), they are still somehow about two.
The best Carly Rae Jepsen songs strain for something ever-so-slightly impossible, lingering just beyond her grasp. “I’m not the type of girl for you,” she sang on Emotion, “I’m not going to pretend / That I’m the type of girl that you call more than a friend”—except of course she was, because otherwise the song and all its potent yearning wouldn’t exist. “I wanna cut through the clouds, break the ceiling,” goes the chorus of “Cut to the Feeling,” an Emotion B-side and one-off cut from the soundtrack of the French-Canadian animated movie Ballerina that became an unexpected fan favorite. (It’s now her fifth-most-streamed track on Spotify, much to her surprise.) I remember learning once, and finding it quite poetic, that the etymology of the word desire was linked to an old Latin verb meaning “to gaze at the star.” That’s the sort of connection that exists in Jepsen’s wonderfully needy music—an outstretched hand, momentarily so caught up in longing that it believes it can bridge an impossible distance and touch the sky.
Here is an incredibly Carly Rae Jepsen story about one of the songs on her new album, Dedicated: During a writing session, Jepsen and some of her collaborators (“all musical-theater nerds”) were talking about their love of “He Needs Me,” the breathless little Harry Nilsson–penned reverie that Shelley Duvall sings in Robert Altman’s 1980 musical Popeye. They started riffing on a modern, more full-bodied rendition of Olive Oyl’s love theme, “funked it out,” in Jepsen’s words. She loved what they came up with, but people on her team told her that Disney owned the rights to the Popeye soundtrack—and just try to get Disney to license something. Undeterred, Jepsen “drove to Disneyland with a fake contract for Mickey Mouse, got the mouse to sign it, then sent a photo to her record label who got onto Disney and pushed it through.” And that is Carly Rae Jepsen in a nutshell: So wholesome and nerdy in a very specific way that she is actually kind of a renegade. Maybe she doesn’t even need a sword.
Dedicated is Jepsen’s first full-length record in four years, and as usual she took her time, wrote way too many songs for it (200, according to Rolling Stone) and then had to whittle the track list down to “only” 15. She certainly chose the right one to lead with: The sleek, sparse, disco-tinged “Julien” is top-tier Jepsen, its shy, understated verses building to a jubilant firework of a chorus. Some songwriters mine old relationships for material; Jepsen hears melodies so easily that she can even get inspired by the cadence of an ex’s name. “I did have a boyfriend named Julien back in the day,” she said in a recent NPR interview. “The best thing about him was—so many things. But the thing that stuck out to me was his name being so musical.”
None of the other singles Jepsen has released in the leadup to the new album have been quite as good as “Julien.” The euphoric “Now That I Found You” is perfectly serviceable CRJ, and it’s easy to imagine it on the (very good) Emotion B-sides EP she released in 2016. The same goes for the bubblegum self-love anthem “Party for One.” Most indicative of the changes Jepsen is trying to make on this record, though, is the sultry second track, “No Drug Like Me.” “When your mouth is running dry / Keep head high / Hold on baby,” she sings in a breathy falsetto, “you ain’t tried no drug like me.” Lyrically, the song seems a bit generic and stale (if you’re still trying to mine the love-as-drug pop-lyric metaphor in 2019, you’d better have a killer hook to justify it) and you can feel Jepsen straining a bit to sell her role as the seductress. On this album she sings in her vaporous upper register more than she ever has before, and, combined with excessive robotic vocal effects (“Want You in My Room”) and some choruses heavily assisted by backing vocals (“Automatically in Love”), her presence on Dedicated sometimes gets lost.
Just because Dedicated isn’t as consistent as Emotion doesn’t mean there aren’t some instant CRJ classics, though. “I’ll Be Your Girl” dials up the melodrama (and as in her most wrenching songs, there’s a major obstacle to happiness: “I go crazy, see red when she’s touching you now”). My favorite song just might be “The Sound,” a mid-tempo, vaguely Ace of Base–ish synth-pop track with a gloriously exasperated pre-chorus (“God, you make me so tired!”) and an infectious hook that finds Jepsen daring a lover to match her vulnerability: “Love is more than telling me you want it / I don’t need the words / I want the sound.” Something about the grain in her voice tells you she’s once again after something she’s not going to get.
“I feel more confident in my weirdness now,” Jepsen told The Guardian, speaking of the difference between Dedicated and “Call Me Maybe.” But aside from making a sexy Popeye jam (three words I never thought I’d string together) I’m not sure I hear that freak flag flying in her music quite yet. I don’t expect her to go full Charli XCX, but Jepsen has no reason not to get more indulgent: She has all but given up tailoring her music to radio, instead focusing on a small, niche audience so devoted to her that they’d start an internet campaign to arm her for battle. What’s there to lose?
Eight months after it started, though, the prophecy was fulfilled: While she was performing “Cut to the Feeling” at Lollapalooza last year, a fan in the front row handed her a toy sword, like something from a children’s pirate costume. “Oh yeah, a sword!” said a slightly puzzled but ultimately enthusiastic Jepsen. Maybe, seven years after “Call Me Maybe,” that has become an odd and almost paradoxical part of her left-of-center charm: Carly Rae Jepsen seems, quite endearingly, to be the least weird person who likes her music.