NO ONE-TRICK PONY
Carly Rae Jepsen’s E*MO*TION didn’t burn up the charts, but it proved she has more to offer than just one song,
No, Carly Rae Jepsen’s E*MO*TION didn’t set any sales records last year, but history will be on her side.
Judged a “commercial disappointment” by many music-industry pundits — who were judging the record’s fate against the impossible benchmark set by the 18 million copies sold worldwide of Jepsen’s 2011 breakthrough single “Call Me Maybe” — the British Columbia-born singer’s smashing third album nevertheless wound up one of the best reviewed releases of 2015.
It snuck onto year-end “best of” lists in Rolling Stone, Spin, Time, the Village Voice, the Guardian, Pitchfork, Vice, Stereogum and on and on and on. There’s a cult of E*MO*TION out there and it is fanatical.
Jepsen’s problem, perhaps, is that — as she described herself to one interviewer — she’s just “a regular, really boring person” disinterested in courting Bieber-esque tabloid infamy or constantly posting stylish selfies on Instagram.
That makes her, as Guardian critic Alexis Petridis put it, “a hard sell in a pop world packed with cartoonish Barbadian bad girls and weed-addled ex-Disney princesses devising ever more elaborate ways of sticking two fingers up at their old squeaky-clean personae.”
That’s also why E*MO*TION is so great, though. It stands on its own merits. “What really makes E*MO*TION refreshing isn’t what it includes — it’s what it leaves out,” noted Jessica Goldstein in Cosmopolitan, calling it “the best pop album of 2015.”
“Think: Who is Carly Rae Jepsen dating? Who broke her heart? Who’s in her squad? Who does she hate? Do you know? Do you care? Nope and nope. She is a rare, remarkable thing: a pop star we know almost nothing about . . .
“She is brandless in an era of #brands #brands #brands, an enigma in a field of oversharers.”
Jepsen herself is content with the response to E*MO*TION, even if the best the record could manage was a No. 8 showing on the album chart in her native Canada and a No. 18 in the States.
“Yeah, it couldn’t have gone better, in my mind,” she says from Kingston, one of the 26 stops on her current cross-Canada arena tour with Hedley and Francesco Yates.
“A few things were important to me and one of those things was to feel like it was something I could be really happy and proud about, regardless of what the perception was. And, to be honest, it’s been shocking to see so many people come to the shows who have actually spent time with the album and seem to know, like, the deep tracks. That was always a really kind of hungry desire of mine, to be able to not just have an album that had a couple of singles, but a whole array of songs that people could, hopefully, connect to and have as a part of their lives. So it’s been really, really cool to see.”
“I knew I had much more to offer than just that one song. That’s been a really strong fight of mine and it was a cool scene to see the transition has slowly, but surely happened.” CARLY RAE JEPSEN ON MOVING PAST ‘CALL ME MAYBE’
Really, all Jepsen — who lands in Toronto at the Air Canada Centre next Friday — needed to do to achieve success with the new record was to move past “Call Me Maybe,” to prove to the world at large that she was more than a one-trick pony.
And she’s done that, smartly taking a break after “Call Me Maybe” and her rush-released (but still rather good) 2012 album Kiss, to play Cinderella on Broadway, workshop nearly 200 songs with various cowriters for E*MO*TIONand let people forget about her for awhile, rather than pushing herself to come up with something new before she was ready.
“I knew I had much more to offer than just that one song,” she says, “so it’s been lovely to feel like that part of the show is just a fun celebration and a great singalong versus the only reason to come in. That’s been a really strong fight of mine and it was a cool scene to see the transition has slowly, but surely happened.”
She’s not lacking for work, either. After briefly returning to musical theatre for Fox’s Grease: Live! this past January, she was tapped to supply Netflix’s new Fuller House series with its theme song. And E*MO*TION is huge in Japan, so she’ll be returning there for a 12th time once this Canadian tour is up.
She has been and will be working on album No. 4 the whole time, too.
“I find I’m actually the most prolific on the road. And whether those ideas are good or not, they keep coming just because it’s a really inspiring time because you’re secluded from the rest of your worldly troubles.
"It’s sort of adult camping in this glamourized way where all you have to do is kill time during the day. I want to make sure I make the most of it.
“I can’t do a tour sanely if I’m not in the middle of creating something. It just becomes a little monotonous. The performing aspect is taken out of that — when I’m onstage it’s the best part of my day — but there’s a lot of hurry up and sit around and wait, and if I’m just reading books or watching TV that gets old pretty quick. I’m lucky enough to be touring with Tavish Crowe, who’s one of my favourite co-writers and collaborators, and Jared Manierka, who I’ve been travelling together with for awhile. We just started writing together and he’s really into the Motown kind of thing so he’s stretching my limits a little bit. So that’s how we travel. We travel and we write.”