Carly Rae Jepsen's lockdown listening: 'My fridge caught on fire!'
I’m in sunny Los Angeles, quarantined solo with my cat. It’s been intense for a lot of different reasons. My fridge caught on fire. I didn’t know fridges to do that. My joke is that it wanted to be a stove.
There are days where I feel on top of the world, and other days where you can feel yourself going a little insane. I love laughing and I’ve been trying to make as many jokes and laugh as much as possible. It’s also been a time to reconnect with people in ways that – especially with my lifestyle before this – I didn’t get to. I’m trying to learn how to cook – that part’s not going very well. But it’s all good because I can send a picture of my miserable bread to everybody and make them laugh.
Writing songs over Zoom has been an interesting challenge. I’ve been working with Tavish Crowe – luckily we’ve been collaborators for years, so we really know each other well. We have our own little baby quarantine album by now. When I don’t have an album immediately due, I just allow myself to experiment. If you heard what we were making you’d be like, “every song sounds completely different” – and that’s the point.
I’m releasing the b-sides to my album Dedicated – I had always hoped that I would be able to share more songs because I had written some 200 for this project. I wouldn’t say this bsides album feels any less important to me than the original album. When quarantine happened, there was still some polishing to do – it was a little tricky to finish an album in quarantine, but I think we’re all adapting to it.
In truth, I’ve been listening to a lot of final mixes of my own music, but I take breaks. I’m going to nostalgia now a lot. This particular song by Bomba Estéreo has special memories for me of driving through Spain – sunshine and open windows. It’s great for dancing and making you feel good.
My friends and I have been sharing a song a day, making a little playlist together – this is my mood today, this is what I think you might need. This was a new discovery for me. It took me right out of a mood I didn’t wanna be in into one where I felt, y’know, excited to see my kitchen again. I connect to [the lyrics] a lot because I really like to play with fantasy in my own lyrics. It’s escapism for me. These songs are all loved-up, but I’m a single lass at the moment. I’ve always felt like throughout my lifetime it’s healthy for me to be in my own thoughts for a bit and do stuff that normally I wouldn’t have time to be doing.
This is a new one for me – a fellow songwriter said it had been her jam lately. I immediately felt like it was the catchiest thing ever, so I’ve been jamming that a lot.
A couple of years ago, I did a solo trip to Italy for three weeks. When I was a little girl I thought there would be something very empowering about travelling alone, and I never had time for it – I always travelled with a team. I had just gone through my previous breakup and I wanted to see the world, so Italy was my dream spot. I was doing these long walks by myself, and I would play this song by Valerie June on repeat – it was so trance-like. I went all over the place, taking trains. There were some lonely nights, but there were also some real victories, and I made some friends that I wasn’t expecting to. I had one of those times of my life when I felt like I grew a lot and it needed to happen.
Whatever I’m doing – getting ready to go out to the store, crying, smiling – I go to this song. It used to be my walking song in my early adulthood years in Vancouver, so there’s a little nostalgia there. I think it fits with what we’re all going through – as you get older and revisit a song you used to love as a kid, you end up feeling lyrics in a different way, so it was a real gift to land upon it again.