Carly Rae Jepsen.Photo: Meredith Jenks
More than a decade since"Call Me Maybe"dominated radio airwaves,Carly Rae Jepsenis performing her biggest headline concerts to date — including a recent, sold-out show at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall in support of her new album,The Loneliest Time.
Carly Rae Jepsen.Meredith Jenks
“I really got a jolt into some kind of fame and stardom. There were fun things about it, and there was a lot that scared the s— out of me,” she says. “I was like, ‘I know I love music, and I know I love performing. There’s some high I get from this, but there’s parts of Hollywood I don’t totally jive with. How do I figure this out?'”
The 13-track album, out now, marks Jepsen’s most vulnerable body of work to date, as it was crafted throughout the pandemic, during which her grandmother died after a long period of illness. Isolated in California, she wasn’t able to travel home to be with family in Canada and found herself experiencing loneliness like never before.
Carly Rae Jepsen.Courtesy School Boy/Interscope Records
“That was my first experience, really, of love lost to that degree,” explains Jepsen. “It’s a really hard thing to even wrap words around. When I have an emotion so extreme that I don’t know what to do with it, part of my therapy has always been to try and process it through songwriting.”
In an office-turned-home-studio, she wrote through hardships and familial experiences on tracks like “Bends” and “Surrender My Heart” — but didn’t think such personal material would end up on the album until showing them to executives at her label, Interscope Records. “To my surprise and almost discomfort in a way, they really connected to this theme,” recalls Jepsen. “We started talking about how loneliness is the key ingredient to all of those extreme emotions, and that became really exciting to me.”
“When he came in, everything was working except for the headphones — eight pairs,” quips Jepsen. “We were laughing, and we’re like, ‘Oh my God, these ones have to work.’ I felt like I was wasting his time. I’m going to send him a really nice pair of headphones as a ‘Thank you. I’m so sorry about that’ gift.”
Recording with another icon from her home country marks a hugely full-circle moment in Jepsen’s career, which launched with a 2007 stint onCanadian Idol, where she finished in third place. Long after experiencing mainstream radio success with “Call Me Maybe,” the fact that Jepsen’s artistic skill has kept her career steadily growing is a testament to the drive she’s held since auditioning forIdol— where she bravely sang an original song against others’ encouragement.
“I thought it would be my one second on television, and I wanted to show people what I wrote,” she says. “I feel protective of the doe-eyed and vulnerable version of me that went onCanadian Idolin a weird way. [She was] about to get into some wild, intense scrutiny from all directions for the first time ever.”
If Jepsen could go back and give advice to her 21-year-old self waiting in line to audition for the singing competition show, what would she say? “I’d want to put on that layer of alligator skin, like, ‘Get ready. This is going to be tough, but it’s tough love that you need, because the business out there is going to be even tougher,'” she expresses. “In hindsight, I wish I could’ve told myself, ‘This is going to hurt, but it’s going to be worth it to see if you have the stamina to handle this thing.'”
source: people.com
