“I need a happier start,” Carly Rae Jepsen admits to me. She’s just decided that the song she’s been using as an alarm for the past year and a half is too sad. “It’s a Dev Hynes song, which I love, but it’s so melancholy,” she says before taking a breath and wearily singing the first lines of “With Him”: “You chose to stay away from me/I chose to try to let you in.” As she takes off her jacket and gets comfortable on a couch inside Manhattan’s One World Trade Center, I briefly wonder if I could also pull off a faded, floral-print mock turtleneck before realizing that, duh, I cannot. “Every morning,” she adds, “I say out loud to my boyfriend, ‘I need to change that song.’” But as we continue to chat about the music Jepsen listened to most often during her childhood, the contemplative track stops sounding like such an odd choice for her to wake up to.
“I grew up in two different houses,” says the British Columbia, Canada native, whose parents divorced and married other people by the time she was 5 years old. Her mother played a lot of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen; her father, who first taught her to play the guitar, preferred John Denver and James Taylor. Later, when Jepsen became close to her grandmother, jazz vocalists like Billie Holiday and Chet Baker were added to the mix. Of her four parents, the only one who favored the sort of infectious pop that has defined Jepsen’s career since 2011’s “Call Me Maybe” was her stepmother, Patti. When the two of them had a night alone, they would dress up in leather pants, tie their hair up in ponytails, and dance to Janet Jackson, Paula Abdul, and Donny Osmond.
But those dance parties were a musical anomaly. Even as a teen, when Top 40 radio is often a great unifier, Jepsen wasn’t well-versed in pop. As a theater kid, she was more into the music of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Evita. And as the daughter of a Joni Mitchell obsessive, she found herself drawn to the songwriter’s ’90s acolytes, like Sarah McLachlan. There were moments in her youth when she found upbeat pop inescapable, though, like when she approached an employee at a record store and asked for help finding a song. This was before Googling lyrics was a thing, so she had to use her voice. “Tell me what you want, what you really want,” she sang to the clerk. “Come right this way,” he groaned before directing her to the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe.”
That slow journey towards embracing pop is a narrative that’s mirrored in her career, during which she’s gone from playing small venues in Vancouver (when she wasn’t working shifts at the coffee shop) to a stint on “Canadian Idol” that led to her first single (a John Denver cover) to the behemoth that was “Call Me Maybe.” Then came two critically beloved albums—2012’s Kiss and 2015’s E•MO•TION—defined by their pitch-perfect blend of earnest ’80s nostalgia and contemporary production. Dedicated, her latest LP, follows closely in those footsteps, with songs that alternate between helplessly-in-love and happily-out-of-it without losing a beat.
As our time together winds down, I circle back to the topic of her dreaded morning alarm. An idea for a replacement comes as she tells me how, while on tour, her crew sometimes plays a classic by Bob Marley & the Wailers on days she has to get up early to have meandering conversations with journalists. (“No offense,” she assures me. “Not you.”) Once again she sings instead of merely naming the track: “Is this love, is this love, is this love, is this love that I’m feeling?” Not a bad choice. Because when you listen to Carly Rae Jepsen, it usually is.
James Taylor: “You Can Close Your Eyes”
Carly Rae Jepsen: My dad had a guitar around, and when I was very little he would ask me to pick three songs and then he’d play them before I went to bed. I would get so emotional. I loved that there was some sort of secret I was unlocking in the stories of these songs and how it could take me to a feeling that wasn’t necessarily mine but that I could imagine so fiercely. I would put myself in the place of the person in these songs and I would always be crying. My dad would be like, “Do you want me to stop?” And I’d be like, “No! I like it!” And he’s like, “What’s wrong with my child?”
Joni Mitchell: “Both Sides, Now”
My mom and I would sit and meticulously go through Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell lyrics together. Even from a young age I remember her being like, “I’m playing this Leonard Cohen song called ‘Famous Blue Raincoat,’ and when it’s done I want you to tell me what’s going on in it.” She would give me like a fake glass of wine when I was 8, and I would listen and be like, “I think there was an affair.”
At the time, Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now” really helped me reflect upon the two houses I was in: “I looked at love from both sides now.” Everything about it was really poetic for me; I was always looking for songs that explained what I was going through. Also, my father was a writer of music on the sly, and I actually felt like he wrote the best songs I’d ever heard. They explained our life in this beautiful way. So I was singing a lot of my dad’s songs back then, too.
Savage Garden: “Truly Madly Deeply”
We would go on these camping trips down to California where we would drive with my dad and my stepmom in this little Buick with a trailer behind us and a cooler under our feet. We would all pick music for a portion of the trip, and we listened to the entirety of the Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat soundtrack and to those songs that were like, [sings] “I want to stand with you on a mountain.” Really cheesy stuff but just loving it, loving it, loving it.
Around 16, I had written a love note to a boy, and it had a cadence and melody to me, so I went home and tried to figure out the chords. My dad started to show me what I call the “classic Elvis Presley chords,” and I was off to the races after that. Every couple of weeks I would have a new performance for my family, and they’d always stop everything and listen, which was very indulgent.
Rufus Wainwright: “Poses”
This was around the time I released my song “Tug of War,” which I was really proud of, and I was stoked that it had some radio play. I was still waitressing, and then “Bucket” came out, and I was asked by my label head if I was willing to work with this dude Josh [Ramsay], and Tavish [Crowe] and me brought him this idea for “Call Me Maybe.”
But there’s a great juxtaposition from the songs I was making to the songs I was listening to. I was writing really poppy stuff but listening to quiet, melancholy music. Rufus Wainwright started to come into my life at that time, and “Poses” was one of my favorite all-time songs. I would listen to it on the train.
From the first time that I picked up a guitar, I didn’t learn someone else’s songs. I was just like, “This is my song,” and that’s just what’s come out. I never really second guessed it. Maybe I like to make music that’s more poppy because it’s like a palate cleanser, like I don’t want to just keep fueling the same sad thing. And as much as I am showy and theatrical onstage, I’m a little introverted in a way where I like to be alone when I listen to music.
The Cardigans: “Lovefool”
After “Call Me Maybe,” my life was so insane that I don’t remember very much except for waking up in different cities, and my mom calling me, and me being like, “I don’t know where I am right now!” But then I really dug into the Kiss album and unabashedly embraced the bubblegum-bright pop-pink of it, and that brought me back. Weirdly, I was listening to Squeeze albums with my boyfriend and enjoying [sings] “Tempted by the fruit of another...” It doesn’t really sound like it on Kiss, but that’s what I was listening to at the time. And I remember referencing “Lovefool” a lot—[sings] “Love me, love me, say that you love me.” Later on, when I randomly met [“Lovefool” co-writer] Peter Svensson, I walked out of the room and got an acoustic guitar and I was like, “You must play that song for me now.” And he did. Then, for E•MO•TION, we worked on “I Really Like You” together. That’s how that came to be.
Billie Holiday: “My Man”
When I come home now, my mom is still like, “Do you wanna hear this Leonard Cohen song?” And I’m like, “I’ve heard it, and I love it, but you need a new playlist. Let me show you some stuff.” You’ve gotta keep on switching it up and keep on digging. I think it’s really important for personal growth that you are not listening to the same thing all the time. My confidence in what I like and what I don’t has gotten more pointed, and my idea of what is great music is starting to change. I love Christine and the Queens. I love the latest Lykke Li album. I think Charli XCX is doing some wild and crazy things.
But the music that I listen to at home is still a little bit old-fashioned. I love 1940s jazz standards. I listen to ’40s on 4 religiously in my car, and I know every single song. My grandma and me are soulmates because of it, and my parents think I’m the biggest nerd in the world. I went to jazz camp for years, and I was really, really into it. Billie Holiday’s “My Man” doesn’t play too much on the ’40s on 4 channel, unfortunately, but I have all her records. Two of my friends are painters and both of them gave me a portrait of Billie Holiday on the same year. They’re in my living room, side by side. There’s something very similar about my attraction to ’40s jazz music and pop music, in the simplicity and the feel-good-ness of it, and the potency of what those lyrics must mean.
