{allcanada} Carly Rae Jepsen won't let 'Maybe' define her

 

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NEW YORK — "You guys want me to sing a song for you?"

Carly Rae Jepsen beams at the modest Today show crowd of tweens and tourists huddled in Rockefeller Center plaza. It's a bright, breezy Friday morning, and she's here to play two singles off her '80s-tinged new album, Emotion, released last week — but not before launching into her once-inescapable smash, Call Me Maybe.

That sticky-sweet pop confection exploded online in 2012 with the boost of a lip-sync video by Justin Bieber and his famous friends, before topping the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for nine weeks straight that summer. Since then, the Grammy-nominated earworm has notched more than 700 million views on YouTube (not counting fan videos) and sold 7.6 million downloads, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

But with Emotion, the Canadian breakout isn't looking for a new calling card.

"It's normal for people to define you by one thing. The trick is to not believe that yourself," says Jepsen, 29, plopped in the backseat of a van inching through Times Square after the performance. "None of us are just one thing — how boring would that be? — so I'm really excited to feel like I have shaken that off for myself."

With her second U.S. release, pared down from more than 200 songs written over the past three years, "I wanted to be able to take my time making an album that felt like every song was there for a reason and had a vital place," Jepsen says, contrasting Emotion to her singles-heavy but low-selling 2012 effort, Kiss (featuring Maybe and gooey Owl City-pairing Good Time).

The more cohesive approach seems to be paying off. Long pegged as a one-hit wonder, Jepsen has earned the best reviews of her career for Emotion: dubbed the "current frontrunner for pop album of the year" by Time, and hailed as an outright "better" effort than Taylor Swift's blockbuster 1989, according to New York magazine. USA TODAY's Maeve McDermott gave it a perfect four stars.

Still, Jepsen only reads reviews her friends send her and brushes off assertions of her newly won "cool" cred among music fans.

"I don't know, I'm pretty geeky. I just told you about Homeward Bound 2 being my go-to movie as a child," she laughs. Riding to breakfast, she chats idly about musicals (she starred in Cinderella last year) and her Paris-set Run Away With Me video (for which she borrowed a stranger's bike in exchange for a bottle of whiskey). To celebrate Emotion, she plans to keep it low-key and meet up with some friends for drinks later that evening.

"It just hit me last night how long I'd been waiting for today," says Jepsen, now sitting down to eat. "There are times when you're making an album and you wonder, 'Will this day actually ever come?' Everyone's been all cute about it, too. My assistant showed up with a sparkled cookie this morning like, 'Today's the day! Today's the day!' It feels fantastic."

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