{allcanada} Jepsen finds power in '80s-inspired 'Emotion'

 

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NEW YORK — It's album release day for Carly Rae Jepsen, whose marathon promo tour is only just starting.

"I'm going to scarf this down, but you can keep asking me questions!" she says, biting into a lox-and-cream-cheese bagel and spilling her coffee moments later. "Maybe just don't look at me."

The Call Me Maybe singer just played three songs on NBC's Today show in Rockefeller Center and is now having a quick bite a few blocks away. Despite waking up at 5, Jepsen is upbeat and chatty this Friday morning, with a full weekend of signings and press lined up for new album Emotion.

Like other artists throwing it back to the '80s on pop radio (Taylor Swift and Jason Derulo, among them), Jepsen infuses Emotion with bold-faced retro flair: Album opener Run Away With Me erupts with a stuttering bass line and gleaming saxophone, while slow-burn ballads All That and Warm Blood flicker with woozy synths.

Crafting the latter songs in particular, "it was really refreshing and freeing for me to feel like I could stretch the bounds of what pop needs to be," Jepsen, 29, says. "There's no rules on that, and if I could imagine where I'd go with the next album, it'd be further coloring outside those lines."

After the stateside debut of Kiss in September 2012 on the coattails of Maybe's summertime sugar rush, Jepsen got right back to penning new music: some with an indie-pop bend and others that were more folk-leaning, akin to what she grew up singing in Vancouver and performing on Canadian Idol. But seeing pop icon Cyndi Lauper play in Tokyo a couple years back ultimately changed her tune, and turned her on to other '80s mainstays Prince, Sinead O'Connor and early Madonna.

"There was something about (Lauper's) songs that felt really timeless to me, and I found myself loving the stories inside them," Jepsen says. "Even Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. It may sound like a simple, feel-good anthem, but when you actually dig into the lyrics, you get invested in the story."

From there, she enlisted the talents of songwriters Dev Hynes and Sia, and producers such as Shellback and Peter Svensson (the muscle behind giddy first single I Really Like You, a viral hit thanks to its video starring Tom Hanks and Justin Bieber). Starting with Emotion's title track, the album was gradually written and recorded between Sweden, Los Angeles and New York, where she starred in Broadway's Cinderella last year.

"My mission statement for myself was to try every avenue that was exciting to me," Jepsen says. "I wanted to get back to that place of natural inspiration, rather than feeling any outside pressure."

It was a 180-turn from making Kiss, which was rush-recorded and released to capitalize on Maybe's staggering success, only to sell 46,000 copies its first week and fewer than 300,000 to date, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Although other singles This Kiss and Tonight I'm Getting Over You failed to gain traction, the album's middling returns didn't faze her at the time.

"I was so proud. I mean, I had just been plucked out of Canada, which I had been fighting to get some recognition outside of for as long as I could remember," Jepsen recalls. "So to have Call Me Maybe take off the way it did and be able to put out an album, you couldn't have dampered my day. I don't know if it was because that kind of success hit me a little later on — I was 26 when I broke out of my country — but I just felt there'd been no real expectation."

Although, she continues, "I've learned more and more this round. Sometimes, there was just such gratitude that I was finally getting any recognition, that I was a 'yes' girl a lot. I've learned to take a little more of the power. Maybe not necessarily say 'no,' but, 'Hey, we're going to do this shoot, this is what I'm seeing for it, how do you feel?'

"To my surprise, most everyone's like, 'Oh, that makes sense!' It just takes saying it, you know?"

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