Карли Рэй Жепсен шинэ цомгийнхоо үргэлжлэл болох шинэ дуунуудаа танилцууллаа

Carly Rae Jepsen has spent much of her career urging us to just go for it. Her biggest hit, the sugary, effervescent “Call Me Maybe”, follows the moment she sees a guy she fancies and, what the hell: “Here’s my number, so call me, maybe!” A few years later, she gave us “I Really Like You”, a shot of pure adrenaline that perfectly captures the giddiness of blurting out your feelings to a crush: “I really, really, really, really, really, really like you/ And I want you, do you want me, do you want me, too?”

“I think there was a time – maybe it still exists – where everyone kept their cards close to their chest and were scared to jump first,” Jepsen suggests. “[In pop music] it was like, ‘If you like me, then maybe I like you, but if not… f*** you!’ And you’re like… Is this a love song?!” But for the Canadian artist, being the person to jump first is a fun prospect. “To know what you want, and you’re OK with the answer being yes or no but you’re just saying, confidently, ‘I want you’. That’s hot.”

Few command the kind of unanimous respect that Jepsen does. She’s an alchemist who, with “Call Me Maybe”, ushered in a new era of a very different kind of pop star – what critics dubbed the genre’s “middle class”. She might lack the kind of all-consuming, mainstream dominance of say, a Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter, but Jepsen still commands a dedicated and hugely engaged audience of loyal fans, along with a consistent stream of critical praise.

And it’s a particularly exciting time to be her. Jepsen just released a new batch of songs to add to her latest and best album, Day and Night, a lengthy work split into two parts. The first is all sun-soaked, blissed-out (often horny) psychedelic pop; the second is heady dance and disco, like the thrilling beginnings of a house party spilling into the messy afters. Now, she and her family are in the middle of packing for New York, where they’ll be living for the next five weeks while she works with Lena Dunham and Jessica Huang on a musical adaptation of the classic teen movie, 10 Things I Hate About You. “Like, what does a Broadway woman wear?” Jepsen asks. I honestly have no idea, but Jepsen has decided that it involves “a lot of tweed”.

We’re speaking over video call – Jepsen is at home in Los Angeles, in an empty room she uses for just about everything, from reading and writing music to folding laundry. Her hair is dyed a fiery copper; the light from the window behind her makes it frame her face with a warm glow. And Jepsen is warm. Fans on social media will relay, with great giddiness, just how lovely she was when they ran into her. In conversation, too, she’s brilliant fun: witty, playful and clearly chuffed with how life is going.

So she should be. Day and Night was produced with Jepsen’s husband, Cole Marsden Greif-Neill, better known as Cole MGN. They were friends first, having met at a songwriting session in 2021 then dating the following year. I love the fact that their first release, 2023’s “So Right”, includes a spoken-word segment between the pair as their characters cross the line from friends to something more: “Do you really think this is a good idea? I mean, no, probably not, but yeah.”

Jepsen giggles. “It’s kind of hilarious how cinematically documented our love story is, but also like… I think a lot of writers find they write something then experience it later.” The first song they ever wrote together, “No Labels, I Love You” – about a casual fling that turns serious (whoops!) – appears on Day and Night. Jepsen can tell which songs they wrote after their romance began “because there’s an intimacy that I have with Cole [by then] where I felt more emboldened to say crazy ideas out loud”.

Their wedding last year was a blur. Greif-Neill proposed during a holiday in Italy and they considered eloping, until Jepsen’s sister threatened to kill her if they did. So they held it at the historic Chelsea Hotel in New York, a haven for bohemians like Mark Twain, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, Leonard Cohen and Jimi Hendrix – and where the couple had once spent “one of the most romantic weeks” of Jepsen’s life holed up in the earlier days of their relationship. “I don’t think we slept,” she recalls with a laugh. “We were writing songs, having our romance, drinking coffee, talking, then going on these walks late at night and coming back to eat food and write some more.”

Among the wedding’s 100 guests was Jepsen’s friend and “The Loneliest Time” collaborator Rufus Wainwright, who surprised them with an a cappella rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel No 2”. Jepsen had wanted to ask Wainwright to sing, but bottled it. “When I get invited to a wedding and people ask me to sing, it adds this pressure, and I didn’t want Rufus to feel that. So I didn’t ask… and then he surprised us after the speeches.” A few poor suckers went to the bathroom and missed it. “It was such a New York City moment, he blew us away,” she says. “We were all in tears – it was the highlight, nothing better could ever happen.”

Enjoy unlimited access to 100 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music

Sign up now for a 30-day free trial. Terms apply.

Try for free

ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.

There was a time when Jepsen wondered if marriage, or indeed motherhood, was for her. There are echoes of Cohen’s song on her track “16 and Often”, about choosing a different path to the “cookie-cutter version of life” once offered to her. “I don’t think of you that often,” she sings, mirroring Cohen’s admission about his fling with Janis Joplin. Growing up in her small town of Mission BC in Canada, she had a “charming beginning”, including a boyfriend who might have asked her to marry him if she’d stuck around. “There was nothing wrong with him, but it wasn’t what I wanted from my life,” she says. “And I was really confused by the desire to almost throw a bomb into that life and run for something else. I was chasing something that was hard to define, but it was an adventure, and I didn’t know where it would lead me, but I wanted to find out.”

Another song, “Wedding Season”, follows a similar “what if?” theme, with Jepsen adding a fantastical air to a situation in which she kept bumping into the same guy at every wedding she attended, both of them always single. Even then, though, as she seemingly starred in a real-life Four Weddings (no funeral), she saw herself as the observer. “I felt like my job as the artist was to have big life experiences to document,” she says. “I didn’t think I was going to be alone forever, but I thought I would just have relationships that would, you know, keep it spicy.” Greif-Neill came as a shock, but by then she’d already released her 2022 album The Loneliest Time, in which she explored new feelings that had begun to surface. “Before meeting him, there was the wanting of him. I’d started to crave something more safe and stable, and that was thrilling to me.”

I’m curious to know what the artist behind The Loneliest Time makes of “the loneliest generation”, the young adults who aren’t having sex, aren’t dating, aren’t in relationships. “I don’t know if I have the answer to it, but it really is a fascinating time,” she says. “I know that Cole and I have talked about the fact that, if we’d met on a dating app, it might not have worked out. When you know you’re on a date, you present a different kind of energy, you’re in your head.” It’s good to be friends first, she thinks, “before you dive into the rest”.

We keep coming back to this idea of diving in. It’s there across the album: the thrill of the potential of falling in the smouldering “On Wires”, then “falling back to love” on “Diver”, and confessing her true feelings on “No Labels”, being the first to take the plunge. “Not knowing where you’re going to land is the terrifying part, and yet, with something as big as love, there has to be surrender at some point,” Jepsen says. “It feels like a lack of control, which if you know me, I love to have. So it was a real conversation I had to have with myself, like, signing up for life in a real way. ‘Say yes to marriage, say yes to baby.’ It’s like control is out the window – I’m just a vulnerable thing in this world, and here it goes.”

Jepson and Greif-Neill’s son, Ilya, was born in March this year; Jepsen first heard the name on the hit Canadian ice hockey drama Heated Rivalry, about two rival players, Russia’s Ilya Rozanov and Canada’s Shane Hollander, who fall for one another. Incidentally, show creator Jacob Tierney, who featured homegrown artists like Feist and the indie rock band Wolf Parade in the season one soundtrack, has made no secret that he’d love Jepsen to write a song for the next season (Jepsen goes a bit coy, for the first time, when I ask if that’s on the cards). “I was kicking it at home, eating snacks, watching the show while I was all hormonal and happy,” she says of watching the show. “Cole would come down in the morning and I’d either be crying or laughing.” Greif-Neill has Russian heritage, and they liked the fact that “Ilya” had a similar sound to “William”, another favourite name, but felt more unique.

What’s it like being a mum for the first time? “We don’t have long enough,” she answers, laughing. “If I could describe it in one word… fascinating. It’s fascinating to see how every single day he changes. I wake up and he’s found a new facial expression, he’s becoming his own person. I love it.” They lucked out, too, in that Ilya is “a super chill baby” – the family travels a lot, and fellow passengers apparently tell them how amazed they are at Ilya. “They’re like, ‘That is the best-behaved baby,’” she says, beaming.

Her other baby, 10 Things I Hate About You, is also growing into something spectacular. It’s being adapted from the 1999 romcom starring Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger, with Stiles’s Cat Stratford a riot grrrl-loving, Sylvia Plath-reading feminist prone to kicking men where it hurts if they get in her way. Her spoiled younger sister Bianca, meanwhile, has a reputation for compliant sweetness. “It’s a pretty topical type of story,” Jepsen says. “I don’t think women’s rage has gone anywhere.” She confesses to being a little starstruck, working with Dunham and Huang and several Broadway legends: “It’s such a stacked crew – you should see me, I’ve got my binder and my tea and my old lady glasses, and I’m just sitting there like it’s Christmas.”

Jepsen has long been billed as a pop genius, and her closest collaborators have observed proudly how “Call Me Maybe” was just a glimpse of her powers. But I get the idea that it’s only recently that she’s truly grasped that herself, even if she’s been surrounded by people telling her she’s brilliant. She’s never not confident about the music she’s making, but she can be shy in a room of other people. “I’ve really learned to stand up in those rooms in a different way, because I’ve had that support.”

Day and Night is her favourite album to date. “I know you’re not supposed to say that, but it is,” she says. “I feel the most myself on it, and I felt the most liberated when making it. It just felt different this time.”

‘Day and Night (Continued)’ is out now.