Before Carly Rae Jepsen takes the stage on her new tour, a large animated moon appears on the screen. “I’ll be your host this evening,” it announces in a shimmering voice, surveying the audience with its dark blue eyes. “I am the ambassador of love … I offer you a safe place to feel whatever it is you need to feel.”
“I’ve been to James Taylor concerts, or American Utopia, the David Byrne musical,” Jepsen tells me over a video call, on a rare day off during her North American tour, “where I leave and I’m 10lb lighter and I don’t know why. But something kind of shifted, or it was the thing I needed.” Her “moon mascot”, as she calls it, looks to offer a similar catharsis.
People love the moon mascot. The audience laugh and holler during its monologue; in a video clip from a recent show, its promise to offer a safe emotional space results in a thundering chorus of cheers. When I ask her how the first week of touring has gone, Jepsen looks momentarily dazed. “It’s only been a week?!”
Today, she tells me, she woke up, called her mother and forgot where in the world she was (she checked: Tennessee). She is sitting on the sofa, her shaggy blond hair falling over her turquoise floral jumper, in a “very strange hotel room”. It is lined with beige floral wallpaper; a still life oil painting hangs on the wall behind her. “It’s kind of grandma-decorated and I really love it,” she says.
“I feel, in a way that I’ve never [felt] before with a tour, more purposeful and excited,” says Jepsen. She speaks quickly and energetically, as if the excitement is tumbling out of her. The show is a “bigger production than we’ve ever done before”.
I ask her about the swords. Four years ago, a Tumblr petition to “give carly rae jepsen a sword” because “I like her and think she should have one”, went viral and became a meme. Since then, fans have regularly handed them out to her during shows. “I have enough swords to create a Game of Thrones chair,” she says, laughing. There are wooden swords and inflatable swords. At her recent show in Boston, she was given an electric blue diamond-patterned one from the Minecraft video games. “It is so fun when you feel the audience partaking in that way,” she says, “where it does become more of a joyful conversation versus me just singing out the songs.”
Joy comes naturally to Jepsen, 36, whose playful, idiosyncratic brand of pop first gained global recognition through Call Me Maybe, a near-inescapable bubblegum‑pop hit about the fluttering excitement of a new crush. It dominated charts in the summer of 2012, was deemed “the catchiest song I’ve ever heard” by Justin Bieber, and spawned tribute videos by Katy Perry, the US Olympic swimming team and the US Marines. Later came the albums Emotion and Dedicated, which traded mainstream pop for 80s and 90s-inspired sounds, complete with exuberant saxophone riffs. While those albums did not scale Call Me Maybe’s commercial heights, they established Jepsen as more than a one-hit wonder, winning over sceptics and gaining her a cult following.
But Jepsen’s current emphasis on catharsis signals a departure from her previous work. Her back catalogue is full of odes to the sparkling rush of love (a selection of her singles: I Really Like You; Want You in My Room; Run Away With Me). On her new album, The Loneliest Time, her most experimental and personal to date, the pop star addresses grief, therapy and acidly bittersweet goodbyes. In one ballad, she advises a former lover to “go find yourself or whatever”. Her voice is full of longing, tinged with the slightest hint of anger: “I wake up hollow, and you made me vulnerable.”
The making of the album was shrouded in doubt, Jepsen tells me. During lockdown, she found herself living on her own in Los Angeles. “It was just me and a cat, and a lot of deep questions about my life decisions,” she says. She realised that, although she had worked hard on her career, she felt a gap in her personal life. “I’d experienced good relationships [but] I hadn’t found that person yet, who was my one.”
A series of family tragedies, including the loss of her grandmother, prompted more self-reflection. “Not being able to be with my family while that was going on was excruciating.” She processed her emotions by writing songs. “I thought, if I’m being really real with you, that some of these songs might end up being just for me. I might not ever really share them with the world.” After giving previews of her more typically upbeat work to bandmates and family, she tentatively introduced them to “my cave of secrets”. She assumed the songs wouldn’t land, and was surprised when they did.
The title track, The Loneliest Time, begins with Jepsen singing about waking up from a bad dream to a steady solo beat. She is then joined by the much-loved Canadian singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, their voices slowly crescendoing into a dreamy, triumphant ending, with the two imagining a sunny new nirvana. Inspired by the fantasy of running over to an ex’s house in the rain to “start it up over again”, the song feels more like a farewell to loneliness, a tribute to the persistence of hope. “I think the feeling that you can be in a dark place, and to know that it is temporary, and that the light’s coming, and [to know that] that’s going to be a cycle that happens back and forth throughout life, is always a huge thing,” she says.
As for duetting with Wainwright, Jepsen, a longtime fan, got his contact details from her manager. “I started to lightly stalk him,” she says, “and when I say ‘lightly stalk’, I just sent a love letter email: ‘Hi. I’m Carly. I’ve met you never, but I’ve known of you for my whole teens and that song Poses changed my life.’ I think I even quoted his own lyrics back to him, like: ‘Life is a game and true love is a trophy, Rufus!’ and, ‘Will you please consider being on my song?’” It turned out Wainwright’s husband was a fan of Jepsen. “That was my in.” Recording with Wainwright, Jepsen remembers being moved by how “this man who I’ve followed and admired my whole life is in my room, in my little house studio, singing a song I wrote back to me”. By the time it was over, she cried.
Although often regarded as someone who found overnight success with Call Me Maybe, Jepsen has had to hustle to make it happen. Looking for a famous actor to star in a music video for the single I Really Like You, she got a phone number for Bill Murray and cold-called it, intending to leave a message (in the meantime Tom Hanks got wind of the project and appeared instead). Faced with the herculean task of getting Disney to approve a musical sample from its 1980 Popeye film for a song on Dedicated, she took a printout of a “fake contract” to Disneyland and got Mickey Mouse to sign it. She sent it to the corporation, with the note: “The big star boss says it’s OK.”
Jepsen grew up in Mission, British Columbia in Canada, wanting to be a singer. At seven, she performed the title song of Beauty and the Beast in a local talent show and won. At around nine she wrote her first track, a protest song presciently titled They’re Cutting Down the Big Trees. Her teacher parents and step-parents – her parents are divorced, and Jepsen grew up in two households – were “dreamer-type parents; the kind of teachers to tell you that you could do anything you wanted to do”.
Reality hit after Jepsen graduated from the Canadian College of Performing Arts in 2005. Her father suggested a plan: she should get a teaching degree, work as a substitute, and earn enough money to pursue music on the side. “I was like: ‘That’s backwards thinking to me,’” Jepsen says, with a laugh. She made a pitch: to work at pop music for a few years, and if it didn’t work, to move on. She remembers telling him “a pop star is a young woman’s game! At least I thought it was.”
And so came the patchwork of jobs at coffee shops, restaurants and bars; living on a fold-out bed, performing at open-mic nights and shopping around her demos. “Maybe I did steal some toilet paper once from the coffee shop I was working at … ” Jepsen says. “And yes, there were a couple of sample muffins that I ate.” Her band would perform at shows and excitedly split the small payment among them. When they ran out of money, Jepsen would make them lasagne and banana bread in exchange for rehearsal time.
A break came when Canadian Idol came to town in 2007. Jepsen was encouraged to audition by her former high school drama teacher, who drove her there on the day and advised her to never think she was “too cool” for anything. She came third and was signed to a label, leading to her debut album, Tug of War.
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“It’s funny, because you’ll be in interviews later on, and they’ll be like: ‘Your first hit was Call Me Maybe.’” she recalls: “And I’m like: ‘Oh my God, I hustled so hard for that first thing to ever happen.’” Viral fame can be overwhelming, but Jepsen says she had by that point already experienced “all aspects of humiliation” as an aspiring musician. There was a lot of gratitude among her band, she says, “because we had done the gruelling work, we knew what it took to get even a little growth”. Her current band is the same one she started with, except her old bassist, she tells me, is now at home with a new baby. “We haven’t lost that feeling of wonder and gratitude.”
Jepsen is one of the rising number of pop stars who enjoy critical acclaim and indie credentials. She has worked with producer Jack Antonoff, Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend, and Devonté Hynes AKA Blood Orange. For The Loneliest Time, she also collaborated with London-based producer and former NTS radio host Bullion, who has worked with Sampha and Nilüfer Yanya. “I reached out and was like: ‘I’ve been listening to your music, it’s so good. We come from different worlds, would you ever consider trying to write with me?’” Jepsen says. “And he was like: ‘I’m down.’”
But Jepsen didn’t always have such indie clout. Soon after Call Me Maybe, she released the album Kiss to a muted reception. Some dismissed her as a one-trick pony. Although she has forged a distinctive career since then, does she ever think about that alternative life, in which she’s churning out mainstream chart-toppers?
She is guided by the “music, first and foremost” she says. After her viral success, she tried to do the usual “LA runs” of making “what I’ll call a manufactured pop song”, she says. “And I didn’t love it.” There was no soul. “I felt like my joy was diffusing. [Now] I don’t look at success based on what others think,” she says. “I lead with my gut.” For the rollout of this album, she bucked the trend of opening with an “obvious smash single”, and chose instead Western Wind, a mellow, quietly reflective song about missing home.
The Loneliest Time isn’t only about grief. She made some “crazy decisions” while living alone, such as joining a dating app. That fleeting experience inspired Beach House, a tongue-in-cheek song about the thankless carousel of online dating, with Jepsen listing dates who turn out to be married, or need to borrow some money, or have a special “lakehouse in Canada”, where they are “probably going to harvest your organs”.
“Our society isn’t super wonderful with knowing how to take and give rejection,” she says. She would go on dates, not have an amazing time, and know there wasn’t a future. And yet: “I find myself being like: ‘Sure! I’ll see you Tuesday!’ Because I don’t know how to let the person down.”
How does a prominent pop star go about online dating? “I was kind of nervous about it,” Jepsen says. She joined a site specific to the entertainment industry, and braced herself for some Call Me Maybe jokes. “It was definitely really fascinating … Being an artist and an observer of life, I’m always down to have an experience to see what I can pull from it for music’s sake. I think you can’t take yourself too seriously. I think, also in this job, especially with any element of fame added to it, deciding that you are above [anything] would be a really alienating experience. So I am kind of no different from a teacher, doctor, anything. So let’s just go try the thing.”
The Loneliest Time also contains songs celebrating the beginnings of Jepsen’s new relationship (not born out of the dating app, she has confirmed) and the feeling that things are once more picking up and going her way. Making the album, she says, involved a “little bit of a rebirth back into myself, into feeling connected with my family again”.
Working on her life, not just her career, has helped her “feel like I’ve landed in a much happier place”. She has always loved the spontaneity of being on tour, but “it’s a different experience this time. It’s not the only thing going on. It’s obviously full-on but it feels temporary. It feels like: ‘OK, I’m gonna do this crazy tour and then come home.’ And home isn’t a daunting thing any more. It’s my place of calm.
“In the past, I used to look at my music specifically as something for escaping from the world when it was hard,” she says. “I do look at it differently now.” She hopes The Loneliest Time is also “a place where you can come to safely feel whatever it is that you need to”. Remember the wisdom of the moon.
The Loneliest Time is out now. Carly Rae Jepsen tours the UK and Ireland from 4 to 15 February.
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