The songs here pay tribute to both their solidity and their ephemerality. While these emotions will certainly pass in time, in the moment they feel impossibly concrete. For Jepsen, no matter of the heart, no crush or romantic rejection is too minor to immortalize. While the sound of the record may not be maximalist, its approach to the feelings that gave rise to it is.
It’s like the songs came unmediated, all written in the immediate aftermath of some great or otherwise momentous night, belying the craftsmanship that is evident on every song. Throughout Emotion, Jepsen is earnest, unashamed of her desires and her fears alike. And while there may be more poetic or nuanced ways of describing the sense of loss and longing that arises when the one you once loved is gone, I’ve yet to discover a lyric as simple and as true as “I want you to miss me when I’m not around you.” Similarly, when a lover has left, the pain is unremitting, the sense of loss so acute that the good times shared together play in one’s mind over and over, ever-present but still outside one’s grasp. That statement may not be quite true in day-to-day life, but when one meets someone new and quickly becomes enraptured with everything about them, it’s hard to think of something more powerful than those feelings. In these songs, new love is the most joyous thing in the world and heartbreak is the most painful. She dispenses of complexity in the hopes of cutting to the core of the matter. The lyrics throughout are direct, clear and impactful. Emotion’s tracks were her stories, but they quickly came to feel like one’s own. However, her relative anonymity - what initially seemed like a failing to capitalize on her moment - became, with Emotion, a selling point: She was your best friend, the girl next door telling you about the boy she loved and lost, her newest crush, and the joy and pain that comes from all these experiences. Despite critical acclaim, Emotion was not a commercial success and none of its singles became true hits. That is the challenge Carly Rae Jepsen faced when she released her 2015 record, Emotion, three years after she briefly became the biggest pop star in the world with “Call Me Maybe.”Īfter “Call Me Maybe,” Jepsen had another top 10 hit, “Good Time,” with Owl City, and a successful second album in Kiss, but by 2015, it looked like she would be remembered as a one, or technically two, hit wonder. It’s hard to escape the shadow of a massive hit.Įven if you create great work in its wake, the association is ultimately impossible to escape, fans’ perceptions already having been shaped in a way that makes altering it a challenge, no matter how far from that hit the artist may stray in the future.
Though not the hit it deserved to be, Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion is a masterful record that resonates as strongly today as it did upon its release five years ago.
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