Carly Rae Jepsen Interview: How She Became Pop’s Greatest Innovator

It’s early afternoon in West Los Angeles and Carly Rae Jepsen is a kid again. Dressed in a delicate sheer skirt with bright green socks popping under stiletto heels for her Hollywood Reporter photo shoot, she turns to her stylist to politely verify that she can get her loaned shoes dirty. The millisecond she gets that go-ahead, Jepsen’s jumping into a tree on the deck of The Hollywood Reporter‘s headquarters, red hair streaming as she adjusts and mugs for the camera.

Her tendency to throw herself into creative endeavors without overthinking has made her the artist she is today, allowing her to sidestep the pitfalls of one-hit-wonderdom. Jepsen shot to fame nearly 15 years ago at the age of 26 when her song “Call Me Maybe” became an early exemplar of modern virality. Living under a rock would hardly have prevented you from hearing the ubiquitous monster hit — and replaying it in your head ad nauseam. (You’re hearing it now, aren’t you?)

Now, 40 years old and just months after the birth of her first child, Jepsen has arrived at a place few might have predicted back then: neither a Taylor Swift-level megastar nor fading into obscurity by limply chasing another pop smash. “Where I’ve landed now in my career is the sweet spot,” the singer tells THR. “I can live a life, go to the grocery store, have a family, tour music that I love and have an audience,” she says. “That’s a very hard-earned, balanced thing that we’ve had to work at.”

Initially released in 2011, “Call Me Maybe” became a global sensation in 2012, earning her two Grammy nominations and a spot atop the Billboard Hot 100. “In the moment, it was all happening rather fast,” Jepsen says. Her career moves after skyrocketing to success were less strategic than instinctual, she says: “If I’m being honest, I felt a little voice from inside screaming at me to hold on to why I started.”

Her longtime friend and collaborator Tavish Crowe, who co-wrote the breakout song, was there to remind her that “Call Me Maybe” was just a “flavor” of Jepsen’s range as a singer. “I’ve always been blown away by how deep she can go on a song,” he says. “She’s always pushing the needle of what someone might expect or doing things that feel like they haven’t been done before.”

With the hit song came a difficult period of adjustment and self-reflection. “It was so overnight that I feel like I understand what it must be like for some people who live in that space consistently, and my heart goes out to them,” Jepsen says. Maybe some celebrities feel they’re better at managing sudden success, she muses: “I’m just not very good at it.”

Fame didn’t just happen to her, it happened to everyone in her orbit. But her main way of processing what happened back then is to simply think back and reflect. “I’m giving shit away, but I don’t care,” she says.

“On a future song, that’s coming out after this album… There’s a song called ’16 and Rising.’ [It’s] about my coffee shop days and a guy I was dating back then, and what happened as I moved through this,” Jepsen says. “[It’s about] why I couldn’t quite settle for this beautiful life that was ahead of me because I was pining for something that I didn’t quite know what it was.”

Since the release of her breakthrough album, Kiss, Jepsen has kept one foot in the door of mainstream pop success and another in a more avant-garde space. Jepsen’s latest release, Day and Night, is a feat of balance, a double album that reflects the yin-yang equilibrium she’s striven for throughout her post-“Maybe” career. It’s divided thematically into Day, filled with sun-soaked psychedelic pop anthems, and Night, dripping in synth-heavy electropop. Jepsen hadn’t set out to make a bifurcated album; as with many of her most ambitious projects, it grew organically out of a back-and-forth with Crowe. She was heading on a trip to New York and was planning to show him the music she’d been working on. “He and I share music kind of like brother and sister in a very deep way,” she explains.

Jepsen presented her friend one song from Day and one song from Night, and he suggested they think of them as contrasting material for a single project rather than two separate albums, as she’d originally imagined. She continued to mull the concept back home in L.A. until one day, driving around the city (once again with Crowe), the idea of Day and Night came to her.

“As we were listening to stuff, it just felt like a song would naturally slot itself into the Night section or the Day section,” Crowe says. “Even before they were fully produced, too, you could still tell.” In the beginning, there were many pushes to divide the songs into two albums, but Jepsen says she “passionately disagreed” with that idea. “I wanted them together. They felt like two sides of the same thing,” says Jepsen.

The duality of the album mirrored Jepsen’s own upbringing. “I grew up in two different houses because my parents divorced when I was quite young and remarried to incredible stepparents,” she says.

It was a “very modern idea of co-parenting,” where she and her brother would switch houses every two days, both within 10 minutes of each other in the town of Mission, British Columbia. Her parents, all four of them, would have monthly meetings to discuss rules for the children. But the houses were very different. Night and day, you might say.

“My mom’s a little bit more free spirit, hippie-ish, and my dad’s a little bit more the opposite of that,” she says. “I feel like musically there was a connection. They all love James Taylor, they all love Joni Mitchell, but they also had different flavors in terms of what my stepparents brought to the table with their musical tastes.”

That duality made its way into Jepsen’s live shows, a mix of hits old and new. She considers it a win that “Call Me Maybe” isn’t the focal point of her concerts anymore, slotted within the set instead of as the closer. “I don’t think it’s a place to sit and hold resentment — what a useless waste of energy,” she says of the obligation to play the song she’s best known for. “If it’s a calling card that makes a couple of people happy, it’s not really about me anymore.”

After the whirlwind release of “Call Me Maybe” and Kiss, Jepsen took a break and headed to Broadway. She’d spend her nights doing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, while her days were occupied by her follow-up album, 2015’s Emotion, which would become a critical success. In the clearest indication of her abiding cultural clout, the video for the album’s biggest single, the bouncy earworm “I Really Like You,” featured an ebullient, fully committed Tom Hanks and included a cameo by Justin Bieber.

The album solidified Jepsen as much more than a one-note artist, pushing the boundaries of what mainstream pop could be with risky sonic choices. She didn’t know whether it would be what her legion of fans wanted and, to an extent, didn’t care. In hindsight, she’s thankful for her “obliviousness” to the mechanics of fame and believes she was better off for her relative cluelessness about how to handle it.

Among her most naive assumptions, she says, was that she would continue writing her own material. “Around that time, the idea of you being a pop writer for your own project was sort of like, it was cute,” she explains. “I had to learn how to know who my people were.”

In another possible sign of her ingenuousness, Jepsen has maintained the same label and team at Interscope for her entire career, something of a rarity in the music industry. She counts herself lucky, gushing about the “incredible relationships” she’s had with her A&R.

But she did make notable changes in her management. “I’ve had some good experiences with people, and I’ve had hard ones too,” she says. “It’s taken a second to figure out the right team for my management, and now I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”

To anyone who has followed her career, it’s hard not to wonder whether “the hard ones” is a reference to Scooter Braun, the high-profile former manager and music executive who signed her in the wake of “Call Me Maybe.” There has been plenty of speculation about the circumstances in which they parted ways — as there has been with several other former Braun clients — but Jepsen claims to hold no ill will toward him.

“I knew that I was on a different journey than he understood,” Jepsen says. “I wanted to do something a little bit less mainstream, and I liked what he had offered, but I didn’t necessarily think it was what I wanted anymore. I felt like it was just going to be a little bit easier to shake hands, walk away and go let my freak flag fly, so to speak.”

The singer didn’t leave empty-handed, however. “I took one of his employees with me,” she admits, cheekily.

Jepsen feels more freedom to explore with her current managers and says Interscope has always done well by her. “I wouldn’t say I had complete agency from the beginning, but not because they were trying to take it away,” she explains. “But I didn’t know how to take it.”

The broad, extensive rollout that Interscope is giving Day and Night is a clear indication that the label trusts Jepsen’s instincts. The album is a collaborative mashup of all her “favorite people,” as well as newcomers introduced through friends. One of those newcomers is playwright, actor and social butterfly Jeremy O. Harris, who directed the music video for one of the album’s prerelease singles, “Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor,” starring Alden Ehrenreich.

“She’s such an artist,” Harris says. “She understands her audience and her own work incredibly well but is also excited for someone who can show her another lens.”

People are lining up to work with Jepsen. Fellow Canadian treasure Jacob Tierney shared that he’d been eager to get Jepsen to write an original song for the first season of his hit hockey romance series Heated Rivalry, but it wasn’t in the budget. Jepsen hasn’t heard from him yet about the second season but admits that writing a song for it would be a “dream” for her.

“It was an incredible show. Ilya is the name of my son. Maybe, not maybe because of that show,” she says, referring to the character played by Connor Storrie.

Perhaps the most significant collaboration on Day and Night has little to do with the music. The album was made against the backdrop of one of the most transitional times in Jepsen’s personal life. While making Day and Night, she was falling in love with the man who would become her husband, musician Cole M.G.N., one of her collaborators and a producer on the album. Later in the process, as the album was being mixed, she became pregnant with their son. When it’s suggested in our interview that the album has effectively served as a time capsule for this time in her life, she asks, “Can I steal that?”

“I don’t want to say that my album’s only sunshine and rainbows and happiness because if I’ve done my job right, there’s some depth to it,” she says. But she’s not going to lie about how she’s feeling: “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”

This story appeared in the Sept. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.