By Michael Scoular (The Cascade) – Email
“I wrote for love / Then I wrote for money / With someone like me / it’s the same thing,” goes one of the poems in Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing. The striving for financial independence and openness to emotional memory that drive recording artists may not occupy the exact same parts of their brains, but they’re both there; when the latter dominates, we look upon the work that results as art. When we see the former first, that’s when music, one of the most territorial and label-obsessed art forms, gets funnelled into the sell-out bin. Carly Rae Jepsen, commenting on the work as she added it to her monthly book club (open to fans but never that popular, it stopped updates this February as Jepsen prepared the release of her new album), said it’s the book that’s “always by my bedside table.” Poetry that reveals itself with each evening, in a different country, or airplane, or dressing room: this is what we hope music will be to those of us who don’t keep poetry by our nightstand. Book of Longing mostly revolves around Cohen’s visits to a religious sanctuary; while written over a long range of years, it’s undeniably the work of an older artist. And yet buried in there is a lyric that might, simple and disarming, show up in a Jepsen verse: “You kept me from believing / Until you let me know: / That I am not the one who loves — / It’s love that seizes me.”
Here’s the part where people scoff, or briefly pause in disbelief; Jepsen and Cohen, two narratives of Canadian singer-songwriters, are not supposed to intertwine. One collects stories, writes prose poetry, is a consummate artist, always working, staying inspired into old age, while the other edits and reduces text-message exclamations into pop lyrics, hitting on the universal (as most pop artists tend to do at least once), with a song that stays in your head for a season.
For those that listen to her albums, though, the connection might come as less of a surprise. Jepsen has chosen a different locale (suburbia, not bohemia), and because of her age and management, the radio is where her credibility lives or dies. But Jepsen’s song-craft — her skill in pulling the poetic out of the everyday, coming through in flashes, circling in the way most visions do, like a routine until it’s broken — sets her apart from the many pop artists she tends to get grouped with. Jepsen is not a one-hit wonder. Like Cohen, she is a writer trying to decipher the language of love: is this the real thing, or just something we’ve agreed to call romance?
Emotion, Jepsen’s third album, is easily her most accomplished work. Aside from the slowest jam of all time (“All That”), and the Buzzfeed and TMZ-dissing “L.A. Hallucinations,” there is a remarkable consistency throughout: each song is about the same pop-song thing, but none of them settle for similar imagery, each trying out a different point of view. It adopts an ‘80s-quoting mode, and, unlike Taylor Swift’s recent attempt, sounds like an artist bridging and building on pop history rather than applying a production layer to “anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better” chart-aspiration. Jepsen knows what’s come before, knows the popularity of saying you’ve seen it all, and knows the adage that all the great pop songs are already written. Emotion, piece-by-piece, breaks it down and builds a case for well, what if they haven’t? It should have been the album of the summer.
Jepsen knows that wherever her name appears, “Call Me Maybe” will be close behind. When it comes up in a making-of video for Emotion, she begins by saying, “It’s a beautiful gift to have a song take off in that way, but …” Jepsen, like every other artist taken by surprise by success, knows the weight of expectations. She knows that even when she says Emotion is an album of her working against, while completely dissatisfied with, the idea of repeating herself (especially when it comes to her biggest hit), that this will not change the conversation. But it is one thing to be pegged a one-hit wonder, and another to see that possibility approach from one direction, while waking up to 11 million Twitter followers still there; still, maybe, listening. When Jepsen posts something on Instagram it routinely hits the front page, next to National Geographic panoramas and celebrity dinner still-lifes. On Emotion, Jepsen is an artist completely informed on the narratives before her — both the feeling of a stadium singing your words, and the feeling of needing to make art to prove something still exists. The recording process for Emotion yielded over 200 song variations, the kind of number you don’t often hear except in cases of singers locked into contracts, where constant production is a way of staying busy, fighting against a label’s refusal to listen to creative energy (JoJo and Sky Ferreira are two artists releasing albums this year after going through this kind of resistance).
But in this case, Jepsen had an unhurried production cycle (Emotion comes more than two years after 2012’s Kiss) and chose to work with some of the most highly lauded producers in the genre, including Devonte Hynes and Ariel Rechtshaid. Jepsen might not be as ahead of the game as Beyoncé or Bjork when it comes to collaborating with yet-to-be-uncovered talent. But as on Kiss, Emotion is filled with moments when the floor drops out, all silent except for a whisper, as there are choruses where her voice roils against a wall of production, transformed and amplified into the type of commanding presence Jepsen’s lyrics demand.
Emotion is 18 tracks long in its Japanese release, a.k.a. the version everybody listened to back in June, because the North American version, in a bizarre flashback to pre-file-sharing obliviousness, was not released for another two months. It is an album with enough variety that each listener will have different favourites: take away the singles, the bonus tracks (Jepsen’s bonus tracks are better than most of the filler that makes it onto other pop artists’ albums), and the actually-not-bad remix, and you still have enough to call this the best pop album of the year. For just two stand-outs, there’s the self-aware bounce of “Boy Problems,” drenched in new jack swing (there could be hints of Orange Juice’s “Satellite City” in there too), and “Warm Blood,” full of low-end bass and slow-burn tension. “You have got me swimming in circles / in your warm blood,” Jepsen sings in the pre-chorus line: a mixed metaphor lacking in proper grammar, good taste, or logical sense that sounds exactly right when backed by arpeggio synths and a just-a-hair too loud, four-on-the-floor beat. “I saw myself tonight / Caught my reflection in a mirror / My hands and heart were tied / But I was scared of almost nothing at all,” she sings right after, confessing stage fright, dismissing its universal hold. As much as the title tips listeners off (guess what this album’s going to be about), the characters in Jepsen’s songs are always met through the way they believe in transforming emotion into something else — usually something that comes at incredible risk, like running red lights to get across town. Or, as in “Never Get to Hold You,” where, “Until I saw you in the thunderstorm, I didn’t see you,”; the kind of minor romantic crisis that summons half-thought or barely considered possibilities to the surface.
It’s the small details and odd turns of phrase that make Jepsen a distinctive song-writer. While Emotion continues a pop trajectory that aims globally, there is still something personal, embedded almost subconsciously, in Jepsen’s repeated scenes of night-time driving. Jepsen comes from Mission, a town known either for its train connection to Vancouver (and reputation therefore as a place where people have houses, but don’t live or work), or for the way its small-shop downtown and early closing hours mean there is, like a lot of places, “nothing to do.” So you pick a place to drive to, like the 24-hour diner, the school park, unattended after-hours, or the view overlooking the entire town and the river that surrounds it, and get there. Or maybe, as Jepsen sings in “Let’s Get Lost” (which opens with background party chatter, and ends with a howling coyote and a saxophone solo), “Maybe you’ll take the long way home.”
