In the summer of 2015, Carly Rae Jepsen was looking to the future: “My desire now,” she told an interviewer, “is to see how far I can stretch pop.” Her latest moves had evolved from the good-enough charm of Kiss—the album that contained her unexpectedly planet-dominating hit “Call Me Maybe”—into glossier, vintage-inspired territory: gated drums, squealing synths, a couple saxophone solos. ’80s pop rehashed for the new millennium feels staid in its omnipresence today—but remember when it actually felt like a bold new idea, when embracing that moment, in all its schmaltz and sentiment, could represent a genuinely surprising artistic turn?
The first step in claiming Jepsen’s future was E•mo•tion, a record of diamond-sharp songs—now a decade old, re-released as a deluxe 10th anniversary edition. In countless interviews, she has rejected the notion that pop music—hers or anyone else’s—ought to be considered a “guilty pleasure,” and E•mo•tion is, fittingly, a record of full-on pleasure: unselfconscious, effervescent, no irony to be found. These are songs about big feelings, matched by big-budget production, evincing a shameless devotion to pure pop: uptempo, tightly structured, stuffed with singable hooks and lyrics that don’t exactly hold up perfectly under scrutiny yet nonetheless scan as immediately relatable. “Run Away With Me” is the aural equivalent of a confetti cannon, the sonic translation of the way a crush makes you feel invincible. “Boy Problems” is neon and buoyant with its groovy bassline, chorus of na na nas, and percussion stabs like the kind of text you send with 15 exclamation marks. The exceptions to the bubblegum bangers formula are equally rewarding: The brooding, breathy “Warm Blood” and the poised ballad “All That” gently widen Jepsen’s sound without becoming a distraction.
No pop star yearns quite like Jepsen, and her best songs thrive in moments of uncertainty and indecision. The tracklist ticks through not-quite-love and sort-of-breakups and headrush crushes and conflicted kiss-offs. She doesn’t just like you—she really likes you, repeating that word five times in a row to indulge the absurdity of infatuation. On “Your Type” and “Gimmie Love,” she’s begging to cross the line from friendship into romance; on “When I Needed You,” she sings like she’s still trying to convince herself to leave an ex in the past. Jepsen always sounds like she means it, her voice all full-on dedication—and rather than rendering her rigid, she only comes across more ebullient. Sure, she claimed she vaped for a week straight to get some rasp in her delivery on “Your Type,” but her voice is still irrefutably sweet; her lyrics are loaded with odd come-ons—“Here I come to hijack you,” or, “Who gave you eyes like that/Said you could keep them?”—but she knows how to land them convincingly.
E•mo•tion’s 10th anniversary edition includes the original 11 tracks plus six bonus tracks from various previous deluxe editions. It’s also got the genuinely euphoric “Cut to the Feeling,” which was written for the album but saved for a Canadian-French animated film in 2016. (No overlap here, it should be noted, with E•mo•tion: Side B, the first edition in Jepsen’s ongoing series of album sequels.) As for as-of-yet unheard material: There’s two “Run Away with Me” remixes (one aqueous, courtesy of Kyle Shearer; one stadium-sized, courtesy of Rostam) and four previously unreleased tracks. The singer said she worked on more than 200 songs to make E•mo•tion, and while these cast-offs are conventionally Carly Rae, hearing them after E•mo•tion proper makes their absence from the original tracklist self-evident: “More” sounds like it could have landed on Disco Sweat, an album Jepsen wrote and scrapped after E•mo•tion in the midst of an ABBA phase (she claims that record “will probably never be released, and shouldn’t”); “Guardian Angel” and “Back of My Heart” are a touch too cute; “Lost in Devotion” is a lovesick but lesser ballad. Still, stans hoping for E•mo•tion: Side C will be well-fed.
In writing those supposed 200 songs, Jepsen spent numerous sessions with a range of producers. Big-name hitmakers like Max Martin and Jack Antonoff could have perhaps helped her parlay the success of “Call Me Maybe” into continued virality or commercial domination, but neither producer made it into the final cut. (According to her manager, Scooter Braun, hits weren’t the goal anyway: “We had the biggest single in the world last time and didn’t have the biggest album,” he told an interviewer in 2015. “This time we wanted to stop worrying about singles and focus on having a critically acclaimed album.”) The producers and co-writers Jepsen stuck with for E•mo•tion—Ariel Rechtshaid, Dev Hynes, Rostam Batmanglij, a pre-Olivia-and-Chappell Daniel Nigro—had bragging rights of a different sort: They’d made their reputations by helping knit together underground and pop sensibilities for artists like Haim, Solange, and Sky Ferreira.
Maybe that’s why there was so much critical anticipation around E•mo•tion, the kind of major-label pop record that didn’t ordinarily get fawning blog coverage a decade ago. This very publication did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 at the time of its release—which was both a massive commercial success and a clear zeitgeist companion to E•mo•tion’s ’80s-inspired pop—but not only reviewed E•mo•tion; it designated one E•mo•tion song Best New Track and dedicated a 1300-word roundtable to another. What made Jepsen catnip for music journalists: the verified indie cred of her producers? The allure of an underdog trying to break free of one-hit-wonder stigma? The relative lack of narrative in a moment of girlbossing, toxic positivity, and self-referentiality? Was it that the boys’ club of music criticism was being proudly infiltrated by a new generation of writers from the demographics best suited to take this kind of music seriously (especially if it came with the signoff of tastemakers): young women and queer listeners? Was it that the record emerged at a time when “poptimism” still felt fresh—before the concept was downgraded to its role as a misunderstood weapon of clickbait; when that idea could still be challenged, debated, and perhaps even embraced among true music nerds; when it felt thrillingly possible to reimagine “pop” not as a lowest-common-denominator commercial category, or the manufactured result of a studio system, but as a lineage of sharp, smart songwriting that didn’t have to be watered down to have broad appeal? The magic of perfect pop music, of course, is that it defies logic; perhaps that’s why E•mo•tion was undeniable.
Despite the critical enthusiasm, E•mo•tion did not make Jepsen a mega-star. “I Really Like You” was her last song to hit the Billboard Hot 100, and the album only reached No. 16—a position that none of the sometimes glossy, sometimes wispy, always lovelorn albums she’s released since have managed to clear. And despite her intention of pushing pop music past its limits, it’s hard to believe that, after E•mo•tion, Jepsen truly committed to her vision, especially when you consider the freaky pioneers and international sounds and chart-topping regional styles and unexpected crossovers that have fallen under the “pop” umbrella in the last decade.
But in a way, she did stretch the concept of a pop career. The album marked the moment when Jepsen became a different kind of star, riding the cresting poptimism wave into what you might call pop’s middle class. Though she wasn’t the first to chart this kind of path, she did so before it was common knowledge that being dubbed royalty by a small army of very online fans could more or less keep a career afloat—a sort of godmother of the khia asylum. The record’s lack of commercial success provided Jepsen with an underdog identity that left her fans fiercely hungry, as has the fact that her later releases haven’t quite matched E•mo•tion’s technicolor glow. Listening to the record today, it sounds neither like a relic of our poptimist past nor like musical clairvoyance nor like the work of an indie darling. It just sounds like one of the best pop albums of the 21st century—a guiltless delight.
