In 2012, Carly Rae Jepsen’s mega-hit song “Call Me Maybe” was pretty much inescapable. The singer scored another U.S. Billboard Top 10 hit that year when she teamed up with Owl City for the duet “Good Time.” Now she’s out with her third album, “E·MO·TION.” It’s ’80s-pop-inspired and earworm-heavy, and it features a bevy of A-list producers including Dev Hynes, Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend), and Ariel Rechtshaid. The critics dig it. Here’s Carly with a playlist you’ll really, really like, too.
Carly Rae Jepsen: Hey, my name is Carly Rae Jepsen, and here is my dinner party soundtrack.
Christine and the Queens – “Tilted”
Song number one I’m going to play for you is by Christine and the Queens. She is a French artist, and the song is called, “Tilted,” and I feel like it’s the perfect warmup, feel-good tune.
She switches between half-English, half-French when she sings, but her lyrics are so potent that that’s all you need to still understand what’s going on.
I’m Canadian, so we had to take French in school growing up. But I was not the best student, so I only ever learned how to excuse myself from class and go to the washroom! I actually, later on in life, fell for a French boy, and that’s when I really started to learn a little bit.
My ideal hosting night is a big dinner with really great people cooking together. Back in the day, before I could actually afford to pay my band members, I used to bribe them with my homemade lasagna, and they showed up! It definitely bonded me to them.
Solange Knowles – “Losing You”
So I’m going to keep the mood sort of on the same train, ’cause I feel like you don’t want to jump around too much. This is a song by Solange called, “Losing You.”
Dev Hynes actually wrote this song. Dev gets teased for having these very long introductions [laughs] before the vocal even comes in. But I think it’s really something that doesn’t get boring. He doesn’t lose you. You’re drawn in and it kind of is almost like this beautiful anticipation while you’re waiting for it. I think that makes it even more magic.
I went through many different processes of discovering collaborators and friends for this album, and this song led me to Dev, so I feel very, very grateful for it.
Probably because the production is just so jamming, you kind of forget that it is a really melancholy theme. It’s not too in your face, you don’t feel like you need to be raging, or on a lot of drugs. You just feel like you can be outside with friends and living free, and having a good chat.
Cherub – “Doses and Mimosas”
My third song — that’s going to be the transition song from dinner party to dance party — is a song by Cherub called, “Doses and Mimosas.”
This is a song that became our anthem when we were on the road. When this song starts to play on the tour bus, it doesn’t matter who’s sleeping, you dance your way out of that bunk and you come have a dance party with us, and that’s how we go down the highway [laughs].
It’s got constant hook after hook after hook. I’ve always been one for music where I can listen right away and I’ll know if it’s gonna be something that is gonna be a part of my life for the next month. And this is a song– I think my cousin Adam showed it to me — where the first time I heard it, I was like, “Uh oh! I have a new addiction.”
Carly Rae Jepsen – “Black Heart”
So if my brother was there, he gets very cute and proud and he’ll definitely try to play my own stuff, which is humiliating actually [laughs], but very sweet at the same time. So if my brother is there… he told me last night that his favorite song from the new album is a song called “Black Heart.”
It’s a song about a Canadian guy I was dating. I felt like he had been hurt in a big way before, and this was a fun way to kind of sing about it in a song… “I’m gonna get into that black heart of yours!”
