Post by Admin on May 27, 2020 0:58:40 GMT
They say you should never meet your idols — that you’ll only be disappointed. We had this possibility in mind going into our first interview with Carly Rae Jepsen, the pop star who inspired us to start our podcast Switched on Pop back in 2012. Back then, Jepsen’s hit “Call Me Maybe” was the soundtrack for our conversion from rock and jazz snobs to true pop believers. As we analyzed the ubiquitous summer bop, we were blown away by how Jepsen’s musical choices reinforced the lyrics’ sense of nervous anticipation.
The narrator of “Call Me Maybe” switches from past tense in the verse (“I wasn’t looking for this”) to present tense in the chorus (“here’s my number”). As she does, her vocal melody explodes into dynamic motion to underscore the plunge into real time. We were hooked. From then on, our ears could be described as pre-Carly Rae and post-Carly Rae. We would seek to better understand the sounds of Top 40 pop in our weekly podcast, all under the watchful eye of the artist we referred to as “Saint Jepsen.”
Six years and hundreds of pleading emails later, the time had come to meet the muse and unpack her latest offering, Dedicated Side B. In the course of composing her last two albums, Emotion and Dedicated, Jepsen wrote more than 200 songs. Many of her favorite works didn’t make it onto either final album, so she’s started a tradition of releasing “Side B” records on the one-year anniversary of her last release. Her newest collection of unreleased music fluidly crosses decades of musical history and spans a vast emotional range.
We spoke with Jepsen over Zoom about how she curated her latest B-side release from a massive body of work. Would this beatific figure, once described by poet Hanif Abdurraqib and the “most honest pop musician working,” live up to her reputation? Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
The narrator of “Call Me Maybe” switches from past tense in the verse (“I wasn’t looking for this”) to present tense in the chorus (“here’s my number”). As she does, her vocal melody explodes into dynamic motion to underscore the plunge into real time. We were hooked. From then on, our ears could be described as pre-Carly Rae and post-Carly Rae. We would seek to better understand the sounds of Top 40 pop in our weekly podcast, all under the watchful eye of the artist we referred to as “Saint Jepsen.”
Six years and hundreds of pleading emails later, the time had come to meet the muse and unpack her latest offering, Dedicated Side B. In the course of composing her last two albums, Emotion and Dedicated, Jepsen wrote more than 200 songs. Many of her favorite works didn’t make it onto either final album, so she’s started a tradition of releasing “Side B” records on the one-year anniversary of her last release. Her newest collection of unreleased music fluidly crosses decades of musical history and spans a vast emotional range.
We spoke with Jepsen over Zoom about how she curated her latest B-side release from a massive body of work. Would this beatific figure, once described by poet Hanif Abdurraqib and the “most honest pop musician working,” live up to her reputation? Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.