As her landmark pop album Emotion turns 10, we run down the funky, feverish and feral of the Canadian star’s greatest hits
Carly Rae Jepsen loves to squirrel away killer songs for her now-standard B-side collections. The opener to The Loveliest Time (the companion to 2022’s The Loneliest Time) evinces several CRJ trademarks: a love of odd production in the drily funky guitar and playful percussion, breathy falsetto – and obsessive, intense lyrics about being willing to do anything for love.
You can plot Jepsen songs on a spectrum of “laser-eyed intensity” to “dreamy reverie”. This Kiss, from her first pop album Kiss (after her dreary post-Canadian Idol debut, 2008’s Tug of War), epitomises the former, with EDM-era synths that rattle and gleam like arcade machines and a sledgehammer vocal performance about wanting forbidden pleasures.
CRJ is a fiend for pure sensation who literally called an album Emotion: often her lyrics skip over any specific object of affection and cut straight to the feeling, as a song later in this list spells out. So when she sings “he never wants to strip down to his feelings” on this pained ballad from Emotion Side B, you know it’s terminal.
Anyone who’s only ever heard the radioactively perky Call Me Maybe and (wrongly) considers CRJ a one-hit wonder might be stunned to learn that she’s elite at genuinely sultry come-ons. No Drug Like Me lives up to its narcotic premise – a risky cliche to sell – with its slinky, muted boogie and Jepsen’s gasped promises to “blossom for you”.
