Carly Rae Jepsen on the music that made it



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"I need a happier start," admits Carly Rae Jepsen. She has just decided that the song she uses as an alarm for a year and a half is too sad. "It's a song by Dev Hynes, which I love, but it's so melancholy," she said before catching her breath and sing wearily the first lines of "With Him": "You chose to stay away from me / I chose to try to let you inAs she pulled off her jacket and settled comfortably on the sofa of Manhattan's One World Trade Center, I wondered briefly if I could also remove a fictional floral turtleneck before realizing that, duh, I can not not. "Every morning," she says, "I say aloud to my boyfriend," I have to change this song. "But as we continue to discuss the music Jepsen listened to most often as a child, the title contemplative stops ringing. as such a strange choice for her to wake up.

"I grew up in two different homes," says the British, originally from Canada, whose parents divorced and married other people at the age of 5. His mother played Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen a lot; his father, who first taught him to play guitar, preferred John Denver and James Taylor. Later, when Jepsen became close to his grandmother, jazz singers like Billie Holiday and Chet Baker were added to the mix. Among her four parents, the only one who has fostered the kind of contagious pop that has defined Jepsen's career since 2011, "Call Me Maybe," was her stepmother, Patti. When they spent a lonely night, they dressed in leather pants, combed in ponytails and danced in front of Janet Jackson, Paula Abdul and Donny Osmond.

But those dancing nights were a musical anomaly. Even in adolescence, when the Top 40 radio is often a great rally, Jepsen was not very versed in pop. As a theater girl, she was more in the music of Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Evita. And as the daughter of an obsessed Joni Mitchell, she found herself attracted by the acolytes of the singer-songwriter of the 90s, like Sarah McLachlan. There were moments in her youth when she found the good mood, such as when she approached an employee in a record store and asked for help to find a song. It was before Google's words were a thing, so she had to use her voice. "Tell me what you want, what you really wantShe sang to the clerk. "Come over here," he whimpered before leading her to the "Wannabe" of the Spice Girls.

This slow journey to popular pop is a story that is reflected in her career, during which she went from small gigs in Vancouver (while she was not working at coffee) to a stint at "Canadian Idol" who led it first single (a cover of John Denver) of the huge "Call Me Maybe". Then came two very popular albums, those of 2012. Kiss and 2015 EMOTION– defined by their perfect blend of 80s nostalgia and contemporary production. Devoted, his latest album, closely follows these steps, with songs that alternate between impotent love and happy happiness without losing a beat.

At the end of our time together, I come back to his alarming morning alarm. An alternate idea comes as she tells me how, on tour, her team sometimes plays a Bob Marley & the Wailers classic on days when she has to get up early to have grim conversations with reporters. ("No offense," she assures me. "Not you.") Once again, she sings instead of just naming the song: "Is this love, what is this love, is it the love that I feel?"Not a bad choice because when you listen to Carly Rae Jepsen, that's usually the case.

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