CRITIC-AT-LARGE: Carly Rae Jepsen: Day and Night

Carly Rae Jepsen: Day and Night

Pop’s reigning princess returns with an inspired double album

Sometimes the marketing copy gets it exactly right. “Carly Rae Jepsen’s pristine, prismatic pop has long been the blissful soundtrack for first kisses and swirling romances...”—so goes the Canadian singer’s Spotify bio. Pristine, prismatic pop—well, that’s absolutely it. (I guess somebody will hire the English majors after all!) But around the time of the release of her third album, Emotion, a number of critics made a significant mistake: Jepsen, these critics argued, was a pop star with no star; no personality. Alexis Petridis put it curtly for The Guardian: “Her voice is fine, rather than outstanding. She doesn’t do anything to stamp her identity on the songs: good as they are, you’re struck by the sense you could be listening to anyone.” 

And yet, for the rest of us, this became her defining virtue. Jepsen’s is a pop music of surface gleam, finely produced and intelligently written. It’s polished—yes, within an inch of its life—but polished until what you see in it is yourself, your own reflection. Jepsen, like Whitman, becomes no one so as to become everyone. It’s quite the traditional formula for lyric exchange, and it's the quiet distinction that defines her art in an era of self-mythologising superstars like Taylor Swift. Jepsen’s best lyrics seem to tumble out of her mouth, almost spontaneously—and they might tumble out of yours, too. This is the woman who gave us such quirky, off-kilter, flirty turnarounds as “Before you came into my life I missed you so bad” (“Call Me Maybe”), “Who gave you eyes like that / Said you could keep ‘em?” (“I Really Like You”), and “Every single minute / I’ll be your hero and win it” (“Run Away With Me”)—speaking before thinking; feeling raised into song. 

That latter track, by the way, is Emotion’s opener, and the single greatest pop song of the century thus far. Sorry ‘bout it! Its psychologically-shaded word setting has now become something of a Jepsen signature. Listen for how its verse melody holds out against chords it becomes increasingly distant from; and for how those chords themselves never resolve, only repeat. Jepsen sings of escaping with a lover—”I wanna go, get out of here / I’m sick of the party, party”—and the lyric desires to bring about a future in which this escape becomes possible, and consent is given. The lyric is full of charms and commands, yes, but the musical setting knows distance as much as it anticipates that distance’s collapse. That brief melancholy between the ask and the answer is Jepsen’s domain—and the blazing, sidechained sax line already wants to jump the gun and know what this boy really thinks of her proposal, arriving at most of its downbeats a quaver early. I know I hyperbolise quite frequently in this column, but believe me when I say that this song is, like the album that follows it, a work of total formal perfection, total symbiosis between word and sound.

On Day and Night, Jepsen’s latest release, some things have changed while some have stayed the same. The new mood is sun-tanned acceptance—reciprocal love—and the newspaper critics have been reciting facts of her biography as though that accounts for musical analysis. It’s true, Jepsen’s now a mum, married, and forty, but the relief is that she has not lost any of her energy, her angst, or her passion here in her new work. The double album has been a long time coming for Jepsen, who since 2015 has been releasing “B-side”-style projects in the afterglow of all her major releases, companion albums whose stylings loosen up and whose musical palettes become a touch larger. The fact that Day and Night reenvisions this tendency in her career, presenting itself as a double album upfront, feels like a statement in itself about the abundance that characterises this album’s mood and lyrics as Jepsen coasts into her middle period and finds stability in family life. Still, she retains her ear for idiom, as in the oddball hook “We go hard in this family” (“Motivation”), which she somehow pulls off. The music video’s clever to emphasise the gay resonance of the word “family,” too—since Emotion’s sales tanked (well, at least in comparison to her smash “Call Me Maybe”) at the same time as critical opinion skyrocketed, Jepsen’s developed an exceptionally strong queer fanbase. (Queers love an underdog.) And then it’s the lovely strummer “Burning Heart,” as it streaks into folksy “Wild Child” (please compare with 2022’s “Go Find Yourself or Whatever”) and then again into the posing “Good Fine Actually” that makes Day the double album’s stronger half, certainly. 

In an album of this length, there are bound to be a few question marks. I’m not sure that “Blue Skies,” with its needling flute line and psychedelic guitar, does much for the project—or just in general, really. And on the Night side of things, “No Labels, I Love You” probably misuses Jepsen’s gift for quirky coinages. Is this a casual, no labels affair? Or are you really falling for this guy? It’s a nightmare situationship recast as a come-on-to-me dancefloor bumper—although maybe that’s exactly its uneasy point. At another level, Jepsen will still come off (as she always has) to unfriendly ears as what I call a “second generation artist.” Her music is steeped in knowledge of popular forms and their histories, of course, but her disco groover “Near or Far,” for instance, sounds less like the originators of the genre—less like the elegant, muscular groove of a Donna Summer or a Schiele-like Nile Rodgers—and more like a Madonna. Similarly, the aforementioned “Motivation”—which I still think is excellent, by the way—will sound to some less Chicago house and more LesMills spin class, and Jepsen’s not really the kind of artist with a sharp enough edge to convince you otherwise if you’ve already made up your mind on reading her that way. She just makes good songs.

But for me, the real puzzle is one of Jepsen’s favourites, “Versailles.” It almost works, but it fumbles in a really awkward tempo change as it plummets for its chorus, and the trap hi-hat programming that comes in on said chorus’ second half feels misjudged—especially for how it plays off against a weird sleigh bell part. The lyrics picture Jepsen in a world of luxury, “Marie Antoinette but modern,” fantasising about long mornings “Staining cherries in the bedsheets”—so why interpolate a percussion line from trap music? There’s something a little touristy about the collision of worlds here, and while perhaps that’s to Jepsen’s point—her fantasy version of Versailles necessarily excludes the monarchy’s bloody history—it feels like one of the rare moments in her discography where just a touch of irony or self-reflection might be called for. But, hold on, isn’t there that strange mention of “losing our heads” in the first verse? It’s meant obviously as metaphor, not as decapitation, but it doubles (in that way metaphor does) as a strange puncture in the fantasy, the outside world leaking in. I can’t tell if this song is unadulterated brilliance for how it amorally lets fantasy persist in all fantasy’s messiness for its duration, or disturbing for how it indulges a range of musical and lyrical gestures that don’t belong together in any ethical world. And all the while what’s really terrifying about a pop stylist of Jepsen’s rank is that she’ll have you singing its earworm melody before you’ve thought any of this through. I surrender, Carly. You win. 

Jepsen’s at her best when she uses her powers for good, and there is plenty of good on this thing. Night leans quite clubby quite consistently, which is a sparkly, grand new look on Jepsen. “Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor” most effortlessly and most deliciously combines this new styling with the old Jepsen trickery. Its bittersweet, subjunctive tense is reflected in a gorgeously knotty 4-3 suspension leading into the chorus, right on the title phrase. Meanwhile, the verses, in which Jepsen tells us in her strength and confidence all she’s meant to this guy—”I’ve been all of your desires / Been a good and been a bad girl”—are set in the moody relative minor. Reversing expectations, it's the chorus—in which she all-but-begs—that’s set in a relative major. And after a decade of, um, “decentring men” or whatever, it’s a relief to hear a grown-up admit that she needs someone else in her life—but now this guy’s gotta show the hell up, and it’s gotta be on her terms. Jepsen’s great subject is love, of course, and she’s as deeply attuned to its complexities here on Day and Night as elsewhere in her discography. Her subject is love, her method is observation, and attunement to a world of other minds is her project. Beautiful things happen all the time—haven’t you noticed?