Album Review: Carly Rae Jepsen - The Loveliest Time

Something that I have tried to remain more aware of since I began regularly writing about music, and thinking specifically about it within the context of contemporary popular music, is what we ultimately ask of the artist, or the performer. What we ask, and what they can, or continue to provide, or give, and what we as the audience, or the listener, seem to continue to want, or need, or in some cases, demand of them, even after they have already given us so much. 

I think about what the artist, or performer, provides, or gives, and what we, as the audience, or listeners, want, or need, or demand, or have come to expect.

I think about if we should be putting those wants, needs, demands, or expectations on them, and when we do, what that might do to the artist or performer—personally, yes, sure, but also what it might do to how they work, or when they want to work. 

I think about if any of it—specifically the demands, and the expectations—are reasonable to place on someone who continues to give so much of themselves to us, as the listener and the audience, because it seems like more and more, in return, we are not exactly ungrateful, or unwilling to be receptive and appreciative, but I feel like the audience, and I am certainly guild of this too, often faces the artist with our collective arms outstretched, our palms open, simply waiting for more than we perhaps even are deserving of.

And I find myself thinking about the expectations that we have, maybe even inadvertently, placed on Carly Rae Jepsen, though perhaps she, as an artist, doesn’t feel that way at all, or that is simply not how she looks at the dynamic she has with her work, and her listeners. 

I think about Carly Rae Jepsen, and even if she does believe that her audience has, at times, placed expectations on her, she is, perhaps, more willing to meet those with a comforting kind of graciousness.

This expectation, in a sense, began in 2016—the year after Jepsen released her breakthrough pivot into adult-oriented indie pop, Emotion, when she issued an eight-song EP of b-sides, all of which were recorded during the sessions for the album—some of them are arguably as good¹, if not better, than the songs that wound up on Emotion itself, like “Cry” and “Fever.” 

Some of them, well, you can tell why they had been cut—I am thinking of “Store,” specifically.

She repeated this with her fourth full-length, Dedicated—the album itself arrived in the spring of 2019, and a year later (roughly on the first anniversary of the original album’s release date), Jepsen shared a full-length collection of b-sides, which, released two months into the pandemic, could not have come at a better time as a means of providing a slight, often dazzling reprieve from the tumultuousness and uncertainty we were living in.

There is, certainly within more recent years, a kind of mythology of sorts, or a lore, around Jepsen as a songwriter, and how apparently prolific she is when working on material for an album. This kind of prolificacy was more than likely there while she was writing and recording her second full-length, Kiss, in 2012, and during the frenzy surrounding its inescapable single, “Call Me Maybe,” but since both Emotion and Dedicated, there are anecdotes and stories about Jepsen writing hundreds (plural) of songs for each album—but I am uncertain how many of those hundreds ultimately end up being recorded, and out of what is recorded, which songs then eventually find their way onto an album (or in some cases, a b-sides collection), and how many songs are still left over, sitting on a hard drive somewhere, perhaps never to really see the light of day and just continue to be subjected to internet message board² rumbling and speculation. 

And so there was, I think, the belief, or the expectation that, following the release of The Loneliest Time, in the autumn of 2022, that around a year later, Carly Rae Jepsen would return with another collection of b-sides from those sessions—material strong enough to have made it into the studio to be recorded, but for whatever reason, was unable to find a space within the context of the proper album release.

I find myself thinking about the expectations that we have, maybe even inadvertently, placed on Carly Rae Jepsen, and I am hesitant to say that with each album, and album cycle, and the inevitability (now) and expectation of a collection of additional material, that the stakes for her become higher and higher, but she, as an artist and performer, even after giving so much already, continues to provide, and every time she seems to be giving us more, or something that is much larger, or more robust in scope, than anticipated.

In 2016, eight additional songs from Emotion were released as an extended play; in 2020, 12 songs from the sessions for Dedicated were collected and issued as a full-length album; and now, arriving roughly three months ahead of the first anniversary of The Loneliest Time, Jepsen has pulled together another album’s worth of unreleased material from the writing and recording of that album, but rather than simply referring to it as a collection of “b-sides,” it is serving as a companion piece of sorts, and given its own title—The Loveliest Time, which, I suppose, implies that it is the antithesis to its predecessor.

Naming an album The Loneliest Time did, in fact, prior to actually hearing the kind of songs, and lyricism, contained within, allude to the fact that it was going to be a much more somber, or melancholic affair for Jepsen, which was ultimately kind of not the case at all. On her previous outings—Emotion and Dedicated, mostly, she was often writing from the opposite ends of a somewhat nebulous idea of love, meaning that many of her songs take place either before love, during the stages of a crush, or during a chase towards a type of desire³; or, they are staged after love has come and gone, and detail the attempts to muddle through heartbreak. 

The Loneliest Time, though, and perhaps it is because there is a relatively new romance in Jepsen’s life, seemed to be written from a place more at the center of that nebulous idea of love, rather than the contrast on either end—albeit both the good things, and the challenging things, about being within the actual moment that it often feels like she was running headfirst into, or stumbling away from in a daze. 

Jepsen, more or less ignoring the material from her 2008 debut, Tug of War, as well as Kiss, has proven herself to be the kind of artist, and performer, who strikes a fascinating balance between remaining within a specific kind of sound, or aesthetic, but has also become more and more comfortable with making bolder musical choices, and subtly wandering further and further out from the kind of mature, incredibly fun, shimmering, and electric 80s inspired, disco-infused pop she had structured Emotion around. 

This is all to say that over the last eight years, she has proven to be a diverse and dynamic artist, and rarely, when a song takes a surprising or seemingly out-of-character turn for her, does it truly seem like a misstep.—and the same can be said for the way that she has assembled these b-side collections or companion pieces. 

Even when the material collected has been worked on by a handful of different producers, and in some instances, finds her stepping out into sonically unfamiliar territory, something like the b-sides to Dedicated, or here, with The Loveliest Time, never feels like odds and ends or something hastily thrown together, which I think speaks to the level of razor-sharp intelligence Jepsen operates with when in the studio, and when putting together the tracklist for an album.

The Loveliest Time as a whole, even tangentially connected to The Loneliest Time, is an album that is bold enough and regularly surprising and thoughtful enough to stand on its own, and it is part of the continued exploration of both the variety and vastness of Jepsen’s creative process.

*

There were a number of things that surprised, or, perhaps, were simply just unexpected in The Loneliest Time—Jepsen’s first utterance of profanity (on a record) in the album’s opening track was enough to apparently earn the whole thing an Advisory Content warning on its cover art; the glitchy, restrained “Bends,” outside of being one of the most evocative the album through its use of imagery, was arranged in such a way that had me wondering just how much Radiohead Jepsen might be listening to or at least find herself inspired by; and the at first seemingly miscast role of Rufus Wainwright as her duet partner on the campy titular track, in the biggest surprise of all, did grow on me after initially being skeptical. 

Dissonance, or a harshness, are words that I would not normally associate with Jepsen, or the way that her songs come together—and so the first surprise on The Loveliest Time comes from the moment it opens, on “Anything to Be With You.”

The first thing you hear as The Loveliest Time begins is Jepsen’s voice, unaccompanied by any instrumentation, but layered in depth and range, repeating part of the chorus to “Anything to Be With You.” “Never over—never, never over,” she sings, primarily from what is both a higher range, but also one that has a rough edge to it. It takes a moment to acclimate, both because the opening is rather startling, and because the dissonance that she pushes her voice into is unexpected.

Across The Loveliest Time’s 12 tracks (there is an additional bonus track included on the digital release), it is structured in such a way that it gives space for Jepsen to move seamlessly throughout the styles and sounds as she so chooses, but there are connections that do tether certain songs together, which gives this collection a welcoming cohesion from beginning to end.

“Anything” is one of two or three songs included—there’s a fourth, then, I suppose, if you count “Weekend Love,” which is the aforementioned bonus track—that in sitting down with The Loveliest Time, I could only describe as sounding quite Luscious Jackson inspired⁴ in both their sonic palates, as well as the kind of feeling that the songs quietly and cooly exude.

Luscious Jackson were a product of their time—a uniqueness to their sound, once they really hit their stride as a four-piece into the mid-1990s that even they could not sustain after a few years and the departure of their keyboard player Vivian Trimble. Their sound, specifically on their opus Fever In, Fever Out, released in 1996 (it spawned the single “Naked Eye”), filtered sultry alternative rock through a hip-hop lens thanks to both the use of percussive samples and the breezy affect of their drummer, Kate Schellenbach.

Jepsen manages to conjure, seemingly effortlessly, that same kind of aesthetic in a few places on The Loveliest Time, which is impressive both in the way it tips a hat to a sound from a different era, that was admittedly a bit ahead of its time, and still manages to push that sound, or feeling, forward in a way that regularly feels original and extremely invigorating.

The most successful use of that feeling does come in “Anything to Be With You,” once the surprise of the song’s introduction recedes and the instruments actually begin shuffling in—beginning with a muffled, chopped up percussive sample that then gives way to the big, swaying ride cymbal tapping and snare hits—hypnotic enough to also, perhaps, be a drum sample, but also lively enough to maybe be generated from a live kit, along with a tightly plucked bass line, and a muted guitar lick that I can only describe as funky, borderline on scratch guitar in how it slithers up and down through the breeze fabric of the song.

The bombastic swooning from the song’s steady rhythm is really what makes “Anything” what it is—there is always, at least since the blindingly bright neon that illuminated the opening saxophone notes of “Run Away With Me” from Emotion, a pressure of sorts, or at least anticipation in how Jepsen will open an album, regardless of it is a “proper” full-length, or a collection of supplemental material, and “Anything” does really take the idea of opening track in a completely unexpected direction. It’s not the slow smolder of “Surrender My Heart,” or subtle like “Julien,” from Dedicated;  nor is it the kind of extended build of “This Love Isn’t Crazy” from Dedicated Side B—it does, quite literally, throw you into the world Jepsen’s going to create with this album, and tosses you around. 

Something that I have tried to do in the last couple of years, and it really doesn’t work, is I try to use some elements of The Bechdel Test to analyze pop music—and it is pop music, specifically,  because these songs are somewhat regularly sung by a woman, or women, and is more often than not, directed at the object of their affection. That object is not always a man, but there are several cases where it is—Jepsen’s canonical output, despite her status as a queer icon because of her performances at Pride Month festivals, is inherently about boys.

A song like “Anything to Be With You” does, even in its title, not pass a version of The Bechdel Test designed to unpack song lyrics—“Anything you want to do, I wanna do with you,” she declares in the opening line once all of the ping-ponging elements of the song begin working together to create the head-nodding groove that is inescapable. “I can be friends with your friends,” she continues. “Anything to be with you.” And there is a surprising urgency—I hesitate to say desperation, to the way she makes these statements within the first part of the song, and I honestly, despite my initial reaction to the songwriting within “Anything,”—leaning heavily into the idea of desire, and the discarding of oneself, what I realized is that we, more than likely—you, even me—have been there. The kind of thrill that comes from spending any amount of time, doing anything, regardless of if it is something you want to do or not, with a person you find yourself enamored with.

The thrill, and the chasing of a desire, at the expense of yourself and at any cost, that Jepsen has written about before and continues to write about surprisingly well, coupled with the frenetic production and arranging of the song, make it extraordinarily vivid as a whole.

Jepsen, then, continues to explore this sonic avenue a few songs later, on the slow and swaying, and kind of somber sounding (at least in the beginning) “Aeroplanes,” which opens with a similar kind of crisp, groove-oriented rhythm that in its precision and near unrelenting nature, blurs the line between live percussion and drum sample—regardless, it moves a much slower tempo when compared to the rhythmic elements on “Anything to Be With You,” setting the stage for a surprisingly mournful, lower tone—the rumble of a bell—that courses through underneath Jepsen’s vocals. Though this all, then, resolves and begins to tumble around with much lighter sounds, creating a contrast that is sustained until the chorus.

And if there is a restlessness in Jepsen’s body of work, just in terms of her unwillingness to concede to just one very specific sound, sometimes that same restless spirit can find its way filtered into just one song—which is the case with “Aeroplanes.” Even with as stark sounding, at times, as the instrumentation can be in the verses—her writing, too, is somewhat surprising in tone, with lines like, “I had a funeral for us and for my life—if I could be the way you wanted me tonight”—she pushes things out of that darkness into a place much more playful and coy in the chorus, before the song takes a turn into a different direction in its final third.

Almost all of the song’s instrumentation drops out, and a strummy, hazy acoustic guitar is introduced—casting a dreamy feeling over the few moments that remain in “Aeroplanes,” while Jepsen, almost whispering her lyrics like a gentle incantation, creates a bit of a contrast with her writing from earlier in the song by, instead, focusing on the work that must be put in from both parties—“We’re gonna have to make time,” she assures. “We’re gonna have to build each other’s lives.”

*

A word that is tossed around, I think, when describing some of Jepsen’s songs, from Emotion and onward—and even a word that I have certainly already used at least once, so far, 2,800 words and change into this piece, is “disco.” It has less to do with the arranging, per se, and more to do with a feeling. There’s an unrelenting exuberance in a lot of Jepsen’s catalog—the kind of excitement, or energy, or propulsive rhythm that does lead you out into the darkness of the dance floor, regardless of how good, or confident, of a dancer you may or may not be.

Perhaps the strongest, or most apparent lean into a 1970s/disco aesthetic could be found on The Loneliest Time—the title track, specifically, which was both campy in a way that pop music rarely is, but took itself seriously enough to still be a genuinely interesting and fun song that you could, if you were so inclined, dance to.

The songs on The Loveliest Time, where Jepsen immerses herself in the disco, or 1970s pop flare, are not the most successful of the set (nearly every song, regardless of its tone, is ultimately incredible, or at least successful in its own specific way) but they are the songs where she is perhaps the most confident, or simply just finds the space to audibly thrive.

Within the context of the album, perhaps where this kind of disco, or post-disco, or funk adjacent anesthetic is the most noticeable is in the first single—released as a one-off, well before the announcement of the project’s arrival as a whole. “Shy Boy,” both in its lyricism, as well as in its arranging, makes it seem like it would have fit in well, structurally, within The Loneliest Time. The song slithers wildly, pushed forward by a thick, rolling bass line, and a crisp, tight-sounding rhythm, with one of the album’s many wonky, or off-kilter appearing keyboard sounds layered over the top of it all. 

There is the urge to presume, and it is apparent erroneous to do so, that “Shy Boy” is, lyrically, about her partner, Cole, but according to the lore behind the song in its annotation on Genius, an early version of it pre-dates “Call Me Maybe,” and attempts to record it, or variations of it, had been made in the past, under the names “It’s Like This,” and “Depends on You,” both of which are among the often mythologized demos and unreleased recordings that her fanbase scour the internet to find. 

Regardless of the identity of the titular boy in the song, structurally, there becomes a sense of immediacy to it all once what is commonly referred to as the “pre-chorus” arrives, where Jepsen quickens her vocal delivery heading into the jubilance of the chorus itself—the song, as it continues to dazzle and spin, is one of the moments on The Loveliest Time where it is so apparent how much fun Jepsen can have when constructing a song, because you can genuinely hear it within the way the exuberance and flirtatiousness simmers then takes off.

Within the album’s final third, Jepsen returns to this more reserved kind of synth-driven and disco-leaning sound, or feeling, on the bass-heavy, twinkling “Come Over,” which is shocking infectious and fun, even in its comparatively quiet nature, when looked at next to some of the brightly colored and faster-paced songs within The Loveliest Time. 

And there is, intentionally so, per a quote from Jepsen about this collection, a little bit more of an experimental feeling to some of the songs that were selected for The Loveliest Time, which is truthfully apparent from the moment it opens with the dissonance in her vocals as well as the production values of “Anything to Be With You.” And she does take this album to surprisingly experimental or at least new places, musically speaking, throughout, it is even within her disco-inspired usual zone of comfort where she is willing to take a few risks, or push things into places that provide fascinating results. 

A majority of these come within the album’s second half—like the dreamy, swooning “Kollage,” which is perhaps where Jepsen taps the deepest into a 1970s slowed-down pop vibe, and then jubilant, dizzying, electro-infused cacophony of “Psychedelic Switch.”

The tempo of nearly every song on The Loveliest Time clips along at a very intentionally quick pace, but “Kollage” is one of the few moments where she slows things down—not slow enough to be considered a ballad, like “Go Find Yourself, or Whatever,” from The Loneliest Time, or the slow-burning “Heartbeats” from the b-sides to Dedicated, but slow enough that it provides a respite from the relentlessness from the first half of the record. It’s that slower speed, then, too, that lends itself well to the slightly more serious (or at least much less dazzling or fun) tone she takes.

I can describe the sound of “Kollage” as hazy, or swooning, or dreamy, but the truth is that none of those words really do it justice—because the atmosphere created is so thick, it sounds like the song is being blasted out of a fog machine, while Jepsen sings, and pines, in a woozy slow motion. Boasting crisp and warm-sounding percussion, wavy, quivering synthesizer tones, and subtle, glistening electric guitar, the production and arranging is a meticulous homage to a very specific sound, and an even more specific style of music from this era. 

There is something that is borderline ominous, or at least incredibly dark, that quietly surges within the arranging, and within both the vocal melody and lyricism in the chorus of “Kollage,” and it is one of the songs on The Loveliest Time where Jepsen steps away from the more centered space a lot of the lyrics on this record (and The Loneliest Time, as well) were written from, and returns to the familiar territory of what comes after love is over.

“Leaving you was certainly the hardest part of all,” Jepsen sings in a flash of self-reflection within the second verse. “But I was living like a servant to a secret I was trying to protect.”

“Did I do it to myself?,” she asks in the surprisingly stark chorus. “It’s hard to know for sure. Did I hurt somebody else?,” she continues, and then a few lines later, answering her own questions with a harrowing honesty. “I did it to myself—I did it to you.”

“Kollage” is certainly not the most experimental song on The Loveliest Time, or the most surprising musically—some of the more surprising moments, though, where Jepsen remains within the kind of disco, or “post-disco” aesthetic, involve what I can only describe as a strong Daft Funk influence, or inspiration—taking a disco rhythm, and then sprinting with it as quickly as she can, and making nearly element more electric sounding—literally, as well as figuratively.

This is most apparent in the album’s second single, issued the day of The Loveliest Time’s release, “Psychedelic Switch,” but it can be heard a little bit in the songs that immediately follow—“So Right,” and “Come Over.”

“Psychedelic Switch” is, without a doubt, the most exhilarating and kaleidoscopic song within this collection—razor sharp in the precision it uses to bend and warp layers of sound as it continues building in the opening—jittery keyboard loops and Jepsen’s voice, manipulated, sampled, and flanged until it works itself into a frenzy, and then explodes into something blindingly bright and contagious in its excitement. 

For the song, Jepsen re-teamed with producer Kyle Shearer, who worked with her on the subtle and shimmering “Julien” from Dedicated, and the titular track from The Loneliest Time, but here, he and Jepsen push things into a place of reckless musical abandon—dragging the listener out into the writhing and oscillation on a packed dance floor, and have created something that, even when it seems like it might be entirely too weighed down in its layers of studio trickery and glossy production, is still undeniably fun.

Something that I have struggled with, as someone who is usually unable to turn off the analytical part of my brain when listening to music—struggling, specifically, with pop music—is the acceptance of a song that is, simply, based around a feeling. Or a vibe. A lot of pop music is arguably “vibe based,” because a lot of pop music is out to have a good time, for itself, and it, in turn, would like it if you had a good time as well, and I do have to play against type with my desire to try to comb lyrics for some kind of greater or deeper meaning.

A song like “Psychedelic Switch” is not here to present anyone with a greater, or more profound meaning. It is a song, based around a vibe, and it wants you to have half of as good of a time as it is having. 

I think I tried to describe Jepsen’s lyrics as wholesome once in a conversation, which is a description that does warrant additional clarifications—Jepsen does write, and sing, about everything that comes along with love and desire, so there are often references to physical intimacy, and what I mean by “wholesome” is that she is much more tactful and often coy in how she addresses the idea of sex, or sexual experiences, in comparison to other performers within the same genre. Jepsen, at perhaps her horniest (sorry) on Dedicated’s “Want You in My Room,” exclaims, “I wanna do bad things to you” in the chorus—though the extent of those bad things is never explored.

Again, there is the chase or a want of this desire, though she often stops short in her writing in the moments just before she is going to reach out and grabs it.

“Psychedelic Switch,” along with being a song built around a vibe more than anything else, also does not take itself very seriously regarding its lyricism. “Baby, I’d be satisfied forever with a couple years of this,” Jespen belts out in the dizzying chorus. “Make me feel like in my birthday suit—with you, I’m putting on the Ritz.” 

And it is easy, I guess, for me at least, as the listener, to make these attempts to wrangle handfuls of songs from The Loveliest Time into these little pockets—grouping things together that are, in a sense, somewhat similar in sound, as a means of both organizing my thoughts the further I waded out into the record, but also as a means of finding the connections, or through lines, from song to song when listening to it as a whole. 

There are songs, though, that are not as easy to sort as many of the others are in terms of their sound or the feeling.

One of those songs arrives early on—“Kamikaze” is sequenced second on The Loveliest Time, and finds Jepsen working from within less of a space that is disco adjacent in terms of rhythm and feeling. But rather, through the different synthesizer textures that are layered, dizzyingly glistening all around her, it is more akin to the kind of sound she favored on both Emotion and Dedicated, though there is an unexpected edge to it that gives the song a bit of a darkness, or severity to it, even though it is, in terms of its melody and components, one of the more immediately infectious.

The darkness, and severity, then also transfer into Jepsen’s writing. Less playful, or flirtatious in its observations, “Kamikaze” does come from that place of want and desire, and the heading towards something, though that “something” is not strictly part of the narrative she’s depicted. “I saw you in the deep end,” she begins, addressing the off-stage love interest, whom she describes as a “Shipwreck underwater.”  

The word “kamikaze” itself is honestly bleak—coming from a World War II-era Japanese aircraft loaded with explosives and making a deliberately suicidal crash on an enemy target. This imagery itself is somewhat reminiscent of a moment in “Making The Most of The Night,” from Emotion, that has always made laugh at the unflinching audacity where Jepsen, boldly, says to the unnamed, desired character, that she is going to “hijack” them, then love them. In that order. 

Here, she takes its step further, alluding to the risks one takes within the pursuit of love, or romance, or at least some kind of physical connection. “I know it sounds fatal—I know we made fires,” she sings in the chorus. “The endings’ real clear and it won’t take us higher. Tonight, I might need to come kamikaze and crash into your way.”

The other track on The Loveliest Time that manages to slightly defy even the general kind of categorization or organizing I am doing here, is “So Right,” which arrives within the album’s final third, and it, surprisingly, includes a cameo from, and production by, Jepsen’s somewhat enigmatic partner, Cole Marsden Greif-Neill⁵, who has been a producer, engineer, and mixer for a number of rather diverse artists including Beck (on one end) and G-Eazy (on the other.)

It is Marsden Greif-Neill’s voice that you hear in a short exchange with Jepsen at the top of the song—he asks if she thinks “this” is a good idea, to which she replies, “I mean no, probably not, but….yeah.”

Musically, “So Right” works from a what seems like a place of tension and release, just in terms of how it is structured. It does recall the kind of neon-soaked, synth-heavy, post-disco vibe that Jepsen favors, complete with a fuzzed-out, thick bass line, and crisp percussion, but there is a rippling undercurrent tumultuousness, and unease—and if not unease, uncertainty. “Did we crash into each other’s lives again overnight,” Jepsen asks in the first verse. “I don’t blame you for your hesitation,” she continues, her syllables measured, tumbling out, and finding their place within the strong groove underneath. “Will we only make each other cry again?”

“So Right,” then, does switch from this tension into the release of the chorus–which switches the tone of the song a little, lightning it up just slightly from a noticeably melancholic kind of feeling conjured elsewhere, with the groove hitting harder, and the song’s rumbling bass line going from just a fuzz to a scuzzy sort of funk. 

“I was wrong—no one’s innocent,” Jepsen declares as the chorus kicks into gear. “Did we fuck this up when it’s critical? Sometimes we get it so right.”

*

I went into this—at least this portion of this piece, now well over 5,000 words, thinking about three specific songs on The Loveliest Time, and how I would try to explain their aesthetic, or why I had grouped them together. 

And these are, at least for me, the most surprising songs on this collection—and where Jepsen, as she was quoted in some kind of press about this album, was touting the experimental nature of them, mostly in comparison by what one could say she normally does, and in turn, normally does the best. 

I went into this thinking that I could, and perhaps would, describe songs like “After Last Night” and “Put it to Rest” as “hyper pop⁶,” but I realize, with even a brief inquiry into that sub-genre, that these songs aren’t really that at all. Maybe adjacent—maybe. And that perhaps is a stretch, but they are where Jepsen and her collaborators are working without a safety net underneath them, and are creating songs with a visceral and often frenetic urgency to them, with the result being, regardless of how you actually feel about the song itself, absolutely fascinating to hear.

In writing about music, I am aware of how often I overuse expressions or certain words to describe things. For as many words as there are in the English language, and for as long as I have been doing this for, you would think that I would not fall into the patterns of regularly describing guitar tones as glistening or shimmery, or as imagery within lyrics being evocative—but I do. And I know this, and I try to laugh at how serious I take myself. Words that I know I use, and perhaps overuse, in writing about percussion and rhythm specifically are “jittery” and “glitchy,” and those are the first words that came to mind when trying to wrap my head around the breakneck pace and sound of “After Last Night.”

The third track on the album, coming after the synth-heavy stuttering pop of “Kamikaze,” “After Last Night” is undoubtedly the fastest-paced song on the record–clipping along breezily, yes, but there is a real immediacy to how it moves–that movement, then, impressively evolving the further along Jepsen leads you into the song.

With the skittering (there’s another one I overuse, certainly) and clattering rhythm, and Jepsen’s voice rising, falling, and floating through it all, are myriad blips and washes of synthesizers. It’s all very airy sounding, sure, but also extremely disorienting during the first time you hear it—but even in that disorientation, there is something really compelling about the way Jepsen allows her voice to soar and descend, especially in the melody within the chorus, and within the unrelenting of the rhythm that does, almost immediately, take over your body, only letting go when the song arrives at its conclusion. 

Somewhere between this kind of jittery, digi-pop, and the type of loosely hip-hop adjacent energy from some of the other songs on The Loveliest Time, is the twinkling, subtle, and surprisingly infectious “Shadow.”

There is a surging feeling to “Shadow,” though it is a bit of an understated one—the song, again, like “After Last Night,” exists in this jumpy kind of effervesce, but even within the excitement that you can feel bubbling up to the surface, there is a subdued nature to it all—like Jepsen is not willing to completely let go of it, allowing it build to the point of a technicolor explosion. 

And the fun of a song like “Shadow” comes in the sentiments within the lyrics—it is an extremely cute song when Jepsen begins the extended lead-up to the chorus: “I want to tell you something so hard to say,” she coos. “I think you might already know. I think about you almost every day—there’s not a place that you don’t go.” But the real marvel of the song does come in the hypnotic nature of the chorus—“The architecture of this connection is your reflection is always following me,”  Jepsen sings, breathlessly. “City to city, heartbeat to heartbeat, body to body.”

The Loveliest Time, as a collection, is comprised of songs that, for me, regularly surprised, as well as songs that can easily, and regularly, be described as simply having too much happening in them at once—layers, upon layers, which can create a listening experience that can be disorienting at first, and disorienting, still, even after subsequent listenings. 

And within this small handful of tracks that both lean into more daring or experimental territory for Jepsen, and that also can have just a lot happening within their confines, perhaps the most experimental and the busiest sounding—and the most genuinely interesting in terms of arranging alone—on the album is “Put it to Rest.”

“Put it to Rest” opens with a quickly tapped-out rhythm on a cymbal, and a short sample of a few notes being plunked out on a cavernous sounding, possibly out of tune, upright piano—and what is most compelling about this is the way that this then seamlessly slides into more robust instrumentation, where the sample of the piano is replaced with the same notes, expanded, and played out on a keyboard, and the rhythm deepening through the use of skittering, pulsating drum programming, all of which are joined by coursing waves of synthesizers, and Jepsen’s voice, which she keeps in a breathier, higher, almost whispered range while the song endlessly spirals around her.

Another song in the collection, and in Jepsen’s body of work overall, I suppose, that is more based around the feeling, or the vibe, than anything else—and the vibe is a kind of frenzied, urgent sensation that grabs ahold tightly and does not let go—“Put it to Rest” is one of the few songs of hers I could say has a very eerie and unsettling nature to it. It isn’t “scary,” but there is something kind of ominous, or at least shadowy, about the theatrically of the piano melody and just how quickly everything seems to be moving, while Jepsen, in the sparsity of her lyrics, sings with an ambiguity about trying to outrun the ghosts of past relationships that do still apparently seem to haunt. 

“Put it to rest so the rest won’t follow me,” she urges breathlessly in the chorus. “The ones I loved and left behind.”

*

I don’t talk about this as much as I perhaps once did, or really have an outlet anymore where I could share my thoughts on this, but for a while, I have felt like the internet is not much fun as it once was—that can mean a lot of things, and it does mean a lot of things, and one of those things is about how infrequently music that I am interested in listening to, and am perhaps impatient for, turns up online ahead of its release date.

The Loneliest Time, surprisingly, ended up on the internet roughly two weeks ahead of its projected late October release date, which did provide me with a head start in sitting with the album as a whole, and the chance to collect my thoughts on it prior to sitting down and writing about it. The Loveliest Time, too, wound up shared online—around a week ahead of its expected release date, which not only provided me the head start in gathering my thoughts on the albums, but it also allowed songs I was skeptical of, at first, to grow on me more.

The spoken dialogue at the beginning of “So Right,” for example, gave me reason for pause during the first few listen—mostly an eye roll at just how campy it is, but how seriously it seems to take itself. Another was the opening moments of the voluminous closing track (on the physical version of the album, anyway), “Stadium Love.”

Hey Carly, watch this

“Stadium Love” opens with a voice—slightly distorted, echoing slightly, and it is the sound of one of the song’s producers, Lewis Delhomme, who instructs Jepsen, in a sleepy drawl, to “watch this.” And there is a small bit of what, presumably, is ad-libbing from Jepsen, in the first few bars of “Stadium Love,” before she begins belting out the opening line of the first verse. 

And, I mean, it’s fine—and this is something that I have written about in the past, outside of needing to remind myself that sometimes, pop music is less about lyrics that need to be analyzed and more about cultivating a vibe, that pop music also doesn’t need to take itself so seriously, and can (and often does) have fun, and in having fun, can be kind of silly. I thought the bit at the beginning of the song was silly, and annoying at first, but the song itself, rather quickly, grew on me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is, like, my favorite song on the album, but I am willing to forgive the whimsical, self-aware nature it begins with, and find myself lost in the towering heights it scales to from the moment it begins.

Built around enormous drums that seemingly ricochet back and forth in time, and an even larger, snarling kind of heavily processed guitar strum, it is both the ferocity in a searing guitar solo that arrives mid-way through, as well as the power of Jepsen’s voice that makes “Stadium Love” as fun as it is.

There is a smoldering flirtatiousness with which she delivers some of her lines within the song’s first two verses: “Am I the only one who’s insatiable?,” she asks boldly while the song gains momentum. “Waiting for someone who’s untouchable.” Then, a few lines later, “This is for the weekend lovers—ones you can’t imagine you’ll forget.” 

Jepsen can, and has, in the past, written real anthems—a bulk of Emotion could be described that way, with the anthemic nature of the songs only getting larger by the time she gets to “When I Needed You” and “I Didn’t Just Come Here to Dance.” And, arguably, her most anthemic would be the non-album track “Cut to The Feeling.” 

“Stadium Love,” I suppose based on the title, and conceit alone, is attempting to achieve that kind of feeling, and of the songs included on The Loveliest Time, it is the one that is able to reach that high. There is the power of the first two verses, yes, but the moment where she goes for it is within the chorus, as Jepsen sings with a kind of raw abandon I have not heard her ever do before. Her voice doesn’t break, but she does really push it to its range and limit, and the way it kind of shreds gives this part of the song, as she’s holding her own against the instrumentation, gives it an unexpected honesty and humanistic quality when she belts—“Hey boy—I saw you on the weekend. Full stop—now I’m in the deep end. Hey, look, now I’m only feeling stadium love.”

Closing The Loveliest Time, at least on the standard edition of the album, with “Stadium Love” makes sense—it is a huge final exhalation of jubilance, but within the digital edition of the album, Jepsen provides an epilogue in the breezy, quaint “Weekend Love,” which returns to that relaxed, groove-oriented production that is similar to earlier tracks in the album’s run, and, at least to my analytical ears, is another song that echoes Fever In, Fever Out Luscious Jackson. 

The production of “Weekend Love” is not as risky, or perhaps experimental, as you will hear elsewhere on The Loveliest Time, but it is nevertheless one of the more inherently fascinating in it the way it gently unravels. Produced and co-written by Ethan Gruska, who is known for his work with Phoebe Bridgers, “Weekend Love” begins with the comforting warmth and hypnotic sounds of the mellotron, which ushers in the resonant layers of drum programming and Jepsen’s hushed, sensual vocal delivery. 

And in a bit of a contrast from the bombast and chase toward desire of “Stadium Love,” “Weekend Love,” is one of the few places on The Loveliest Time that is written from a reflective and rather pensive kind of place for Jepsen, and even within the song’s first few lines, creates a startling and vivid portrait.

“Eyes like invitations,” she begins while the music slowly swirls around her. “One seat left, and you moved over—and it was on. Conversation was more than ordinary,” she continues, before things then take a bit of a darker, or at least a more melancholic turn. “Young girl bought the things you sold her, and on and on.”

And the further along Jepsen pulls us into “Weekend Love,” the more we see that it is a song that is firmly rooted in a sense of not so much regret, but certainly remorse and some misgivings about what has come and gone. “Summer flies, and we got a little bit older,” she continues. “Got me so high, but everybody comes down.” And even in this kind of difficult reflection, there is still a small sense of hope that she depicts in the second verse (“No more sleeping on your shoulder—I’m moving on. In the park, there’s a violin beginning. Like a movie kind of closure”) as well as in the assurance she seems to be giving both us, the listener, and herself in the final lines of the chorus—“I’ll be alright. I’m alright.”

*

And I do, often, think about the relationship between the artist and their audience, and what that artist, or performer, gives—sometimes giving entirely too much of themselves to listeners that seem to want, or demand, or expect, more of them.

Within the announcement of The Loveliest Time, Jepsen tried to maintain a graciousness about what her audience has ultimately come to expect from her during the cycle of an album. “At this point, you know me so well that I won’t even tease about a b-sides,” she said. “It’s almost disrespectful because you know that it’s coming.”

You know. 

Or, you demand. You want. You expect.

We know, and in knowing, if anything, we should be showing gratitude. 

Like its companion, The Loveliest Time is an album that there are certainly moments from it that stand out more upon initial listens than others, but it is also a collection of songs that does ultimately implore you to have patience and to sit with it a little longer with the hope that some of the songs that are slightly less accessible to a casual listen, or are a little more difficult to process can open themselves up to you, because even in its restless spirit, this is a wildly fun and dynamic album that provides moments that challenge us, and even frustrate us, but Jepsen, offers us more reward within the moments of pure pop perfection she has crafted. 

^{1- I will admit that, in several cases, I am very quick to sing the praises of b-sides, or songs that are tacked onto special, or expanded, editions of an album. This kind of response, on my part, has gotten me into some debates with my friend Alyssa, who is more skeptical of these kinds of songs and often disagrees with me, asserting, “I can see why these are b-sides.”}

^{2- Jepsen, like Lana Del Rey, is prolific in the sense that there are seemingly endless demo recordings or unreleased tracks that ultimately turn up on the internet. A passing comment on the Genius page for The Loveliest Time made reference to a song called “Lost in Devotion,” which was apparently in the running to be included on The Loneliest Time, but was cut. Given that it doesn’t turn up in this collection either, I do wonder how many more completed songs Jepsen has stored somewhere from these recording sessions.} 

^{3- It wouldn’t be a piece about Carly Rae Jepsen if I did not reference the idea of “The Kingdom of Desire,” from the essay that Hanif Abdurraqib wrote about her in 2017.} 

^{4- I understand that everyone listens to music differently and certainly experiences, or thinks about music differently, and not everyone is going to think about things analytically the way I do. I made this connection between Luscious Jackson and The Loveliest Time, and I attempted, and perhaps I did not articulate myself (or my comparison) well enough, to share this thought with my friend Alyssa, and she did not really hear what I was trying to describe it at all. So maybe this one is more of a stretch than I thought.} 

^{5- Jepsen did a hard launch of her relationship with this guy shortly before the release of The Loneliest Time, and whether this was intentional or not, in her own Instagram posts that feature photos of him, or with him, she did a pretty good job of keeping many things about him private, as in, like, his last name, or the fact that he has been working within the music industry for several years as a producer, mixer, and engineer—he also released an insufferable EP in 2016. Despite playing down all of this, which makes him appear as if he were just some regular, dopey guy, his involvement in “So Right” does launch him further in terms of his identity, and I will be honest and say I do not like his vibes, at all.} 

^{6 - I don’t think I was familiar with “hyper pop” as a genre, theoretical or otherwise, until a few years ago when I was working with someone who had recently graduated from college, and if you ever want to feel not so much “old,” but certainly out of touch with what young people are listening to, or interested in, a circumstance like this is an excellent opportunity for you.}

The Loveliest Time is out now digitally, with physical editions arriving in early September, via School Boy/Interscope.