E•MO•TION

"Call Me Maybe" went to number one in nineteen countries in 2012. The album that followed it was fine. Then Carly Rae Jepsen decided to forget about chart performance entirely and make the album she actually wanted to make, which turned out to be one of the most purely pleasurable pop records of the decade.

She spent two years writing and recording Emotion across studios in Los Angeles, Stockholm, and New York, working with over twenty producers including Dev Hynes, Rostam Batmanglij, Greg Kurstin, and Sia. She wrote the title track in 2014, scribbling the lyrics on a coffee cup so she would not forget them. During the sessions for "Your Type" at four in the morning, she was using strawberry-flavored nicotine-free vapes and her voice took on a grittier, smokier quality that the producers loved so much they abandoned plans to rerecord the parts when she was more rested. Rostam Batmanglij misheard the original hook of "Warm Blood," which Jepsen had sung as "warm love feels good," as "warm blood," and both of them immediately agreed the mishearing was better. The song became a standout.

The album was not a commercial success in the conventional sense. It did not produce a smash single. The music press barely paid attention. And then slowly, through word of mouth and fan communities and the internet's tendency to find the thing that deserved more attention than it received, Emotion became a cult phenomenon, then a critically reassessed classic, eventually landing on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums ever made. It is a pop record with ambitions that most indie artists would be proud to match, and it sounds like falling in love on a summer night and being completely fine with how devastating that is.