Welcome to Defector Music Club, where a number of our writers get together to dish about an album. Today, Kathryn Xu, Lauren Theisen, Luis Paez-Pumar, and Kelsey McKinney reminisce over Carly Rae Jepsen's underappreciated pop classic Emotion, which is about to turn 10 years old.
Lauren: Ten years ago, Emotion was the most important record in the world to me. Actually, I’m struggling to remember what my life was like before I heard it for the first time. It was one of, if not the definitive albums of my college experience, and it instantly turned Carly Rae Jepsen into a load-bearing artist on any Michigan Daily Arts section party playlist.
Kathryn: I have something of an opposite start, where Emotion released at a time theoretically primed to be perfect for me (i.e. freshman year of high school), but I only really listened and came into loving it five years later, in the throes of the pandemic. It probably wound up being, if anything, an even more perfect time: I was over the worst of my tendency toward kneejerk contrarianism, and I was ready to run away with someone. The album wound up being a very bright spot that I associate with a very specific group of friends who came into my life at a very dark time.
Luis: I was one of the 17 people who listened to "Call Me Maybe" and thought, “Hey, I wonder if she has other fun songs.” So I already liked Kiss enough to be primed for EdotMOdotTION, but even in my most optimistic Jepsie state, I didn't think it would be as good as it was. (This was doubly true because "I Really Like You" was both the first single and one of the worst songs on the record.) But from the first sax in "Run Away With Me," I knew I was locked in for life. I have a lot of memories tied to this album, from bopping with my friends to “I Didn’t Just Come Here To Dance” to fighting my way to the front of a rowdy Terminal 5 crowd in time for the very silly “LA Hallucinations.”
Kelsey: It feels almost unreasonable how biased I am in favor of this album. I was a true head (saw her play a show in 2013 somewhere that I cannot remember now. Maybe it was Southby? It’s unclear to me because that was twelve years ago somehow), so I was seated for the release of Emotion ahead of time. It’s hard for me to talk about this album without feeling a little EMOTION myself because I was in a dark place in 2015 and this album is so positive in a way that I was really able to latch onto.
Lauren: Yeah, I think I take the sound of this record for granted now, because it sounds like a lot of pop music that’s come since, but there was something so incredibly simple about how great this album was that it was impossible to resist. Every song hooks you immediately, all the lyrics connect squarely, and the sequencing is frankly flawless. Maybe I’m just thinking this because pop wasn’t my primary focus when I was 20, but did it feel that striking to you, too?
Luis: It's funny that you call it simple, because I agree, but also there are SO many sounds on this, thanks to a truly bonkers producer lineup. It feels like every song has a different person guiding its sound, so it should sound disjointed, but it all sort of works together anyway, in part because Carly Rae is a great performer and also because the lyrics tend to be big broad statements that flow well into each other.
As for the uniqueness, it definitely feels like the '80s pop that was starting to really take over at the time, and which would later be warped into boredom by Jack Antonoff (who is luckily nowhere to be found here, though he would show up on Dedicated, Carly Rae’s next album). But at the same time, Emotion blended in enough silliness and earnestness to stand out; it never felt like a cynical nostalgia play to me, in the way that 1989 did at times (an album I love, to be clear). It’s hard to listen to “All That” and feel like she was just trying to ride a wave, instead of simply writing really good pop music that felt true to whatever vague feelings of longing she was feeling at the time.
Kelsey: I was such a baby when this album came out. I saw this tour at the Fillmore in Maryland and it was sold out and they descended a pink chandelier from the ceiling and it felt like throwing open blackout curtains in an unfamiliar room to see a beautiful ocean view. I felt so proud of her, because “Call Me Maybe” was huge but she was also instantly hit with the ONE HIT WONDER stamp, and then instead she was playing just regular-ass venues sold out with a great album. Now, listening to it, it’s funny because I have never really liked this kind of true optimistic pop music, but this stuck for whatever reason.
Kathryn: Emotion is basically an album composed of songs that completely align with my pop music tastes with the one exception of “All That.” I’m going to do something awful here and immediately relate listening to Carly Rae Jepsen to my K-pop listening habits that developed in high school, the primary consequence of which is never caring about lyrics in pop music. And in that light, what’s always been striking about listening to Emotion as opposed to [REDACTED FOR HATERISM] is how much the music itself carries the buoyant feeling of the entire album. Luis already brought up the sax in “Run Away With Me,” but the entire album is just chock-full of melody and momentum that knows how to do the affective work.
Lauren: I’m curious how the one-hit wonder aspect affected anyone’s listening. For me at the time, mostly an indie kid who was also super into a now-very-cancelled hip-hop artist, Emotion was like a special discovery in a way that pop on the radio could never be. Everyone I knew was aware of Carly Rae Jepsen, but only the coolest music knowers knew to take her seriously as an artist. I love how much of a step up this is from Kiss, without sounding like it was made by a different artist.
Luis: I don't think it did for me on record, Lauren. It was definitely more felt at her shows (I saw her three times in 2016 as this album's wave was cresting, but “Call Me Maybe” always got the biggest pops), but on record, I had already explored past "Call Me Maybe," and aside from "I Really Like You"—and, to a lesser and significantly better extent, "Boy Problems"—there's nothing on Emotion that sounds at all like that big hit. If anything, I became a CRJ evangelist because of her wider reputation as a one-hit wonder—“You have to hear her other stuff!” and other annoying comments like that. It’s lucky that she included a new calling card on this one with “Run Away With Me;” it was very easy to convince people just off that one song.
Kelsey: It’s interesting to look at Emotion now from an era where poptimism has clearly gone too far and is now inundated with fans demanding you think everything they like is high art.
Kathryn: Yeah! I don’t know if anyone else here has read that Jia Tolentino essay on Carly Rae Jepsen, which was very foundational for me just as a quintessential example of internet essay. I think it very sharply observed how Emotion doesn’t rely on the self-mythologizing lyricism that marks a lot of popular Western pop artists, which makes it so much more free in terms of just being fun music on its own merits
Lauren: Yeah I think even at the time, what was important to me about Emotion was that it was my favorite music to play at parties. In some ways, that’s still kind of a sacred thing, but it’s not the same thing as treating her like a prophet.
Kelsey: If I remember correctly, part of the reason this album was able to be taken seriously and evaluated in that kind of sweeping, thoughtful way by culture writers is that she did not play the Single Machine Game. She released the whole album in Japan (why?) a full month before it came out here, so everyone was already listening to it illegally by the time it came out. Like, I have this album in my Apple Music with slightly wrong titles, which is just a lost culture now.
Luis: Something that I've always thought about with Emotion, that sort of ties into this, is how badly it performed, sales-wise. In part, this was because as Kelsey said, leaks were up immediately, but also because the broader music listening public will always see her as the "Call Me Maybe" person. It felt like those of us who were in on it, to be annoying again, were ALL IN on her. She was like a secret, which is funny because she is and was very popular! Just maybe not as popular as someone with such a massive song might have been if she had gone in a different direction.
By crafting a capital-A Album, she appealed to a certain type of listener who, whether consciously or not, wanted to be like “Hey, this is pop music, but it’s more than that!” It was poptimism at its most smug, but there’s nothing smug about the music itself. I was guilty of this myself, but it was definitely one of the prevailing feelings I remember from 2015. It was “cool” and “smart” to like Emotion; hell, she played a BIG set at Pitchfork 2016, in the middle of the afternoon. You couldn’t move, it was so crowded, and this was at Pitchfork Fest, of all places.
Lauren: Her sales were amazing with Canadian gay men, though. I certainly learned that when I saw her at a 1000-cap show in Detroit. (And, sidenote, I think that’s probably the core audience that’s stayed with her most fiercely, while the girlies have gone off to either the Eras Tour or Chappell Roan.)
Kathryn: Back to me: I went to see a Gracie Abrams concert with a friend as a fill-in (I had never listened to a single Gracie Abrams song prior to that moment), and when I was standing among the swath of primarily middle-school students who were all singing along to these referential songs about heartbreak etc., I had this sort of re-recognition that there was some part of girlhood that I missed out on or was fundamentally out of tune with that was preventing me from having whatever experience they were. But I never ran into any of that listening to Emotion, which I think works so well outside of a certain young-girl demographic because of how much the album centers fun more than any sort of relatability.
Kelsey: The great thing about not being a nepo-baby who is 24 (Gracie Abrams) is that you have more to say. The thing that always felt a little refreshing about Carly Rae Jepsen was that she had lived and dated and fucked around before she got famous. She was 30 when Emotion came out!
Luis: I feel like we're talking a lot about the Emotion Moment, but the songs themselves feel timeless in a way that many ten-year old albums do not, to me. What's everyone's favorite track? Least favorite?
Lauren: If I have a least favorite, it actually might be “I Really Like You,” just because it kind of feels like getting hit with a hammer. I love basically everything else though, with a special shoutout to the bonus track “I Didn’t Just Come Here To Dance” and the strange little groove of “LA Hallucinations.” I’m obsessed with the way she enunciates “hallucinations,” and it also has a line of “Buzzfeed buzzards and TMZ crows.”
Kelsey: “LA Hallucinations” and “Making the Most of the Night” have always been in a dead-heat for my favorite on this album. I love them. They make me feel insane! If there’s a skip song on this album for me it’s “Warm Blood,” but I never skip it. I like the whispering. And I think the album still feels so fresh to me because it doesn’t feel choreographed the way a new Taylor Swift album does. There are so many strange choices throughout that all work but don’t repeat. Maybe that’s because of what you were saying, Luis, about the sheer volume of producers.
Luis: I just counted, there were 21 producers in this thing! Insane behavior!
I think my least favorite is "Gimmie Love," but yeah, "I Really Like You" is not great either. I do love the "Who gave you eyes like that? Said you could keep them?" line, which is the exact type of off-kilter line I love from Carly Rae. (See also: that immediately aged "Buzzfeed buzzards and TMZ crows" one.)
The chalk take for favorite is "Run Away With Me," and I think it’s definitely the best song she’s ever done, but I've gone back to "Your Type" more than any other song on the record. It’s my favorite hook here. The closing duo of “Warm Blood” and “When I Needed You” also rank highly up there for me, thanks to their anxious instrumentals—especially the former’s synth womp-womp-womp in the chorus. God, there are so many good songs here, I didn’t even mention that “I Didn’t Just Come Here To Dance” is exactly my type of uproariously dumb dance music, purposefully so. (I’ll also say my favorite song from the Emotion era as a whole is “Cry” from Emotion Side B, but that’s a story for a different day.)
Kathryn: My least favorite choice is super easy, because I really do not like “All That.” (The ballad hater has logged on!), and my favorite choice is also super easy because I love “Run Away With me” so much. Picking my second favorite is a bit harder because I really do go through the album falling in love with every single song. But I also love “LA Hallucinations,” and “I Didn’t Just Come Here to Dance” because I’ve manufactured an extremely undercooked parallel with her earlier song “Guitar String / Wedding Ring” (which was on Kiss) through the repetition of “if you know what I mean.”
If we’re including Emotion Side B in here, I have a lot of extraneous love for “Store” for the base simplicity of it all and the fact that approximately 30 percent of the time that I’m going to the store, I think “I’m just going to the store to the store I’m just going to the store” to myself.
Kelsey: I hate to admit it, but on this listen the song I felt the least for was “Boy Problems.” But I remember really liking it when the album was released, so maybe it's just due to the fact that there are 500 songs like “Boy Problems” now. But I, too, love “Store” because I’m always going to the store!!!
Lauren: How do you guys feel about Carly’s career after Emotion? I would classify it as, like, “pretty good.” I think if you did a best-of collection for all the songs she released after it came out, it would be nearly as strong as this one release. The boom-boom-boom pace of Emotion, and the nonstop fun it brings, just can’t be touched.
Luis: Since we’ve already mentioned Emotion Side B, I’ll just say more bluntly here that, as a collection, it has a higher hit rate for me than the main album; that's easier with fewer songs, of course, but I’d put it as her single best release. (I hate “Store” more than any other CRJ song, though; the duality of Defector staffers strikes again.)
After Side B, I would say that Dedicated took me longer to get into, but it’s almost as good as Emotion. It doesn't have that same sledgehammer immediacy, but songs like “Want You In My Room” and “Too Much” stand up to anything on Emotion. Elsewhere, “Cut to the Feeling” is perfect pop music, too.
She lost me a bit with the Loneliest/Loveliest Time era, though, because it felt like someone who had already grown up through her music organically making the choice to Do A Grown-Up Album, and that was a bit boring in comparison. It’s still expertly crafted, though, so that’s a minor complaint, and those songs sound great live. (Except for “Beach House,” which is too stupid even for my tastes.) I’ll still see her any chance I get—I think I’m up to seven total shows?—but the life-defining excitement from the 2015-2019 era is gone. I’ve come to terms with that.
Kathryn: I was going to say that as a side effect of getting to pretty much every single Carly Rae Jepsen song late—with the exception of “Call Me Maybe,” which was truly the song of middle school—I’ve never really followed releases the traditional way. I was going to say that most of the songs I’ve listened to are from Kiss or Emotion, but I dug out my old last.fm stats from 2021, and Dedicated is right up with them. I definitely agree with Luis that it doesn’t have the same immediate punchiness that makes me love basically every single song on Emotion, but every Dedicated song I come across always holds up.
Lauren: I did really love the nostalgia of getting to revisit this front-to-back, though. It was like spending a night in your childhood bedroom or something. The part of me that held this album so dear is still very much in me; I just don’t connect with her as often.
Kelsey: I want to admit that I have Emotion on vinyl, so it was almost impossible for me to revisit this with fresh eyes because I still listen to it front the back all the time. Sue me!!!!! It’s great music for tidying up your house!
Lauren: Oh my god, I got it on vinyl, too, back in the day. But now my record player has like candles and perfume on top of it.
Luis: I also have it on vinyl, even though it’s warped as hell from an unfortunate moving accident. I was listening to it recently, not for this blog but just because I go back to it maybe once a month. It’s also heavily featured in my driving playlist, so I didn’t really discover anything new this time around, except that even the songs I don’t like and generally skip or tune out work for me when I commit to the whole album. I feel like these songs are so woven into my music listening over the last decade that it just feels like going home again whenever I put it on.
Kathryn: I do not have it on vinyl … in fact, I probably do the exact opposite of having it on vinyl, which is that 90 percent of the time I’m listening to music, it’s on one of my “every song I ever liked even a little bit” playlists that is three days long and has an approximately 70 percent hit rate, so if I encounter an Emotion song I’m always super pumped and jacked. When I was listening to this album in full for the first time in a while, it was a borderline religious experience. Maybe I should consider getting it on vinyl.
