Slow jams, smash hits and Popeye samples: Carly Rae Jepsen's 20 best songs – ranked!
You can plot Jepsen songs on a spectrum of 'laser-eyed intensity' to 'dreamy reverie'. This Kiss, from her first pop album Kiss (after her dreary post-Canadian Idol debut, 2008's Tug of War), epitomises the former, with EDM-era synths that rattle and gleam like arcade machines and a sledgehammer vocal performance about wanting forbidden pleasures.
CRJ is a fiend for pure sensation who literally called an album Emotion: often her lyrics skip over any specific object of affection and cut straight to the feeling, as a song later in this list spells out. So when she sings 'he never wants to strip down to his feelings' on this pained ballad from Emotion Side B, you know it's terminal.
Anyone who's only ever heard the radioactively perky Call Me Maybe and (wrongly) considers CRJ a one-hit wonder might be stunned to learn that she's elite at genuinely sultry come-ons. No Drug Like Me lives up to its narcotic premise – a risky cliche to sell – with its slinky, muted boogie and Jepsen's gasped promises to 'blossom for you'.
Avant garde collaborators love Jepsen, but unlike, say, Caroline Polachek or Charli xcx, she's never made leftfield cool her brand. Those moments feel more like surprise gems in her enjoyably wayward catalogue: All That, made with Ariel Rechtshaid and Dev Hynes, is a sparkling devotional that forms a perfect period trifecta with Sky Ferreira's Everything Is Embarrassing and Solange's Losing You.
The verse to Joshua Tree is all sharp, hungry anticipation of – what else – some kind of sensory high. Jepsen makes it worth the wait when the tension breaks into a chorus of rapturous satisfaction, à la Jessie Ware's sultrier disco moments: 'I need it / I feel it,' Jeppo sings, her unusually fragmentary lyrics evoking the strobe-lit half-memories of an ecstatic night out.
The cutely funky Boy Problems solidified CRJ's gay icon status – you'll seldom see a crowd yell louder than when she sings, 'Boy problems, who's got 'em?' – and gave the concept a self-aware spin, acknowledging how bored her friends are of hearing about her messy love life. The sing-songy chorus sends up her predicament and is totally addictive.
Intended for Jepsen's scrapped second album Curiosity, Tiny Little Bows got a glow-up from its coffee shop-pop demo to the machine-tooled whirling strings and snapping bass of its incarnation on Kiss. The lyric about chasing Cupid and his dinky arrow makes little sense (how do you think it goes with those tiny little bows? Err, fiddly?) yet hits like the best of Scandi-pop nonsense.
CRJ had failed to clear this song's sample of He Needs Me, from Disney's 1980 Popeye film. So, naturally, she went to Disneyland and got Mickey Mouse to sign a fake contract approving it, then sent it to the publishers: 'The big star boss says it's OK.' They relented, and thank god, otherwise this slice of flirty madness, with its chorus that ascends like a starlet climbing a light-up staircase on a TV special, would never have existed.
''Cause I want what I want / Do you think that I want too much?' could be the Jeppo MO. On Gimmie Love, she lunges for, then suddenly withdraws from her crush, scared by the enormity of the feeling. It echoes within the cavernous, bass-wobbling production, offset by her effervescent vocals – and a determined cheerleader chant pivot in the middle eight.
No stranger to gothic intensity, Jepsen sings that she's 'forever haunted by our time' on this sleek, sumptuous recollection of a formative romance. It was originally written for a scrapped disco album, its cool bass and enveloping sparkle hinting at a student of the French touch sound.
The Sound offers a rarity in the Jeppo catalogue: unequivocal exasperation, anger flashing as she rebukes an unpredictable lover. 'Love is more than telling me you want it,' she sings over an abrupt beat, craving – once again – the feeling. The tender piano in the verses drives home what she's missing.
Not to accuse co-producer Jack Antonoff of recycling, but this song's bass/percussion intro very much recalls his work on Lorde's Hard Feelings/Loveless. Anyway, it sets up a fantastically feral CRJ moment: 'I wanna do bad things to you!' she rhapsodises, with teeth-baring pep to rival early Madonna and robotic zip out of the Daft Punk playbook.
Jepsen's lead singles have sometimes failed to recreate former glories: see Call Me Maybe redux I Really Like You, a red herring for the depth of Emotion. But for the first taste of The Loneliest Time, she ditched her bangers-first approach for this gorgeous, dusky Rostam collab, a pandemic rumination on memory.
Charli has form for drawing out unexpected sides of well-known artists, and the first taste of mixtape Pop 2 showed off an unusually, captivatingly desolate CRJ. The pair spun a tale of powerless self-sabotage in relationships, their Auto-Tuned voices fluttering 'all alone, all alone, all alone' over AG Cook and Easyfun's tweaky ghost-in-the-machine ballad.
Jepsen may be as good a successor to Kylie as we've ever had: a beloved, benign pop presence with an endless thirst for cheeky disco. Shy Boy is Minogue-worthy: a commanding, tart invitation to the dancefloor, although CRJ fabulously overplays her hand in a wordy bridge that reveals just how frazzled desire has left her.
One billion times better than a song written for an animated kids' film about a ballerina should be, Cut to the Feeling is raw Jepsen ID: she's sticking her hand straight in the socket of desire, and conducting it through the rowdy, euphoric chorus, written at peak leaping-around tempo. It's basically Run Away with Me 2.0, but this is a song about overcoming reason, so just give in to it.
The first time I heard Call Me Maybe I thought it 'wasn't that catchy'. Like biting into a chilli and declaring it 'not very spicy', only to be left weeping and demanding pints of milk, its delirious strings, pogoing beat and Carly's nuclear-force yet endearingly innocent crush got the better of me. And rightly so.
Emotion arrived a year after Taylor Swift's 1989, the latter laden with lyrical Easter eggs that clearly identified her songs' subjects. Emotion hit certain listeners hard because it felt so free from subtext, hungering instead for BIG FEELINGS shot straight to the heart. The brazen sax and 'oh-oh-whoa / OH-OH WHOA!' of RAWM are a direct hit.
The moment a crush becomes reality is rare and beautiful. Often, it simply never happens. If it does turn into a relationship, that moment of tingling anticipation can still only happen once. Here, Jepsen and Rostam precisely capture the feverishness of finally being so close to someone's face, you can feel their breath. Their subtle rapture softens the arpeggiated judder of Robyn's Call Your Girlfriend into a beat that rushes like adrenaline, the song's body heat contrasting the parched desperation in Jepsen's voice. It skips the cathartic peak of many of her hits to circle this precious feeling, willing it to last as long as possible.
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