‘E•MO•TION’ Still Sounds Vital 10 Years Later
In seizing her post-“Call Me Maybe” moment in a dumbfoundingly obvious yet sneakily savvy way, Carly Rae Jepsen ensured her icon status among LGBTQ+ pop music fans.
WHY SHE’S HERE: For the past decade or so, Jepsen has operated adjacent to the mainstream while cultivating a huge fanbase of mostly LGBTQ+ folks
WHAT’S THE VIBE: Fun, upbeat, vividly crafted
START HERE BUT ALSO KEEP READING: “Emotion,” “Run Away With Me,” “Your Type”
In the thick of the summer humidity, I was the only gay who didn’t want to see Carly Rae Jepsen. It was the 2016 edition of Pitchfork Festival Chicago — the final one happened in 2024, but Pitchfork Festival CDMX, London, and Paris are alive and well for now — and I was deep in my regrettable, embarrassing, pretentious Bad Phase™ of feeling that, if I were to listen to pop music, I was being too femme, too basic, too gay. The straight friend who I was with knew better. At one point that day, he said to me, “I can’t believe you’re gay and don’t like Carly Rae Jepsen.” Yeah, man, me too.
I eventually grew out of that phase and came to embrace all styles of music, mainstream pop very much included, so long as the sounds actually made my spine tingle, activated that impulse to keep hitting the replay button, compelled me to dance and — once I learned the lyrics — sing along. That’s the thing about my relationship to sound: I would truly be a dry, sad sack with no ebullience, personality, humor, or anything other than a boring, unpleasant demeanor if I weren’t regularly listening to music that moves me before I really know what the lyrics are. I need music, and it affirms my essence, reminds me that I’m alive, before I know what the musician I’m listening to is really saying, though once I do, I can’t unhear it, and it becomes vital to the art and to my listening experience.
All of which is to say that E•MO•TION, Carly Rae Jepsen’s third studio album, is the sonic equivalent of distilled, purified dopamine, so much so that its thematic matter mostly doing little to move the narrative of 65 previous years of pop music forward doesn’t matter whatsoever. The LP, which turns 10 next Tuesday, June 24, was Jepsen’s most recent studio album at the time of Pitchfork Chicago 2016. I wound up at her set because my straight friend wanted to go, and I was too deep in my Bad Phase™ to allow myself to just, you know, enjoy the fucking music even though everyone else sure was. And you know what else mostly everyone else there was too? LGBTQ+.
Seriously — the only time I’ve been around that many other queer people outdoors is at Pride festivals, and that’s not a coincidence. After Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” (you know it, we all know it, it’s a masterpiece of pop production and songwriting) unexpectedly became a smash in 2012, she faced the dilemma of what to do next, and she made a move that was at once dumbfoundingly obvious and sneakily savvy. She kept making buoyant, infectious music you’d have to be in a Bad Phase™ to not experience viscerally, but with production and songwriting choices that landed her just left of center — exactly where you target if you want to become a cult icon among LGBTQ+ music listeners. One of E•MO•TION’s primary legacies is ushering Jepsen into that storied status, where you can make a meaningful living while pursuing music you’re passionate about without sensational coverage and gossip around your every move.
E•MO•TION’s existence at a healthy but not vast distance from the mainstream in no way means there’s a lack of hooks — the album peddles those like breadsticks at Olive Garden and is all the better for it. The chorus of “Gimmie Love” approximates H&M-core but struts and thumps in a way that evokes club music more than the slick sheen of songs engineered for commercial domination. “Your Type” is a melancholic yet effervescent burst with sparkling synths that amplify the minor-key melody. Jepsen’s vocal performance on the chorus is so full of conviction that — even for someone more sound-focused like me — her cocktail of longing, nostalgia, and regret is immediately obvious. It’s impossible not to relate to Jepsen’s yearning to reignite a failed romance: Who hasn’t been there? I mean, this song is 10 years old and it was also my life less than a year ago. Jepsen absolutely pours her upper register into lyrics as banal as “I'd break all the rules for you / Break my heart and start again”; in transforming mundanity into glory, she establishes herself as a pop magician.
Not that the broader pop public caught on. “I Really Like You,” the E•MO•TION track that many have said was designed to re-capture the mainstream for Jepsen, only went to #39 on the Billboard Hot 100, whereas “Call Me Maybe” went to #1 here and just about everywhere else. No other E•MO•TION songs even charted. Folks are missing out: The music across E•MO•TION is immaculately composed, produced, and performed. “LA Hallucinations” revives the corpse of pre-Silent Shout The Knife with synths that are somehow equal parts alluring, sexy, propulsive, and sky-reaching. “I Didn’t Just Come Here to Dance,” technically from the deluxe edition but decidedly a fan favorite, rides house-like grooves and piano into sheer ecstasy, adding color to what’s already a rainbow of lust: “I didn’t just come here to dance / if you know what I mean? / Do you know what I mean?” Yes, Carly. Yes we do.
Love and romance is E•MO•TION’s domain, which is also true of everything Jepsen did before and has done after (there’s a youthful innocence running through her work too, sometimes even for camp value). This is what I meant earlier when I said the LP’s thematic matter does little to move the narrative of 65 previous years of pop music forward — “In your fantasy / Dream of me / And all that we can do with this emotion!” from the title track’s chorus are the kind of lyrics that anyone who’s any level of horny could’ve written. I’m harping on this because it feels obligatory to try to find a flaw when writing a retrospective review, and this is the closest I can get — musically, “Emotion” might be my favorite song on the album. The groove that leads up to the chorus is irresistible, and Jepsen’s vocal performance and the production from Christopher J Baran and Ben Romans is a thrilling adventure of euphoric highs and alluring quieter moments.
And hey, if Jepsen isn’t as vulnerable as 2015 chart-topping artists like Taylor Swift or Adele, she is someone who can find an unexpected angle into romantic strife. Her sense of humor and her most tender self alike emerge on the verses of “Boy Problems,” co-written by (sigh) Sia. A friend tells Jepsen they’re done with Jepsen constantly recounting her relationship troubles, and then, on the chorus, Jepsen balances the celebration of a breakup and winking irony with effortless gusto. “I think I broke up with my boyfriend today, and I / didn’t care / I’ve got worse problems (I broke up with my boyfriend!)” And she does have worse problems: On the bridge, she mulls over her relationship with the friend in question, and it just hits. Who hasn’t come to the realization that losing a longtime friend is way worse than haplessly trying to salvage a romantic relationship that clearly isn’t working out? To be honest, my sound-forward brain made it so that I didn’t quite realize this was the narrative until I listened exceptionally closely, and that speaks to how good the music is: “Boy Problems” is such a pop banger that Jepsen could say something way less profound and I’d still love it. E•MO•TION mines the classic verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure for pure gold, with moments of unexpected complexity too.
I also wanna shout out E•MO•TION’s “Making the Most of the Night,” because it’s the one track on which Jepsen is credited with writing the music — on the other tracks, she’s only credited as the lyricist and performer. And even more interestingly, it’s the only track on which she isn’t credited for the lyrics whatsoever. In seemingly the most unlikely of partnerships, Sia and the Haim sisters co-wrote the lyrics. I’m surprised Haim (as in, the band comprising the sisters) doesn’t have a music or production credit, because the bass funk underlying the chorus is deeply Days Are Gone. The rolling groove and flashing synths are pop music in its highest form, as are Haim’s Days Are Gone and Women in Music, Pt. III, which is one of my favorite albums of all time even if concerns similar to those I mentioned in last week’s one-year retrospective on Charli xcx's Brat swirl around Haim. And Haim’s longtime collaborator Rostam Batmanglij — a queer music producer and former Vampire Weekend member whom I’ll be writing about as part of a future newsletter — produced E•MO•TION’s “Warm Blood,” which has a tremolo sensation to its beat like the titular object flowing through the body. It’s lovely.
One thing I couldn’t get off my mind while writing about E•MO•TION in 2025: There’s nothing political about it. Granted, I firmly believe that not all art needs to be political; art is art if it tells you something about the person who created it, brings you into their world, makes you feel what they felt (and sometimes, the personal is political). E•MO•TION checks these boxes, but if you’ve been reading this newsletter from the start, you may recall that I’ve written about pop music potentially contributing to our collective brain rot. But I need pop music if I’m going to be alive, and that’s a sensation based in the melodies, the production, the sonic experience. And moreover, no one musician is responsible for major labels pivoting their focus and resources away from almost all music that could be described as political. I might wish that we had more fanged, angry, righteous, protest-oriented pop music amid the vise grip of capitalism and Christofascism, but I also know dang well that it’s often cringeworthy, to say the least, when musicians try to go didactic, theoretical, academic, or polemic in their music.
One thing you can’t do amid all the horrors is stop being you, stop living life to the best of your ability, stop caring for your health. I try to jog a 5k at least once a week (ideally twice a week), and I’m always elated when “Emotion” or “Your Type” comes on while I’m jogging and I have my workout playlist on shuffle. Millions of LGBTQ+ music listeners, myself included, feel the same passion and fondness for E•MO•TION. Many of these people feel as strongly about Jepsen’s subsequent work, which I’ve avoided mentioning since most of it doesn’t linger with me. But it does, like E•MO•TION, get thousands of people, largely queer folks, into concert venues whenever Jepsen tours. E•MO•TION is more than a pop masterpiece: For much of the LGBTQ+ listening community, it’s a grand unifier.
Please read this article. The current presidential administration is looking into sending U.S. citizens to prisons in El Salvador that are generally understood to be torture camps. This is analogous to Nazi Germany, as are many actions over the last 10 years of U.S. presidential administrations and Congressional politics; when I walked along the thousands-feet-long timeline of Nazi Germany that’s on display outdoors at Berlin, Germany’s Holocaust museum, it mapped near-perfectly onto said period. We are in danger. What will you do to help the people take back their power?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Max Freedman launched the LGBTQ+ music newsletter Lavender Sound in January 2025 to create an online writing community by and for LGBTQ+ people about LGBTQ+ music. They also interview artists for The Creative Independent, which is their favorite website (they really want you to read their Jaboukie Young-White interview), and they’ve previously contributed music criticism to Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, and Paste. Their pronouns are whatever float your boat ⛴️💜