Emotion at 10

We all know “Call Me Maybe.” It infiltrated our lives and completely dominated the sonic landscape. Its catchy strings and excellent hooks brought together by the sweet voice of a young Canadian named Carly Rae Jepsen. Its success was well earned. It was a winning pop song, clever and catchy without being completely cloying. Many of us expected the future of pop music to be dominated by Jepsen.

Fast forward three years, Jepsen follows up that massive single and the accompanying album, Kiss, with Emotion (NB: This article will not be doing the stylization on the album cover for consistency reasons). Rather than continuing down the same lane as she had before, Jepsen and her team of collaborators—which included Dev Hynes (Blood Orange), Rostam (Vampire Weekend), Ariel Reichshaid (HAIM), and Sia among others—changed up her sound and produced one of the best pop albums of 2015. A 40-odd-minute album with excellent writing, raw emotion, and sophisticated 80s-style production, everyone affiliated with this album was correct to think that they were sitting on an absolute goldmine of an album—they were.

The music-listening public seemed to disagree. In its first week, the album only sold 16,500 copies in the United States. By the time that Joe Coscarelli talked to Jepsen’s manager, Scooter Braun, the album only had sold 36,000 copies, even though it had been out for more than four months. As Braun does note in that interview, Jepsen did sell well in Japan, going gold there by selling over 100,000 physical copies.

The poor sales of the record don’t match up with the content of the record though. From the opening saxophone on “Run Away With Me,” Jepsen is working with a very different palate, presenting a much more mature version of herself both lyrically and sonically. This is noted by everyone who touches the record. If you look at articles about this album on the internet, they all ask the same question: How did this pop masterpiece get lost in the mix?

Given that I have the benefit of a decade since this album’s release, I think there are three possible ways that this album did not get over the way it should have at the time it was released. The first is the promotion. The promotion of Emotion is littered with missteps that very well could have doomed Jepsen’s pop aspirations. The second is the image. Jepsen is an extremely sincere Canadian woman whose music displays that same sensibility. Did this just not get over with the public but resonate with indie kids, who are the primary fans of Jepsen and used to such displays of plain emotion? The third is the space. Where does this album fit in the music landscape? Does it go on the radio? In the club? Does it get over at a festival?

To start with promotion, the album was announced in April 2015. The announcement was preceded by the release of the first single “I Really Like You.” From a business level, this makes a ton of sense. It is the song on the album that sounds closest to “Call Me Maybe.” It’s got a simple, catchy hook. It goes down really easily. If you vaguely remember Jepsen from before, it’s an easy way back into her music. However, this decision is a bad one.

While it is a reminder of who Jepsen was in 2012, it was not a good indicator of who Jepsen is 2015 or what Emotion would actually sound like as a whole. In an interview with Stereogum, Jepsen noted that she wanted the first track on the album, “Run Away With Me,” to be the single. For a woman who had spent the last three years considering what she wanted to do and decided upon a reinvention, this position makes absolute sense.

The saxophone line brings us into the song and the album. Slowly, the synth and drums come up, and there is Jepsen, the same honest lady that we know from “Call Me Maybe,” but rather than acting like a teenager, she is an adult expressing her desires openly and confidently. One such example is the pre-chorus:

The sentiment of “Run Away With Me” is still really sweet—it’s about wanting your partner to be with you all of the time—but the packaging feels more appropriate for her. When you listen to this song against “I Really Like You,” the error becomes more glaring.

Even though it might have been the wrong choice, “I Really Like You” was everywhere. She was playing the song on various late-night and morning shows. She played it on SNL, along with “All That,” a smooth funk-styled ballad in the model of Prince and Blood Orange (which is not surprising as Dev Hynes was a producer on the track). There was a fun music video with Tom Hanks. “I Really Like You” did make the Top 40. One could quibble that it was only number 39 in the states, but that still gets your song played by Ryan Seacrest at the week’s end on thousands of radio stations across the country.

So, on that level, it was not a complete disaster. However, the actual release of the album left something to be desired. As I noted earlier, Carly Rae Jepsen is very popular in Japan. Her team decided to drop the album there first in June 2015, two months before its release in the States and three months before its release in Europe. Many surmise that piracy ate into her record sales. In addition, her promotional team decided to dump singles into the market before the release of the album. By the time it hit the states, seven of the album’s 12 tracks had been released ahead of time, decreasing the appeal of buying the album on some level.

These are problems to be sure, but an album can overcome such errors, especially when the material is excellent, as is the case with Emotion. The audience should still be able to pick up on this album and get behind it. As is clear, the promotion was less than ideal, but people heard the singles and enjoyed them. These promotion errors are clearly not the only reasons that this album failed to sell as it should have.

The next thing that I thought of was with regard to Jepsen’s image. She is extremely normal. She’s polite and friendly. She studied musical theater, so she has some of that energy as well. In short, the woman that we hear on the record is the woman who exists off the record.

For some, this was not the case. Some critics expressed two problems with regard to Jepsen. The first is that she feels anonymous on the record, that they don’t know who she is as an artist. The second is that her lyrics come across as immature, as lyrics that are more appropriate for someone who is 15 rather than 30. While both of these are tinted with more than a bit of misogyny (what coverage of a female pop star isn’t?), I think that they are both extremely unfair to Jepsen.

Over the course of the tracks that make up both Emotion and its companion EP, Emotion Side B, Jepsen clearly defines herself as someone who loves love. Aside from the fact that she says as much in interviews, her songs convey the idea of someone who is dealing with love in its various forms. In “Your Type,” she’s a woman pining for the man who will never see her as more than a friend. I can relate to this feeling. I’m sure many of you have had a similar feeling in your own lives.

A song that was pointed out as feeling immature is “Boy Problems.” In this song, Carly sings about her friend telling her to break up with her boyfriend because she’s sick of hearing her complain about him. Again, this is very relatable. Have you never told a friend to either stop doing something or stop complaining about it because you were sick of it? I’m not sure what makes this song immature. Is it the use of boy? That can’t be it—Queen Bey used that word in the classic “Sorry”: “Middle fingers up, wave them hands high/ Wave it in his face, tell him, boy, bye.” If it’s good enough for Bey, it’s good enough for Carly.

By the end of Emotion, Jepsen clearly shows us who she is. She has crushes, and she struggles with terrible relationships. She hopes that person near her finally sees her as more than a friend. She wants her lover to see her the way she sees him. She wants to spend more time with the person who lights up her life. In short, she’s a normal woman with desire and passion. She expresses her wants and needs directly. Where is the mystery? Due to the clarity of her persona on record, this line of argument falls a bit flat for me.

The last reason that people might not have known what to do with this album is because it does not fit into a neat slot. I’m going to try to explain this by talking about other albums. It’ll come back around to Emotion in a second, but follow me on this walkabout.

Taylor Swift released 1989 in 2014, and to the absolute surprise of no one who heard either “Blank Space,” “Shake It Off,” “Bad Blood,” or “Style,” it was an absolute juggernaut of an album, flying off the shelves and dominating the radio. Although she was already in the midst of her crossover from country to straight pop, this album signaled its intentions very clearly. The sound is huge. The songs are perfect for dancing and pop when you hear them on the radio. (I’m not a monster; I sang along with “Blank Space” when I heard it in stores. It’s catchy as fuck.) In short, this is a stadium-sized album, an album that says I want to dominate the pop game. Lo and behold, that’s what Swift did.

Florence + The Machine’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, her 2015 release, is another example of an album that shows its aims. While it never plays the straight pop line, the music on the album is infectious. It makes you want to groove. When I started listening to this album, the first thing I thought of was Florence + the Machine headlining at Glastonbury, a sea of thousands just dancing and singing along with her as the vibes spread through the fields. While this might not have been a radio album per we (the instrumentation is a little off-kilter for the radio), it is an album that people could put on their headphones to help them get their mood right. Its purpose was clear, and I loved it.

For all of its excellence, Emotion struggles in this effort. When you listen to it, it is unclear what lane this album fits into. It has some poppy elements that could play on the radio, but the lyrics feel really intimate. In addition, the tempos on the album are not necessarily pop radio friendly. One of the absolute standout tracks is “All That.” With lyrics that just hit like “Show me if you want me, if I’m all that,” “All That” is a beautiful slow burn of a song. However, its strength is also its weakness. This song isn’t going to play on pop radio.

In addition, the more upbeat songs (e.g., “I Really Like You”) are a touch too slow for the club. They can work for a house party, sure, but you aren’t going to put them in your nightclub DJ set. They are going to slow the pace down a little bit too much. You could put them in the beginning of the set, but you don’t want to be in the ramp-up; you want to be in the middle of the set, when the floor is getting hot and everyone’s E is kicking in.

While not fitting in a lane is a challenge, excellent albums have a way of breaking through. Bruce Springsteen had released The River and was working on the follow-up. He recorded some songs to a four-track and carried the tape around with him. When he finally sat down to work the songs with the E Street Band, he realized that they didn’t feel right. Instead of scrapping those songs, they released them as is and called the album Nebraska. Maybe you’re familiar with it.

Much like Emotion, Nebraska had its fans when it came out. People saw it for its genius. However, also much like Emotion, there were people who thought the album was terrible. Richard Harrington called it “horrid” and “flat.” He said, “it may be the most undynamic album of 1982.” Time proved Harrington to be extremely wrong. In the time since its release, Nebraska has come to be widely hailed as a masterpiece, and correctly so. The tales of the down and out that Springsteen tells on the album are vividly drawn and intensely affecting. It is, hands down, one of the best albums in Springsteen’s discography, and if you were to make an argument for it being the best, I would absolutely buy it.

Ten years on, Emotion has gone through such a renaissance. Although the album was slept on when it dropped, more and more people have found it and loved it. The things that were weaknesses—Jepsen’s sincerity, the seeming immaturity—are strengths of the album. The collaborations with Swedish masterminds and indie darlings have held up extremely well. The album is timeless and only keeps giving back to us as listeners.

While the album dented Jepsen’s pop star ambitions, it gave her something more important: the ability to be herself. She could make her own music and express herself without any other concerns. We can hear this on her later albums, Dedicated and The Loneliest Time, as well.

At the end of this all, do we know why Emotion didn’t succeed? No, not really. But that’s OK. We should consider what we have: an excellent piece of pop artistry that people will continue to find now and into the future. And for that, I say, thanks, Carly.

Thank you for reading this week. I hope this has encouraged you to go listen to Emotion again if you haven’t in a while. Tell anyone who wants to listen to some new jams to subscribe, and I’ll be back midweek with a new edition of The Spins. Next week’s long read, in tribute to Transgender Day of Visibility, is going to focus on trans women making really cool music. Here’s a sample of what I’ll be discussing next week. Tata for now.