2015 was the year when Carly Rae Jepsen stopped being just the “Call Me Maybe” singer. Her album E•MO•TION, one of the best albums of the year, was packed with euphoric sing-alongs about new crushes, and intimate electro-pop tunes about what happens when those crushes grow into something else. “Having a hit is a gift,” Jepsen told TIME during a photo shoot that appears in the magazine’s Person of the Year issue, on stands now. “There’s also that moment afterwards where you feel frozen, as in, ‘What do I do next?’ There’s this expectation of, ‘Can you deliver the exact thing again?'”
She didn’t—and was all the better for it. Instead of trying to replicate her past successes, Jepsen first threw herself into Broadway in the title role of Cinderella and then teamed up with the coolest people in music to make a slick but heartfelt album inspired by the best of ’80s pop. “It’s scary when you’re making an album because you’re trying to filter everything else out other than what matters to you, as in, what you feel is a honest record, what you feel is something that you want to say,” Jepsen said. “I was not expecting people to react so positively to this album. The fact that they have—it’s meant the world to me.
- These Charts Show COVID-19 Is Still the Pandemic of the Unvaccinated
- Reddit Allows Hate Speech to Flourish in Its Global Forums, Moderators Say
- What It Takes to Get Support for a Black Boy With Special Needs
- Shonda Rhimes Already Knows What You're Going to Watch Next
- How Harry Reid Paved the Way for Democrats to Kill the Filibuster
- President Biden's Speech in Atlanta Was Designed to Appeal to Black Voters—But Not Everything About It Succeeded
- China Is Finding Fewer Reliable Sources of Coal. That Could Be Bad News for the Climate
