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.
- TIME's Top 100 Photos of 2022
- I Tested Positive for COVID-19 Right Before the Holidays. What Should I Do?
- Column: How To Create a Sense of Belonging In a Divided America
- How to Survive the Holidays if You're a Scrooge
- Life Expectancy Provides Evidence of How Far Black Americans Have Come
- The 10 Best Albums of 2022
- Iran Has a Long History of Protest and Activism
- 6 Ways to Give Better Gifts—Based on Science
