Today, Carly Rae Jepsen releases her long-awaited new album, Dedicated — a record that, over its four year gestation, took her through a handful of countries, a breakup and new love. Asked about how her personal life affected the album's construction — particularly songs like "Happy Not Knowing," "The Sound" and "Right Words Wrong Time," which address complications and heartbreak — Jepsen is forthright.
"Not everything is a journal entry," she tells Exclaim! from her Los Angeles home, "but they're all moments I've experienced, things I've felt in some way."
Jepsen is most prolific, she says, "whenever I'm really present with whatever I'm feeling, and accepting of it. I feel like any extreme emotion that I'm feeling, whether it's a high or a low, comes around the same time in my life — at night, when I'm experiencing insomnia, or I'm not sleeping well. I'll wake up with a lyric in mind, or ideas start coming to me, rather than me having to search for them. That's usually because it's me processing what I'm feeling, what I'm going through."
At the heart of Jepsen's music is her own, and that's truer than ever on Dedicated, she says.
"I wrote some more melancholy songs on this album that were places I haven't really gone to publicly before. I think 'The Sound' is a good example; it was written during a time that was absolute melodrama for me, but I was allowing myself to kind of milk it and live in it, rather than shying away from the feeling. It's a little, almost therapeutic, to put poetry to it; it makes the sting beautiful somehow."
And if her use of the phrase "live in it" sounds ripped from a therapy session, that's because it is.
"I've actually made more of a dedicated attempt at therapy," she explains. "Even when I'm on the road, I do phone calls; it really helps to have a sounding board to go to and kind of lay out things that you don't want to put on people's plate. It's almost just a conversation with yourself, a good way to check in. I have a lot of friends that find it really valuable, and I like it too."
Dedicated is out now courtesy of 604 Records.
"Not everything is a journal entry," she tells Exclaim! from her Los Angeles home, "but they're all moments I've experienced, things I've felt in some way."
Jepsen is most prolific, she says, "whenever I'm really present with whatever I'm feeling, and accepting of it. I feel like any extreme emotion that I'm feeling, whether it's a high or a low, comes around the same time in my life — at night, when I'm experiencing insomnia, or I'm not sleeping well. I'll wake up with a lyric in mind, or ideas start coming to me, rather than me having to search for them. That's usually because it's me processing what I'm feeling, what I'm going through."
At the heart of Jepsen's music is her own, and that's truer than ever on Dedicated, she says.
"I wrote some more melancholy songs on this album that were places I haven't really gone to publicly before. I think 'The Sound' is a good example; it was written during a time that was absolute melodrama for me, but I was allowing myself to kind of milk it and live in it, rather than shying away from the feeling. It's a little, almost therapeutic, to put poetry to it; it makes the sting beautiful somehow."
And if her use of the phrase "live in it" sounds ripped from a therapy session, that's because it is.
"I've actually made more of a dedicated attempt at therapy," she explains. "Even when I'm on the road, I do phone calls; it really helps to have a sounding board to go to and kind of lay out things that you don't want to put on people's plate. It's almost just a conversation with yourself, a good way to check in. I have a lot of friends that find it really valuable, and I like it too."
Dedicated is out now courtesy of 604 Records.