Carly Rae Jepsen, The Loneliest Time (Interscope Records, 2022)

When I saw Carly Rae Jepsen in concert here in Boston this past fall, it became obvious that her career has been kind of a barometer for mainstream pop and its public reception. Her fans often lament that her music isn’t more widely celebrated, yet she’s continued to swim soundly in the mainstream ever since her 2012 breakthrough single “Call Me Maybe,” which I first heard at a gay club downtown back when we all still stared up at the giant video screens on the walls, rather than down at the tiny screens in our hands. Carly Rae Jepsen’s gay following has a lot to do with her ongoing relevance since the gay men who love her songs are a diehard group, both the younger generation down on the floor by the stage at her concert, and the older guys who were dancing up in the balcony like I was. It’s no coincidence that her fellow Canadian crooner and gay icon Rufus Wainwright performs a duet with Jepsen on the disco-infused closing title track of her latest album The Loneliest Time, a title that’s an honest admission by Jepsen not only of heartbreak but also that the past three years weren’t easy for any of us globally, least of all touring pop musicians whose line of work got shut down perhaps the hardest.

And so The Loneliest Time is also a return on several levels, including a return to celebrating music together in person around the world, and it’s Jepsen’s best collection of songs since 2015’s fantastic pop masterstroke Emotion. I still have The Loneliest Time on frequent rotation several months after its release, and the songs haven’t yet lost their appeal, probably because the sonic palette is more mature and diverse this time around, the musicianship solid and deeper, although about half of the album is as playful as one would expect. Having witnessed the kids belting along loudly in unison to songs like “Talking to Yourself” at her concert, a trend that’s gotten a bit overwhelming at other pop shows that I’ve attended recently (let’s all just let the singer sing, you guys), I’m sure that’s the upbeat strand of Jepsen’s catalog that most of her audience prefers.

Yet the cute guy dancing next to me and I agreed that the breezily percussive, semi-tropical “Western Wind,” co-written and produced by Rostam Batmanglij, was one of the best songs we heard that night, and it’s equally among the finest cuts on the album, the sort of jam that puts its listeners directly into a trance and doesn’t soon let go. “Joshua Tree,” with its vivid reminiscence of hanging out at night in the California desert with one’s friends decked out in glow-in-the-dark body paint, feels just as transporting. But Jepsen is just as adept at keeping things friendly and accessible in the way only she can, as on the song “So Nice,” which wisely benefits from the R&B-flavored backdrop of her supporting vocalists, who are also a key part of her songs on tour. Carly Rae knows how to make fun of herself in the right ways, too, as she details her history of beyond shifty boyfriends on “Beach House” and kisses off another one on the more contemplative “Go Find Yourself or Whatever.”

In fact, the entire album is a smart succession of modulations in tempo, from the uplifting opener “Surrender Your Heart” to more downbeat numbers like “Far Away,” “Sideways,” “Bends,” and my favorite, “Bad Thing Twice” (“You’re my little rock-skipper, skipper, skipper...”). Lyrically, Jepsen’s songs tend to stay consciously within certain bounds and thereby avoid overreaching. Taylor Swift’s Midnights is another album I’ve listened to often over the past few months, and while Swift is clearly a great songwriter and lyricist, she keeps herself visible in her lyrics in overarching ways that can feel at once like a little too much and also maybe not quite enough. Though plenty of gay men idolize Taylor Swift as well, I have a feeling that Carly Rae Jepsen’s very vocal gay fanbase is kind of championing her more classically pop-based approach in a way that makes me want to say to the younger gays down on the dancefloor: trust us. We raised you.

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Jason

Boston, United States

Pop culture aficionado.

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