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12 by Carly Rae Jepsen

Here's the drill: 12 songs to summarize an artist's career, in chronological order (of course). This one features...


Carly Rae Jepsen started out as just another mainstream pop starlet, but with her second album somehow made the shift to hipster-approved pop starlet, all without changing much of anything about her musical approach. So here are 12 tunes to get you dancing, or at least nodding your head in approval.

(If you have Amazon Music Unlimited, you can listen along here.)


1. "Call Me Maybe" (from Kiss, 2012)
I like the Jimmy Fallon and the Roots toy instrument version best, but either way it's an earworm for the ages. When this song came out my oldest son was a toddler, and he absolutely hated it when I sang it to him. He would clap his tiny hand over my mouth before I could get through a couple of bars.

2. "Tonight I'm Getting Over You (from Kiss, 2012)
Feel free to correct me on this, but I'm pretty sure that every single one of Carly's songs is about some aspect of romance, and she's very good at exploring all the nooks and crannies of that theme. This peppy tune is about pining over someone while also trying to pretend you're not pining over them.

3. "Good Time" (from Good Time, 2012)
Listening to this duet with Owl City is effective substitute for inventing a time machine that will take you ten years into the past. 

4. "Emotion" (from E-MO-TION, 2015)
E-MO-TION is the album that won over the hipsters. I said that Carly didn't really change her songwriting approach much from her mainstream beginnings, and that's true in that she kept doing dance songs about love, but as this song (and the album in general) shows, she refined it to a pointed '80s-Madonna-and-Stacey-Q-by-way-of-early-'00s-Kylie-Minogue approach.

5. "I Really Like You" (from E-MO-TION, 2015)
I really really really really really like this song!

6. "When I Needed You" (from E-MO-TION, 2015)
One of the big appeals of Carly's music for me is the way it evokes pop music of the '80s without directly aping anything. If you put this on a "Hits of 1987" compilation, I'm guessing most people wouldn't challenge it as being out of place.

7. "Store" (from E-MO-TION Side B, 2016)
"Store" is like four different songs Frankensteined together. It's starts out as a synth-laden ballad, transitions to hooky pop melody, then into a bratty chanted chorus, then throws in an R & B bridge. It's like a dance pop side 2 of Abbey Road, all in 3 minutes.

8. "Party For One" (from Dedicated, 2019)
Pop music has a short-but-venerated subset of songs about self-pleasure, and this is a fine addition to that pantheon.

9. "Julien" (from Dedicated, 2019)
A hooky and lovely ode to the power of saying the name of the person you love.

10. "Feels Right" (from Dedicated, 2019)
A collaboration with Electric Guest that's a curious-but-hooky mix of eras, at turns sounding both more contemporary and older than Carly's other songs.

11. "This Is What They Say" (from Dedicated Side B, 2019)
See #6. The same sentiment applies.

12. "Comeback" (from Dedicated Side B, 2020)
This collaboration with Jack Antonoff (who co-wrote and sings harmonies) is a synth ballad that sounds like a love song but is really a break-up tune.

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