Ten Years of Emotion
The Carly Rae Jepsen album that changed everything (for me).
Ten years ago, almost to the day, Carly Rae Jepsen released her third album. It is not hyperbole to say Emotion changed my life, so I have gazed at my navel and memoirized about it. This whole thing was supposed to be like three paragraphs long but it really… ran away from me.
Music is memory, and I have many associated with this record—from when I first heard that famous “Run Away With Me” sax riff, in a windowless office, to when I saw her perform the closing track “When I Needed You” at a music festival, singing along with thousands of fellow travelers, and everything in between and beyond.
It’s an obviously perfect record and I won’t waste words proving it1; if Emotion is not your type, that’s on you. Despite its self-evident magic, none of the songs on Emotion2 reached the same level of ubiquity as “Call Me Maybe,” but the lack of commercial success only built up her street cred with the Crown Heights media-journalism cabal and with gay men everywhere. Both groups were eager to declare that Carly Rae Jepsen should be a bigger artist, and that “should” is the key to why she has a small but passionate fanbase. She has gone on to make more albums, and they are very good, great even. But I think every fan would agree that they don’t have the same magic as Emotion, and it’s okay if she most likely will never get to hold us under that same spell again.
This week may mark the album’s decennial in the US, but it was released in Japan a full two months earlier3. Because the internet exists, by the time Emotion popped up on Spotify and iTunes and all that, I, like many other new fans, were already obsessed. I think this period of exclusivity only built up the legend, with those in the know furtively sharing links to MP3s in advance of the stateside release. It was the secret we wanted to spill, much like the infatuations that Jepsen sings about.
Every summer is a summer of Emotion/emotion if you try hard enough, but that first one in 2015 was a big one for me. To borrow a galaxy brain allusion to cellular biology4, I was in a state of totipotency. Anything was possible. I was twenty years old, going into my last year of college and anticipating the beginning of my adult life. The week after graduation, I visited New York for the first time and decided before flying back to California that I would move there as soon as it was reasonable. The city, like Carly Rae Jepsen’s music, had expanded my world.
During the third summer of Emotion, I flew to New York for a two month trial run of living there. My cousin’s upstairs neighbors were subletting their Park Slope apartment for just $1,250 a month, an opportunity too good to pass up5. The company I worked for at the time had an office in the city, and I told my boss that it was strictly temporary. It was really a soft launch.
(Really though, 2017 was Melodrama summer6. I remember listening to Lorde’s album for the first time at work and struggling not to tear up at my desk during that outro of “The Louvre” or like the entirety of “Supercut.”)
By now, Carly Rae Jepsen had firmly cemented her grip over a certain slice of Brooklyn, and talking about leftfield pop music was an easy way to sustain conversations with my cousin’s friends, who were nearly a decade older than me and otherwise didn’t have much in common with a twenty-two year old who thought he really liked going out on the Lower East Side (RIP Sweet & Vicious). I remember hanging out on the roof of a Bed-Stuy apartment complex while “Boys” by Charli XCX played on loop through a Bluetooth speaker; would the general public ever catch on to her genius? (It took seven years but boy did they.) When “Look What We Made You Do” dropped at midnight, I was in Kevin’s apartment with his media friends and he put it on so we could all listen to the much anticipated Taylor Swift song. It was received very poorly, and they all spent the next half-hour workshopping bitchy takes to share with their Twitter followers. More often than not, I was making the most of the night. There was warm blood and cold drinks. It was a good summer.
Time moved on, and it’s been almost eight years since permanently moving here7. While I really love Emotion and Carly Rae Jepsen, I am also normal about it and eventually it stopped being my entire personality. (My friends may dispute this.) But every now and then, I permit myself to feel a bit of nostalgia. Whenever I play the album and really listen to it, I hear and know and feel where I was and who I was all the other times I put it on. That opening saxophone melody, those ten notes of euphoria, is the sound of anticipating falling in love, whether it be with someone or a city. Whether or not the feelings are returned is immaterial. That potential for desire, of awakening feelings that were sleeping, is the real triumph.
It is the best (and perhaps only) album that is almost entirely about having a crush and lowkey feeling happy about the emotional torture that comes with it. It’s about wanting what you want even when others may think you want too much. And about being on the precipice of change, but it won’t happen if you don’t take the leap. When I listen to Emotion, I remember how it felt in the moment just before deciding to go for it, briefly believing that everything could be possible. It takes me to the feeling.
I have seen Carly Rae Jepsen perform “Run Away With Me” five times:
An abridged catalogue of Emotional encounters over the past ten years:
April 4, 2015: Carly Rae Jepsen performs on SNL and I watch it the morning after. “I Really Like You” is fun, but I was intrigued by the slow burn of “All That,” and took note of the on-stage presence of Dev Hynes (aka Blood Orange) and Ariel Rechtshaid (producer for Haim and Vampire Weekend).
June 3, 2015: “Emotion,” the title track, is released and it comes up on one of my Spotify playlists. I really, really, really, really, really, really like the song.
June 24, 2015: Emotion is released in Japan, which means MP3s are available globally. I torrent the album from What.CD (RIP) and hear the RAWMe saxophone riff for the first time.
Summer 2015: Evangelized Emotion to anyone I spoke to, efforts mostly in vain but a couple people got it.
July 2016: “Store” becomes my song of the summer.
July 2017: I went to a delirious show at Littlefield where writers and stand-ups delivered presentations about every single song on Emotion. (It was Peak Media Twitter.) Most were comedic (“LA Hallucinations” is part of a conspiracy about Hollywood Babylon), some were nerdy (my cousin Kevin used “All That” to talk about Dev Hynes and indie pop production). Only one was earnest: Hanif Abdurraqib read his stunning essay on the friendzone anthem “Your Type,” and I remember the crowd, primed for merriment after drunk exhortations connecting a Carly Rae song to Twilight or whatever, was talking over him as he sat down and spoke plainly and seriously, but as he kept pushing through the background chatter everyone pretty much shut up and he got the loudest applause of the night. Behind him was just one slide, and it read “TELL A FRIEND THAT YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH THEM TONIGHT.” A photo from that reading has since taken on a life of its own.
August 1, 2018: I see Carly Rae Jepsen in person for the first time. Proving my bonafides as a New Yorker tote bag toting liberal New Yorker, I went to an NPR hosted panel discussion at the Lincoln Center with Jepsen, Mitski, Phoebe Bridgers, and Jamila Woods. Each of them performed a brief acoustic set. This was free to attend. Yeah, I know.
August 10, 2018: At Outside Lands in San Francisco, I see Carly Rae Jepsen perform a full set for the first time. From “Run Away With Me” to “Cut To the Feeling,” I don’t think I stopped smiling. My friend later told me it was the happiest she had ever seen me.
December 2019: Watched Mr. Robot with my roommates and tearing up at an absolutely perfect needle drop.
Sometime in 2022: The cousins go out for karaoke and “Boy Problems” is in the songbook (shoutout to Beats Karaoke) so we sing it and now it’s a permanent fixture in our family repertoire.
September 2022: My third time seeing Jepsen live, this time at Radio City Music Hall. Not the greatest venue for pop music but we tried our damnedest to dance in the stands.
August 2023: Another Carly Rae show, outdoors at Pier 17. It was cancelled four songs in due to an incoming thunderstorm. After a consolatory scoop of ice cream I went home and while scrolling through Reddit and Twitter, I saw that Jepsen was staging an intimate, last minute gig in Rockwood Music Hall (RIP) and I considered jumping out of bed and hustling back into Manhattan but didn’t think I’d be able to get in. I kind of regret not trying though, which in a way is the theme of some songs on Emotion. Tell a friend that you’re in love with them tonight.
The makeup show was the next afternoon and I had to duck out of work. The crowd was sparser, but the weather was much better and after what had happened the night before, everyone—in the crowd and on the stage—was just so happy to be there. What a joy.
August 2025: Listened to Emotion several times while writing this piece, frankly the first time in awhile since I’ve done so. Still falling in love with this album every time I hear it.
Though if you need convincing you should read this anniversary essay in Stereogum, written by Grace Robins-Somerville: “When Jepsen begs, “Baby, take me to the feeling!” at the chorus [of “Run Away With Me”], she sounds victorious enough to make you forget that the person she’s reaching her hand out to hasn’t taken it yet.”
Technically the album name is E•MO•TION but that stylization is annoying to look at.
For an overall timeline of the Emotion era, there’s a great Reddit post in /r/popheads, a subreddit that literally only exists because of this album. (The mods of /r/indieheads kept removing CRJ-related posts.)
Taken from Jia Tolentino’s seminal essay in The Awl: “Notes on 21st-Century Mystic Carly Rae Jepsen.”
They had been living there for well over a decade and the landlord never really upped their rent; my cousin, who had moved in the year before, was paying double that, and even then it would be a steal today. Things really were cheaper back then.
Speaking of Lorde, John Proctor Is the Villain closes its Broadway run in a couple weeks and the much talked about “Green Light” scene is even more cathartic than you can imagine. Brilliant work.
Slim chance I move back to California. There are no LA hallucinations.