Are You Ready to Have THE LOVELIEST TIME?

As you should all know by now, in 2015, Carly Rae Jepsen released one of the greatest pop albums of all time, Emotion. Since then, every album she’s dropped has been a slam dunk. Pop banger after banger. Hit after hit. She’s also gotten into the habit of releasing companion albums about a year after the main release.

2015’s Emotion was followed by Emotion Side B (2016). In 2019, she released Dedicated and then Dedicated Side B a year later (the only notable event of 2020, I think). Last year, she released the phenomenal album The Loneliest Time, so I’ve been eagerly expecting the companion piece.

These B-sides are more than just deluxe tracks. They’re independent albums all on their own, and they often have songs that surpass anything that was on the original. (see Emotion Side B’s “First Time” or Dedicated Side B’s “This Love Isn’t Crazy). So I was beyond glad to see CRJ’s announcement for The Loneliest Time sister album. But this announcement was a little different than the other B-sides.

In her announcement, Jepsen wrote:

At this point you know me so well that I won’t even tease about b sides. . . . It’s done and a month from now The Loveliest Time will be all yours. I can’t really call it a b side as if these were cast off ideas - it’s the completed set to a body of work that taught me so much about love and loneliness and myself.

She seems to have taken a note from Taylor Swift here, whose Evermore was obviously a side B to 2020’s Folklore. This is the first time Jepsen has given a companion album its own distinct branding and title — leaning in to the fact that these songs are worthy of standing on their own. These side B albums are full-length pieces. The follow-ups for Dedicated and now The Loneliest Time are almost the same length as the original albums.

Full disclosure, I’m a sucker for recency bias. I usually need at least six months of distance to accurately rank a new release in an artist’s oeuvre. But I’m going to take a swing here and say that The Loveliest Time is the best of Jepsen’s B side albums. Usually these sister pieces have at least one track that I consider a Must Skip (I’m looking at you “Now I Don’t Hate California After All”1), but The Loveliest Time — at least so far — seems to have no skips. Maybe this will change as I listen more, but for now I’m standing by that.

It has the dance-pop tracks you’d expect from CRJ (“Kamikaze,” “Shy Boy”) as well as the more understated, intimate songs like “Shadow” which was produced by frequent collaborator Rostam Batmanglij.2

Jepsen is a bit of an oddity in pop music. Even after almost a decade of releasing critically acclaimed albums, I still hear people say, “You mean the ‘Call Me Maybe’ singer?” whenever I tell them to listen to one of her new songs. She has a dedicated fanbase (with a surprisingly wide demographic range3), and she’s covered positively by music outlets and critics. But she’s still considered a one-hit-wonder by a significant number of people, and I think that’s tragic.

The last song of hers that entered the Billboard Hot 100 was 2015’s “I Really Like You” which peaked at number thirty nine. I’m not sure anyone else is doing mainstream pop better than Carly Rae Jepsen, but for whatever reason she can’t crack the charts.4 It’s wrong, it’s devastating, it’s a miscarriage of justice.

I’m getting lost in the weeds.

My point is that, if you like pop music, you owe it to yourself to listen to Carly Rae Jepsen because you are guaranteed to have The Loveliest Time.

That’s my recommendation this week. I also want to mention that Soccer Mommy released a cover of Sheryl Crow’s “Soak up the Sun” and it’s great. So listen to that, too. Okay, have a great weekend.