Carly Rae Jepsen on motherhood, marriage and her sexiest album yet

Carly Rae Jepsen sits down for breakfast at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan with the ease of someone who belongs there—which, in a sense, she does now. She married musician and producer Cole MGN at this same New York landmark last year, drawn to the venue partly because its intimate scale forced the guest list to stay around a hundred people. "I loved that it was smaller," she says. "It felt big to me! I didn't even get time with all the people that were there." At 40, she's arrived at a version of her life she once thought might not be hers to claim.

Fourteen years have passed since Call Me Maybe transformed her from a Canadian Idol third-place finisher into a global phenomenon. That 2012 single became the year's bestselling track worldwide, selling more than 18 million copies and reaching number one in 19 countries. It launched her album Kiss into the top ten across Australia, the UK, Canada, and the US. But success at that scale came with a particular kind of disorientation. "Who was she? Who was her music for?" were questions that hung over her career in those early years. The industry around her seemed equally uncertain. When she made her Broadway debut in Cinderella in 2014, less than a year after winning three Juno Awards, colleagues were baffled. "I think everyone in the industry around me at the time was like: 'What is she doing?'" she recalls. Yet the production's ticket sales were strong enough that her run was extended, and the detour reconnected her to something essential about her craft.

What followed was a gradual clarification of purpose. Her 2015 album Emotion was ecstatically reviewed, but it was the decision to release Emotion: Side B in 2016—initially conceived as a lower-stakes B-side EP—that opened an unexpected door. The project gave her permission to be more experimental, to have a place for the hundreds of songs she writes but doesn't release. After that came Dedicated Side B in 2020 as a full album, then The Loveliest Time in 2023, salvaged from roughly a hundred tracks she'd written for a previous project. "It ended up being such a weird door that opened for my life," she says of this prolific overflow. By the time she was creating Dedicated in 2019, she was already mentally sorting material into different buckets, thinking: "Maybe not everyone will get it, but I'll have some fun."

Now comes Day and Night, a double album that marks a departure in its ambition for cohesion. Where her recent work has been about expansion and exploration, this project aims for something more unified—"something that felt like it lived in a home; a pure world." Sonically, she'd drawn inspiration from soul singer Minnie Riperton and jazz vocalist Blossom Dearie, then balanced those influences with the darker textures of house music and chillwave producer Bullion, with whom she collaborated on the 2024 single Rare. A visit to the Abba Voyage hologram concert reinforced her appreciation for tight melodies paired with contemporary production. Her longtime guitarist Tavish Crowe suggested a conceptual framework: imagine a musical walk through a house party, stopping by the stoners, the ravers, the couple fighting in a locked room. The double album became the vessel for all these sonic territories.

The album also captures a life transformed by circumstances she once held at arm's length. Jepsen became a mother in March, an outcome she "didn't always think was on the cards." Twenty years ago, working in a Vancouver coffee shop, she'd see young children and feel a pull toward motherhood. But she had what she describes as "a very clear vision for my life; that I was on a mission to make music, and that was, for a very long time, my priority. Similar with getting married." There was no bridal Pinterest board, no daydreaming about husbands. These were "nice, hypothetical ideas that belonged to other people." She'd positioned herself as an observer of life rather than a full participant in it. "At this stage in my life, I feel much more comfortable with the parts that I don't have full control over," she says now. "There is nothing more vulnerable than having a child. It's this whole heartbeat that breathes outside you. I've never been happier and more terrified—but I feel very, very alive."

That vulnerability and desire thread through Day and Night in ways that surprised even her collaborators. During a session with King Princess, the fellow singer-songwriter called her a "very horny writer." Jepsen laughs at the characterization but doesn't entirely deny it. "I don't love it to be aggressively there," she says. "However, I think that longing is really sexy—knowing what you want and being not afraid to say it out loud. I've always found a real thrill in being the person who's advancing the thing; who's a couple steps ahead of the person they're chasing." The lust in the album is less about seduction than about the difficulty of leaving someone's bed in the morning. It emerged partly because she and her husband fell in love during the album's creation. "'Don't kiss the producer' was a rule of mine," she says with a grin. "And yet she did."

Beyond Day and Night, Jepsen's focus is already turning toward Broadway. Five years ago, theatrical producer Mike Bosner called with a proposition: scoring an adaptation of the 1999 teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You, with writer Lena Dunham and co-composer Ethan Gruska. Jepsen had long wanted to work with Dunham, whom she'd met through their mutual friend Jack Antonoff. Dunham had championed her music for years, even using a line from the Kiss track Guitar String/Wedding Ring as an epigraph in her 2014 autobiography. "She's been a support from the beginning, always so sweet about certain songs," Jepsen says. The musical, an adaptation of a Shakespeare riff, is due to open in August 2027. Writing for existing characters and a pre-existing story represents "a completely different energy of approaching music," she explains. "You want to honour the 90s and really do it justice." Having seen a workshop presentation earlier this year, she's energized by the challenge of writing for different voices, particularly male characters. "I do believe if you haven't felt it you can't write it," she says. "You have to really feel them in order to have anything for them to say."