I gotta hand it to Carly Rae Jepsen, she worked through the sophomore slump that plagues many artists. There’s always the danger of being a one-hit wonder, and “Call Me Maybe” was so omnipresent for a few months that it presented a challenge. How do you live up to that sort of pressure? A lot of artists don’t make it, but Jepsen has worked hard to keep her momentum going. “I Really Like You” is a decent pop song. She’s still selling records. It’s all good. There’s still the burden of being discovered by Justin Bieber to overcome, but people may forget that someday. Carly has a lengthy interview with Rookie magazine — the piece is five pages long. She talks about earning respect as a songwriter and pushing past attempts to record other people’s writings for her second album. It’s easy to forget that Carly is 29 because she looks younger, but she sounds pretty mature here:

On escaping “Call Me Maybe”: “It was an uphill battle to prove myself as a writer. I felt myself doing that too much, almost, at the beginning, when I was wanting to show all my ideas when you first shook my hand. I had to dial back and be like, That’s my ego. I’m a writer, I don’t need to prove it, and it’s equally important to listen and to hear other people’s ideas and to be ready to challenge that and have them challenge yours. Whether I want to admit it or not, there was a very real pressure of having a song that was that big of a gift, [it was this] this ginormous elephant in the room. Whenever I walked in it was like, How are we gonna top Call Me Maybe?’ I was like, ‘Stop saying that!’ I needed to at least be strong enough in my own sense that I wasn’t there to talk about Call Me Maybe or make another version of that. When I found people who were excited about letting that go and trying something new and letting that pressure dissipate, I knew I’d found the right people.”

Dealing with fame: “In moments of high stakes and high pressure – this doesn’t go for every time but most of the time, I don’t mean this in a braggy way it’s just a weird thing that I’ve noticed about myself – I can somehow be more present and do a better job when the stakes are high versus when they’re low. I don’t know if that’s like a weird thing.”

On writing diss tracks: “Lots of times, can also start a piece from a really sincere thing that happened, and then allow my imagination to almost make it a better story, you know what I mean? Just because that’s the beauty of it: You can play out your fantasy in music. I think that’s what I love about it so much. But I’ve never really had – well, that’s not true. I did have a Canadian ex of mine ask him if ‘Black Heart’ was for him, and I was like, ‘Yeaaaaah, it was.’ He knew. ‘Cutting through the cracks of the concrete.’ It was a guy who was like, it was really hard for him to let loose and allow himself to be in love. I worked at him, finally got him.”

[From Rookie Magazine]

I like that Carly admitted that diss tracks are embellished. This is probably the case with most artists, especially those who revel in the practice (Taylor Swift). Overall, a pop star must entertain, and if someone writes a song that’s like, “We grew apart and went our separate ways,” that’s too boring to sell. You never hear any bad stuff about Carly, she’s just getting along and forging her way. That’s not exciting from a gossip perspective, but it’s refreshing.

Photos courtesy of WENN