I am getting married next year, and have begun the daunting process of planning a wedding. Between scouting out photographers, narrowing down a guest list and making very important font decisions for our invitations, my partner and I have also started the process of developing our wedding playlist.
A wedding can live or die by its playlist—not just for the couple at the centre, but for all of the guests in attendance. Will we include dance-floor staples in the vein of “Sweet Caroline” and “Mambo No. 5”? Or will we curate the jams to our actual personal tastes, conventional norms be damned? What will play during cocktail hour? Will we do our first dance to “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls? These choices matter as much as what we wear or where we have the ceremony.
We have a year to narrow down the details and finalize the playlists. There’s plenty of runway for tastes to change and musical compromises to be made. But there is one thing I know will be true just as surely as I know I want to get married: after saying our I dos, I want to walk back down the aisle with my newly minted wife to the blazing saxophone of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away With Me.”
No other song, artist or album perfectly encapsulates the earnest (and slightly cringey) love that I want my marriage to embody. Looking back at the 10 years since EMOTION first dropped in North America, the album’s most lasting impact beyond its synth-driven pop innovation is its pure clarity of feeling. With EMOTION, Jepsen showed us that sometimes cringe love and just saying what you’re feeling is both cool and cathartic.
EMOTION, Jepsen’s critically acclaimed third studio album, was released in North America exactly 10 years ago this week. It’s a record that has aged well beyond its initial sales disappointment, and rightfully developed a cult following among queers and critics alike.
While this cult love has percolated over time, EMOTION has been criticized for its overly simplistic lyricism. In his review for Pitchfork following the album’s release, Corban Goble criticized the album’s “lack of personality.” “There’s an unshakeable vagueness to her,” Goble wrote. “E•MO•TION as a whole sounds like a slab of blank space.”
But with a decade’s reflection, I would argue that vagueness is the point!
Carly Rae Jepsen—as a person, as an artist, as a pop star—is a little bit cringe. She’s not giving us confessionals with hyperspecific details like Lorde or writing bops with an air of detached irony like Charli XCX. She’s not peppering in fifth-dimensional narrative Easter eggs like Taylor Swift or trying to shake up the music industry like Beyoncé.
Look at the DIY video for “Run Away With Me,” which sees Jepsen, filmed by her then partner David Kalani Larkins, traipsing around the streets of Paris, Tokyo and New York City. There’s no persona to what she puts out. She’s just a girl singing about wanting to run away with you. And yes, that can come across as cringe, but sometimes it’s that simple!
Even in her personal life, she projects normcore. Jepsen might be a pop star deeply beloved by a certain corner of the internet and LGBTQ2S+ community, but she’s also just a girlie from Mission, British Columbia, who goes to Disneyland and vacations with her parents and is marrying some guy named Cole. Her Instagram account seems run by her—not a team of guarded PR professionals. She’s not crafting a persona or an era or a narrative. And that is her superpower as an artist, and has been for over a decade.
EMOTION embodies Jepsen’s most alluring quality: her earnestness. The album is about saying what you’re feeling and not dancing around it. Her lyrics aren’t vague at all—they are distilled emotion straight from the source. If the pop stars of today are presenting hyper-filtered, mineral-enriched water, EMOTION is like drinking straight from a mountain spring.
Sure, it’s simple. But it shines in its simplicity. What Goble critiques as “vagueness” is actually a broad, sincere clarity that is missing from modern pop music, and it’s what makes Jepsen and EMOTION stand the test of time.
Ten years ago, I was a second-year undergraduate student in Calgary, living on campus, banking long nights at my campus newspaper and sitting in the back corner of my lectures, running a fan Tumblr dedicated to the TV show Orphan Black. I’d just come out as queer and had never been kissed. I’d only freshly come to terms with the idea of dating women (and was still years away from coming out as trans), and the idea of marrying someone and wanting to be with them forever was so far from anything I could put into words. Loving as deeply as Jepsen seemed foreign to me. Admitting that was something I wanted felt far too vulnerable.
It would be another year before I started dating my first girlfriend, and another two after that before we broke up—partially due to my inability to commit to the long term. And while it took some time for me to relate to the romantic feelings Jepsen sings about on EMOTION, back in 2015 I still had a budding proclivity for earnestness that I certainly understand a lot better in the rearview.
Around that time back in 2015, I became fixated on the idea of making sure my friends knew how much they meant to me, and started sharing increasingly lengthy holiday cards with long handwritten notes declaring exactly why I loved and appreciated each of them so much. In retrospect, it verged on a sort of platonic love bombing. A page-long handwritten letter is a lot to dump on someone. But it is in that spirit that I appreciate what Jepsen does with EMOTION.
On the album’s lead single, “I Really Like You,” Jepsen sings, “I really, really, really, really, really, really like you/ And I want you, do you want me, do you want me too?” On the surface, these lyrics feel shallow—but in their simplicity they reach right to a universal sentiment: I like you. I want you. Do you feel the same? Another artist might couch such a sentiment in metaphor or specific scene-setting, but sometimes you just have to say it.
In the years since EMOTION’s release, Jepsen has steadily continued to make music.
But Jepsen’s biggest project of late is her own nuptials. The “some guy named Cole” whom I mentioned earlier is music producer Cole Greif-Neill, notable for winning six Grammys for collaborating with Beck. He’s successful, sure, but not famous in a “get recognized on the street sort of way.” The pair have been together since 2022, and based on the way Jepsen posts about him on Instagram, they seem happy in a way that I can relate to now.
My future fiancée and I met in the back seat of a friend’s car in Vancouver in 2017, gave a short-term go at dating in 2019 and finally found each other for good in the midst of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
During those early days of love and since, EMOTION has come to soundtrack many of the most wholesome moments of my own life. Road trips to Whistler with some of our best friends, loudly singing along to “Boy Problems.” Late-night parties where it is the default album to put on in the background. It’s a big, bombastic album full of, well, emotion. It’s meant to soundtrack big, crystal-clear feelings. And what is bigger and more clear than a wedding?
In my future wife, I’ve found someone who shares my embrace of the earnest. For our first Valentine’s Day together, she made me a hand-drawn zine of some of our favourite moments of the past year. It’s become an annual tradition. I look forward to adding a new zine from her to my bookshelf every February.
As Jepsen sings in “Run Away With Me”: “This is the part you gotta say all that you’re feelin’, feelin.’” That is the resounding lesson of not only the song, but the album as a whole.
Ten years after the release of EMOTION, I’m ready to run away with someone.
This week at Xtra, we’re celebrating a decade of Carly Rae Jepsen’s EMOTION with a series called E•MO•TEN. This essay is one of several pieces we’re publishing to commemorate the album’s deep impact on the LGBTQ2S+ community. You can check out the rest of the series here.
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