Carly Rae Jepsen officially broke out of her “Call Me Maybe” bubble with her critically-acclaimed 2015 album E•MO•TION, and the Canadian pop star decided it was finally time to revisit her 2011 smash in a new interview with Billboard. The magazine recently crowned “Call Me Maybe” as the best chorus of the 21st Century, and she opened up about how the song first came together.
Jepsen explained that the chorus was originally intended as a pre-chorus and the lyrics were just filler:
I was in Vancouver at my apartment, with [co-writer] Tavish Crowe to begin with, and he was just strumming some chords, and I sang out what I thought was a pre[-chorus]. We had a verse, we had a completely different chorus, and I thought that what I was singing at the time—‘Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy’—was just, like, filler lyrics. I mentioned to Tavish that we would fix them later, and he said, ‘No, I think they’re kind of quirky and light-hearted and fun. I think we should keep those.’
When she brought “Call Me Maybe” to its eventual producer Josh Ramsay, it still sounded like a folk song, in keeping with her roots as an acoustic singer-songwriter. It was Ramsay that turned the track into a pop smash. “He went, ‘That pre-chorus is way hookier than the chorus that you guys have, so let’s repeat it,’” she said. "He got inspired and started adding strings. Before we knew it, it had this whole new life.”
According to Jepsen, the song’s runaway success took her by surprise. “I’d be lying to say that I knew the song was going to be a career-changer for me,” she said. "It’s a gift to have a song like that, because it’s allowed me now to start to be able to make, without sacrifice or compromise, the exact music that I’ve always dreamed of making. ‘Call Me Maybe’ was definitely a part of my story and part of how I look at myself as an artist, but that’s always evolving. It’s nice to have the confidence and freedom to be able to change like that.”
“Call Me Maybe” is the fourth-highest selling digital single of all time, achieving Diamond certification in September of last year and reportedly racking up over 18 million sales worldwide. It spent nine consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the U.S., and its music video has been viewed nearly one billion times.
You can check out the whole interview here and catch up on all the lyrics to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” on Genius now.
