Carly Rae Jepsen admits that she felt a little uneasy when she stepped on stage for her first night opening for Justin Bieber on his fall arena tour.
“It was one song of nerves on the first night, the very first song, where I’m like oh my goodness, how’s this going to be?” Jepsen said in an early October phone interview.
“Then it went right back to feeling like home again. I don’t know, it’s funny, you can kind of be a bigger and louder and a more excited version of everything in arenas like that. It’s really kind of satisfying and the biggest thrill and the biggest rush that I’ve ever experienced in my life. And it’s a good thing. I want to keep doing it. I can’t wait for the next show and the next one. I just want to keep trying to make it better and better.”
If Jepsen’s immediate future is anything like this past year, she’ll have plenty of chances to make it better.
Jepsen, of course, rocketed into the spotlight this year with the chart-topping single “Call Me Maybe.” Now her first American CD, “Kiss,” is out and “Good Time,” her collaboration with Owl City, recently cracked the top 10 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 singles chart and gave her another shot of momentum.
It’s quite a whirlwind for this singer, who at this time last year, was still largely unknown outside of her native Canada. She was, however, not a fresh-faced newcomer to the music scene.
A native of Mission, British Columbia, Jepsen, 26, showed her interest in music at an early age, giving her first public performance at age 7. After toying with musical theater after high school for a year or so, Jepsen shifted her focus to writing and singing her own music.
“I realized…I didn’t want to go on stage and play somebody else,” she said. “I just wanted to be me and write the songs I was currently writing and see if that kind of career took off.”
But like most aspiring musicians, Jepsen’s music career was slow to gain momentum. She spent several years in Vancouver playing pubs when she could and working jobs, including coffee barista and bartender, to pay the bills.
In 2007 her high school drama instructor suggested that she try out for “Canadian Idol,” the counterpart to the highly popular “American Idol.”
“She was like ‘Carly, I know you’re trying everything, but try this. Why not? It could be a bit of exposure. Worst case scenario, you go to audition and it doesn’t work and you just keep doing whatever you do,’ ” Jepsen recalled, noting that she resisted the idea for a time. “It wasn’t until season five that I finally caved in to her suggestion and went and tried it.”
Jepsen passed her audition and landed on “Canadian Idol.” She finished third.
That helped Jepsen land a record deal and finally get her career moving. In August 2008, she released her debut CD, “Tug Of War,” in Canada through Fontana/Maple Music. Radio responded, and the CD produced a pair of hit singles, “Tug Of War” and “Bucket.”
While “Tug Of War” showed some folk influences — Jepsen grew up a fan of artists like James Taylor, Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen — she said her music began to shift toward the high energy synth-driven dance pop of “Call Me Maybe” well before she made her next record, a six-song EP, “Curiosity,” which was released in February.
“What happened is I moved to the city and all of a sudden some girlfriends and some new music buddies were showing me different kinds of songs that I had never heard before, like the Robyns and the Le Rouxs, the Madonnas and the Dragonettes of the world,” Jepsen said. “And I fell so in love with it. I loved the fact that they made me want to dance and want to sing.
“Then all of a sudden this natural kind of polar attraction was happening where I would go into the studio with every intention of writing a folk song and I would be writing a pop melody. At one point, I just kind of threw my hands in the air and said ‘This is what I want to do. Why am I fighting it?’ And it was around that time that ‘Call Me Maybe’ came to be.”
That single was already getting airplay in Canada by Christmas 2011. And it was on the radio where another Canadian star, Bieber, heard and instantly fell for it.
He started tweeting about “Call Me Maybe” and then made a viral video parody of the song, with Selena Gomez and Ashley Tisdale, among others. The video caught on like wildfire across the Internet. Soon Jepsen had signed on with Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, and Bieber’s record label, Schoolboy Records, and radio was jumping on the “Call Me Maybe” bandwagon. The song became more than a hit. It was a phenomenon, going No. 1 in 37 countries, including the United States, where it held the top spot on the Billboard 100 for nine weeks.
That success, of course, has been nothing short of mind blowing for Jepsen. But one one thing that helped her deal with her sudden fame was that she was very busy working, either on the “Kiss” album or on promotional activities.
“The pace of things has been really fast,” Jepsen said. “So I feel like if anything, that’s been on my side because I’ve always had some kind of work to do or some kind of traveling to get done, and it’s kind of given me something to focus on if it’s been a little overwhelming or if it is a little bit like ‘Wow, this is crazy.’ It’s like well, we’re flying to Japan today. We’re going to do some promo, and it’s like ‘OK, I’ve got to do that.’ “
From www.mcall.com
Source:
http://justinbieber.blog7up.com/2012/11/02/carly-rae-jepsen-riding-high-on-tails-of-call-me-maybe/