How Carly Rae Found New Love And A New Sound

Her upcoming album is full of sparkling, openhearted dance pop. All it took was four years, a breakup and 200 songs.

- Brittany Spanos

‘You have to promise you won’t think I’m a maniac,” Carly Rae Jepsen says, sitting in the living room of her Spanish-style home on L.A.’s east side. A devilish grin spreads across her face as she jumps offa plush blue couch and runs to the dining room. When she returns, she’s clutching a few large, sturdy poster boards.

On the largest — scrawled in different colors and surrounded by a bouquet of Post it notes — are the titles of nearly 200 songs Jepsen wrote for Dedicated, her fourth album (due May 17th). Her latest tracklist is on the smallest board. That one is a mere two dozen or so songs.

Jepsen, 33, is trying to figure out the next move in one of modern pop’s weirdest careers. She went from open-mic nights in her native British Columbia to a third-place finish on Canadian Idol to a folky debut in 2008. Two years later, she swerved into dance-pop and made “Call Me Maybe,” which spent nine weeks at Number One and is probably still stuck in your head. But the album it appeared on, Kiss, fell flat, and Jepsen seemed destined to become a one-hit wonder — until she swerved again, working with indie-minded producers (Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij) for 2015’s