Jepsen refused to rush ‘Call Me Maybe’ follow-up

Everyone knows the song, but now a tour of theater-sized venues gives people a chance to catch up to the singer.

The jury is still out on whether Carly Rae Jepsen will ever be able to top "Call Me Maybe."

"I don't want to make songs that come and go. I really aim to make songs you can still hear five years down the line and they still have something to them," she says.

Time well tell. But if Jepsen is destined to go down as a one-hit wonder? It might as well be with an 18 million-selling song that bridged pop culture with a reach even the president couldn't escape (thanks to a viral video splice job that made him appear to sing along with the rest of us).

So what do you do for an encore? Jepsen took her time figuring that out. Her follow-up album, "Emotion," was released this past summer, three years after the peak of "Call Me Maybe" mania.

"There's a bit of a payoff to finally getting to do it live," Jepsen says of prepping for a winter tour with three shows at The Venetian: a New Year's Eve concert bookended by dates on Wednesday and Jan. 2. Rather than trying to compete with the fireworks show on the Strip, the New Year's show will end about 11:30 p.m. to let fans head outdoors.

(Disclosure: The Venetian's parent company shares an ownership interest with the Review-Journal through the Sheldon Adelson family.)

And while Jepsen was Justin Bieber's MGM Grand Garden opener in 2012, she's now sticking to theaters instead of risking a splashy, choreographed pop show.

"It's the way I used to tour way back in the day, and I forgot how amazing it feels," says the Canadian singer, who turned 30 on Nov. 21, and who released her first album in 2008 after competing on "Canadian Idol."

"Everybody who's there is there because they know the album and they're singing along to every word. It feels like a different rush and a different high than stadiums could ever be, in a weird way."

She's happy with the album "in a way that I don't think I've ever cared about anything so much. So yes, I feel very at home on the stage, oddly in a way that is new to me."

Critics also are in Jepsen's corner, praising the '80s pop sensibility of "Emotion," even though the album is currently lingering at No. 88 on Billboard's album chart and the advance single, "I Really Like You," stalled at No. 39.

"There's something exciting about being really stubborn and refusing to put anything out until I knew exactly what I wanted to do," she says. "It took me two and a half years, but I think the joy of feeling really in my body and a confidence on stage is that there is not one song on here that I wouldn't have fought with every bone in my body to be heard by people."

Jepsen diversified by her portfolio last year with a stint as "Cinderella" on Broadway. And on Jan. 31, you can see her as Frenchy in "Grease: Live," when the musical is broadcast on Fox.

The Broadway experience and her background both help explain why "what I really value is a little less fireworks and a little bit more real music."

"I think that it has a lot to do with the music that I was raised on being a little more my parents' style, the singer-songwriters," says the British Columbia native, who covered John Denver's "Sunshine On My Shoulders" on her first album. "You just go see a show and you hear them play live music. It's a little bit less about all the chaos going on behind them (with choreography) or the big screens and stuff."

Jepsen was born in 1985, the golden-age MTV era clearly referenced in an album that seems to pay homage to Madonna, Blondie's "Call Me" and other pop and New Wave hits of the era. Since Taylor Swift is trying to make ownership claims on the year 1989 as well, what's the current fascination with the '80s?

"For me it wasn't really a trend thing, it was an honest-to-god attraction to that music," Jepsen says, apparently referencing reports of an abandoned, more folk-sounding album when she talks of "straying away into almost too crazy a rebellion I tried for a while in the writing world … . I went somewhere completely different before I shook my head and said, 'This doesn't feel right either.' "

She circled back to the "things I'm probably best at, which is writing in the pop world. But the pop world of the '80s just felt like this really new sort of old way of kind of coming at music, where there still is that heart and that emotion and passion to it and it's a song that still has a chance at longevity."

"Emotion" was assembled with an armada of co-writers and producers, something that's become the norm for a high-stakes pop album. The collaborators included Sia ("Making the Most of the Night"), Tegan and Sara and Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij ("Warm Blood") and Swedish producer Shellback ("Run Away With Me").

Yet those critical raves for the album praise it for having a cohesive voice at its center. Jepsen says she learned to "allow myself to let go of what I felt was so right," and "if it worked out I would want to just shake their hand and kiss them and say, 'Thank you for pushing me in a different direction.'

"But at the heart of this thing, this really was my baby and my vision of '80s pop, and I felt like I met a lot of like-minded … people who were lovers of that era as well, who kind of came in and gave some direction and brought it to a completely different level."

And now it's time to turn those songs into a Las Vegas party.

"My sister and her man are going to come down for it. We're going to have some friends from L.A. and New York. We're all meeting up in Vegas," she says of the three Venetian shows.

"Vegas is one of those places where it's so crazy you have to just go and embrace it," she adds. "New Year's is one of those times people are celebrating to the nth degree. It's almost like two wrongs make a right. I can't think of anything better than the craziness of Vegas mixed with the craziness of New Year's."

— Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.