BeatRoute Magazine B.C. print e-edition - May 2016

CARLY RAE JEPSEN
an emotional homecoming
Canadian gem Carly Rae Jepsen is quietly but forcefully pushing the boundaries of pop music.
Carly Rae Jepsen is coming home and
she’s bringing a big show full of all
kinds of emotion with her. BeatRoute
caught up with the illustrious homegrown
pop star to find out more about her latest
album, E•MO•TION, the creative process
involved in bringing it together, and why
it’s taken her so long to bring it all back
home. Her absence in Vancouver is purposeful
however, as she explains, sometimes
certain places mean more and in
this case it’s her home city. “This album
has been my passion project and my baby
and we spent so long promoting it and
GLAD RAGS
socially progressive punks with their humour on-point
With song titles like “Anorexia” and
“5HTP” (an over the counter mood
balancing drug), Glad Rags attempt to
assault their audience with progressive commentary
on the world around them. Glad Rags
are a punk band, and contrary to some of their
subject matter, they certainly do not take themselves
seriously. Glad Rags is Andrea Demers
(drums), Sarah Jane Taylor (guitar/vocals),
Tracy Thorne (bass), and Selina Koop (guitar/
vocals). As for how they found each other,
Koop explains, “The guys in our friend scene
were having these brojams where they would
go to the jamspace and play covers. I think that
sparked the conversation like ‘that sounds fun,
we want to do that!’” They joked about playing
exclusively Courtney Love covers, before they
found their grounding in writing original songs.
“I think the abrasiveness came out quite
naturally,” says Thorne. “We would literally drive
around in [Selina’s] truck and scream at each
other,” Taylor mentioned, in absolute seriousness.
Anyone in this time can find something
to scream about if they dig deep enough, and
the single, “Anorexia” provides an emotional
outlet for Glad Rags about the disease that
plagues many. “The anger is directed at the
disease itself. So the lyrics go, there’s something
that is encouraging you to be a certain
12 MUSIC
releasing it,” Jepsen says on the phone
from her tour stop in Halifax. “Now we
get to celebrate the songs and it’s going
to feel really wonderful to come home.”
E•MO•TION is a fast paced journey
through some very personal stories. Aptly
named, it moves from track to track, eliciting
all kinds of feelings. The tracks themselves
serve as an emotional barometer
of sorts, they aim to inspire the listener to
feel comfortable knowing certain experiences
in life are shared rights of passage.
Jepsen gets personal, she goes deep and
she wears her heart on her sleeve.
way. You feel helpless, you feel hungry and
you don’t love yourself because you don’t feel
like you’re meeting a standard that someone
else has set for you,” recalled Taylor. Glad
Rags is very pro-food, “The amount of potato
chips we have eaten could circumvent the
world, twice,” insisted Demers. “We consume,
and we don’t feel bad about it,” added Koop.
On being a band comprised of females, they
laugh and poke fun at the possibility of calling
any and all “all-male” bands as “boy bands” or
a “male fronted” band. “Growing up I listened
to all-male bands,” remarked Demers. “Well,
yeah, they wrote the scene,” added Taylor.
“Being in an all girl band seemed to be a niche,”
continued Demers, “I had to pay attention to
that, and be conscious of that difference.”
The band simply loves playing together,
and enjoys seeking out the weird shows.
They’re gaining more momentum with Sled
Island and Music Waste in the queue for the
summer. Aside from their message seen in
the lyrics of their songs, they are focused
on the energy of the party, and what their
take on punk music can bring to any situation.
Their full-length album is sure to make
hair and consciousness stand on end.
Glad Rags perform at SBC on May 28
“I wanted to make an album that was
very personal and that felt like it was from
the heart. An album that’s honest and that,
even if no one heard it, I could die happy
knowing it existed,” she says. “And at the
same time I really wanted to connect it to
people and for it to feel like an album that
people could hear and feel like it had been
written for them, for their personal life or
for whatever they were going through.”
E•MO•TION had a slow burn upon its
initial release, but by the end of the year it
had made its way on to many year-end best
of lists. Her newest video is for her single
“Boy Problems,” directed by Canadian
photographer and Instagram starlet, Petra
Collins. The end result was a female-driven
1980s dream paradise crossed with
slumber party shenanigans featuring the
likes of Tavi Gevinson (ROOKIE magazine
editor-in-chief). The collaborative process
is something Jepsen promises more of.
“I basically arrived to a girl party where
we talked about our male problems and
danced it off together,” she says. “It couldn’t
have turned out better in my mind.”
Evolving in pop music as an artist can
be tricky, with mounting pressures to
recreate your last hit, but Jepsen’s aim
is to improve as a songwriter, growing
from one project to the next.
“With Tug Of War (2008) I began very
much as a singer-songwriter, sort of pull
out your journal entry and put it to music. I
wasn’t considering song structure so much.
Then with Kiss (2012) we had this amazing
opportunity to work with a handful of
world-renowned producers and different
collaborators and I think I allowed myself
to just run into that project to try and get it
out as quickly as possible because we were
kinda on fire with the single ‘Call Me Maybe’
so we wanted to share something quickly.
With E•MO•TION, one of the first things I felt
while I was talking to my team about what
was next was that I didn’t want to do it that
way again. I really felt like I needed time and
I needed time to explore and to write many
songs until I landed on the sound. That
was really my sound and with E•MO•TION,
that is the discovery that is most exciting
I found the form of pop that attracts me
most. And I am excited to share this more
than anything else I have done before.”
Gently rejecting the title of pop star,
she is quick to assert that she is an artist
above all else. “There are many different
sides to music and I think sometimes
you can get pigeonholed into one type,
which is where people stamp an identity
on you,” she says. “Every artist is allowed
to explore and change and grow and go
for things you want to do, as opposed
to the things that are expected of you.
I really experienced that (with E•MO•-
TION). I think this discovery will help me
go even deeper with the next album.”
Carly Rae Jepsen performs at
Rogers Arena on May 20.
Local punks Glad Rags are not afraid to call society out on its bullshit.
by David Cutting
by Erin Jardine
photo: Andrea Demers
May 2016