There are songs you hear and immediately understand as the beginning of something. “Call Me Maybe” was not that song for me.
I heard it, thought well, that is certainly an aggressively catchy little song, filed Carly Rae Jepsen under “probably one of those people we will all remember from one very specific summer,” and went on with my life.
This was, in retrospect, an embarrassing administrative error.
“Call Me Maybe” is approaching fifteen years old, which is rude for several reasons, but mostly because I remember treating it like the platonic ideal of a novelty-adjacent pop smash: perfect, enormous, unavoidable, and probably not the beginning of a long-term relationship.
the song i thought was the whole story
The funny thing is that I did not even dislike “Call Me Maybe.” Disliking it would have required immunity to one of the most efficient pop hooks ever constructed, which I did not possess. I just thought I understood the assignment. Here was the goofy, charming one-hit wonder of the moment. We would all yell the chorus for a year or two, then eventually hear it in a grocery store and briefly remember 2012.
Carly, meanwhile, was apparently busy becoming one of the people who would most permanently alter what I wanted from pop music.
She has talked recently about how strange the scale of “Call Me Maybe” felt from her side, and how much it made her want to prove that its playful, quirky sweetness was not the only thing she could do. That makes sense to me now because the next chapter of her career feels almost impossibly clear in hindsight: the giant hit opened the door, and then she used the door to leave the room everybody expected her to stay in.
and then came E•MO•TION
Then, in 2015, E•MO•TION happened.
I do not mean “I heard an album I liked.” I mean one of those records that quietly reorganizes the shelves in your brain. Suddenly pop could be this glossy and this specific at the same time. It could sound enormous without sanding off the weird little emotional details. It could be ecstatic, embarrassing, wounded, horny, lonely, and incredibly precise about all of it.
“Run Away with Me” alone should probably qualify as corrective action against my earlier one-hit-wonder diagnosis. That opening saxophone arrives like somebody has kicked open a fire door to the most emotionally dangerous Target commercial ever made, and then somehow the song gets bigger.
But the thing that made E•MO•TION stick was that it was not one perfect single surrounded by supporting documents. “Your Type.” “All That.” “Boy Problems.” “Warm Blood.” “When I Needed You.” The whole album felt like discovering there was an entire city behind a storefront I had casually walked past three years earlier.
And once that happened, “Call Me Maybe” changed too. The silly song did not become less silly. It became better. It stopped looking like an accidental novelty and started looking like one very bright piece of the same songwriting brain that would later make all of this other stuff I loved.
being wrong is occasionally a gift
There is something genuinely fun about being this wrong about an artist. Pop fandom can make everybody feel like they need to have arrived first, recognized the genius immediately, preserved the correct old Tumblr post as documentary evidence, etc. I did not. I heard “Call Me Maybe” and basically said, “cute, anyway,” and had to be dragged several years into the future before understanding what was happening.
I am glad I was wrong.
Fifteen years later, Carly is still here, and the one-hit-wonder story now looks almost comically inadequate. E•MO•TION became a modern pop landmark, the B-sides became events of their own, Dedicated became another whole vocabulary, “The Loneliest Time” somehow became both a great Carly song and a TikTok dance, and now Day and Night has arrived as a 24-track double album because apparently restraint remains optional.
Even better, Carly has said that “Call Me Maybe” is no longer the biggest moment at her own shows. There is something lovely about that. The song that once threatened to define her career forever now gets to simply be what it was all along: a ridiculously good pop song that introduced a lot of us to someone we did not understand yet.
So: happy almost-fifteenth birthday to “Call Me Maybe,” and congratulations to Carly Rae Jepsen on proving my 2012 music criticism should not be entered into evidence.
Sources: ELLE, Universal Music Canada, and Carly Rae Jepsen’s official site.
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