Day and Night is out September 18.

Photo: Charlotte Rutherford for New York Magazine

On a recent sweltering Wednesday at the Huntington gardens in San Marino, California, there are pairs of elderly women speed-walking in hiking shoes and wide-brimmed hats, young families with strollers full of sunscreen, and even a small group of Buddhist monks in long gray robes. Then there is Carly Rae Jepsen, looking very much like a pop star in her linen Miu Miu baby-doll dress and pink ankle socks with matching kitten heels. Somewhat mommishly, I’m immediately forecasting a sunburn and sore feet. But when I suggest avoiding the gardens’ paths in favor of paved roads because of her shoes, she demurs. “I only wear a shoe to ruin a shoe,” she says.

We’re a little under two months from the release of her ninth studio album, Day and Night. (Reminded of this timeline, she gasps. “Holy shit!”) A double album, it’s the most ambitious project of the Canadian singer’s 18-year career. Over its sprawling, variegated 24 tracks, Jepsen draws on ’60s folk, ’70s psychedelia, and ’80s synth-pop. The Day tracks evoke the sparkliest, brightest summer pool party, while the Night tracks are, appropriately, dancier — if also, as is often Jepsen’s wont, a little sad. “We’ve been fighting fire with fire / But when our song comes on, I search the crowd and look for you,” she sings in the album’s third single (and first bop), “Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor,” for which playwright Jeremy O. Harris directed the music video.

Many musicians have faltered when trying to follow their first, most famous song. Jepsen’s 2012 track “Call Me Maybe” was an irresistible overnight megahit lip-synced by just about every celebrity and sports team but endlessly mocked for its middle-school-crush cheesiness. One can only imagine if TikTok had existed at the time. In the nearly 15 years since, Jepsen has sustained a somewhat modest but loyal (and considerably queer) fan base. Emotion, her third studio album, has proved particularly enduring. Last year, she performed it start to finish for an audience of 500 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, where she had originally celebrated its release. Many, many fans tried to attend, myself included. (I clocked in at 5,000th on line for a ticket; at one point, more than 87,000 people were waiting.) Demand was so high that Jepsen’s team entertained the idea of an anniversary tour, but she wanted to keep it moving. “I don’t normally love to exist in too much nostalgia,” she says. “I feel like I’m on to something, and I need to exist in this energy.”

Now 40, Jepsen says getting older (and more experienced in the industry) has made it easier to focus on what she wants and bypass what she doesn’t. “I went to a label meeting one time early in my career, where a guy introduced me to a younger artist and was like, ‘This is Carly Rae Jepsen. She says “yes” to everything,’” she says. “And I remember being like, Oh, I don’t love that reputation. I also remember thinking, I didn’t know that ‘no’ was an option.” Burnout made her recognize the need for balance and boundaries. So too did a few major changes to her personal life. “It’s a nice thing to have this new center, and the center is my husband and my child,” she says.

In October, Jepsen married music producer Cole Marsden Greif-Neill, known as Cole M.G.N., at the Chelsea hotel in New York in front of 100 guests and a baby-blue backdrop — her favorite color. The parasol Jepsen brings on our walk is the same shade, as is her engagement ring, as are her eyes and some of her French-tip nails. “Blue has always symbolized love to me,” she says. “Our child’s middle name is Blue.” Jepsen’s son, Ilya, was born in March, and it was important to his musician parents, she says, that his name sound lyrical. I point out its pop-cultural relevance, too, thanks to Heated Rivalry. “Which I was watching while pregnant, so it’s probably not a total coincidence,” she says, grinning. “I cried so much.”

In February, she shot the video for “After All” at eight months pregnant. Between fast-cut footage of ocean waves and fireworks and shots of a lightly raucous house party, she sings about finding domestic bliss (“Baby, one-bedroom apartment, Daddy and me”) while swaying and rubbing her stomach, half-covered in lace. “The unsung hero of that day was the bed in the next room,” she says. Between takes, she snacked on fruit and her makeup artist oiled her belly.

Fans don’t always like it when yearning, oft-heartbroken pop stars get married and have babies — who wants to sing along to songs about being content? Jepsen understands the sentiment. Although the album isn’t short on happily-ever-after themes, Jepsen says she doesn’t want to hit anyone over the head with it. “I was very conscious that I didn’t want this album to be like” — she breaks into song — “I have a baby and a maaaan!” She began writing it before falling in love with her husband and having a baby. “I am a mother. It’s a beautiful aspect of who I get to be as a woman,” she says. “But it also was a time to explore, as a musician, what I wanted to play with.” Among the album’s influences, she cites Minnie Riperton, Blossom Dearie, and Earth, Wind & Fire. “I don’t think Earth, Wind & Fire is on the album,” she adds. “I just listened to a lot of it while making it.”

Still, Jepsen can see how her child has already begun shaping her songwriting. “I was nervous about having writer’s block after Ilya’s birth,” she says. “But I’m sitting there looking at my son the other day, and for the first time I’m understanding how ‘Beautiful Boy’ was written. I understand looking at your child and needing to write that song.”

Photo: Charlotte Rutherford for New York Magazine

Jepsen announced her new album on Instagram in mid-June and released the first single, “On Wires,” soon after. Its plunky staccato piano builds to an anthemic ballad and then reverts back, making it an unexpected first choice for Jepsen, but that’s what she liked about it. “It felt rebellious,” she says. For similar reasons, she chose the falsetto-heavy “After All” (a second Day track) for her next single instead of showcasing the album’s other side. “I kind of wanted to sit in one world before I whiplash you to the other,” she explains.

Looking for ways to translate the album visually, Jepsen decided to hire a creative director. She met with a few people before finding her match in Humberto Leon, the fashion designer, a co-founder of Opening Ceremony and the creative director for Katseye. “The first thing he showed me was a tomato that had lace on it,” she says. “I have this song called ‘Amalfi Coast,’ and it just matched it so beautifully. We started to talk about memories and mementos and objects.” Leon asked Jepsen to send him voice notes about the inspiration behind each track, and together with another director, João Moraes, they built an eclectic vintage-pop mood board of sorts with images of pocketknives, lighters, and a peach with a bite taken out of it. “I’m a Criterion Collection nerd, so I kept saying, ‘This is the Criterion version of you,’” Leon says. “Carly loves a direct task, so she took that to heart. She did the first voice-note, and she was like, ‘Is it too much? Too little? Am I sounding crazy?’ And I was like, ‘No, keep going.’ ”

As with “Amalfi Coast,” many of the album’s songs were inspired by a European vacation Jepsen took with her husband in 2024. The couple got engaged on the same trip. Jepsen knew the proposal was coming — sort of. “I didn’t know what to do when he knelt down,” she exclaims. “I sat on his knee! I thought he was offering me a seat. Isn’t that humiliating?”

After an hour of looping through the gardens, it’s time for high tea and, more important, air-conditioning. Before her wedding, Jepsen tells me, the bridal party had tea at the Plaza. “It was very cute and a lot of fun to dress up,” she says. “I had a fuzzy hat, but I didn’t have the balls to wear it.” Today, Jepsen’s hair — currently copper colored — hangs in waves down her back. She has had many hairstyle eras, which she says often help her adopt her desired persona for an album. “I really wanted to feel tough,” she says of Emotion’s black mullet. “And I wanted to feel less worried about how I was perceived by anyone other than myself.”

Prior albums have seen Jepsen vetting potential tracks with a wide circle of friends and associates; she famously wrote more than 200 songs for Emotion and Dedicated before whittling the list down. This time, she wrote around 100 and consulted with a smaller circle she calls her “anchors” — among them her longtime guitarist and friend Tavish Crowe, with whom she co-wrote “Call Me Maybe.”

When she’s narrowing in on a song, “you can see it in her face,” Crowe explains. “She’ll hear something, a line or a sound, and then it’s like, Oh! She’s writing a song in that head right now. There’s a genius at work here. It never stops.” If someone doesn’t like a favorite song of hers, that’s not necessarily going to stop her from putting it on the album. Criticism, she says, “emboldens” her: “If I know I like it anyway, that’s powerful.”

Jepsen is currently writing her first Broadway songs for the musical 10 Things I Hate About You. Lena Dunham and Jessica Huang are writing the book. Having starred as Cinderella on Broadway in 2014, Jepsen has been itching to return, if under slightly different conditions. “I really loved the musical I was in, and I loved the people, but I didn’t love the lack of the spontaneity that I get to explore in my own shows,” she says. “I felt like if I wanted to tackle Broadway again, it would be exciting to think about participating on the writing side.” When she was approached by 10 Things producer Mike Bosner, it was the right opportunity.

“The first time I heard one of the actors sing one of the songs that Ethan [Gruska, her co-writer on the music] and I had worked on, I had this out-of-body tingling,” she says. “I’ve never had that experience because I’ve always written just for myself. I understood the writer’s high of writing for a different voice and the idea that this voice can do things my voice could never.” The musical will premiere next year, and Jepsen hopes it’s the first of many to come. “I was told you go and do your first Broadway project, and you leave and either you’re like, Oh, I’m in it for life, or you’re like, Never again,” she says. “And I’m like, I’m so in.”

After tea, Jepsen will return home to see her family before resuming work in the afternoon. There are music videos to edit, press trips to take, and rehearsals for the All Things Go festival in New York, which she headlines on September 27. She knows the cycle well, though it’s a bit different this time: “My sweet assistant’s bag now includes breast pumps and coolers for the milk. My social team’s like, ‘Do we have a picture of you recently?’ And I’m like, ‘There is no picture where I’m not breastfeeding. I don’t know what to tell you.’” She’s coy about the details but says that even more music is coming after Day and Night and that she’ll tour in 2027. “Next year, we’re going to press go,” she says. Then, grinning, she adds, “I hear 1-year-olds are really easy.”

Production Credits

  • Photographs by
    Charlotte Rutherford
  • Hair by
    Zaheer Sukhnandan
  • Makeup by
    Sully Layo
  • Styling by
    Sophie Hardeman
  • Wardrobe by
    Kimberly Corday (dress), Balenciaga (shoes), Erik Charlotte (corset jacket, trousers), and vintage shoes

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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the September 7, 2026, issue of
New York Magazine.

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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the September 7, 2026, issue of
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