Carly Rae Jepsen on How Marriage, Motherhood and the Joy of Pop Music Fueled Her Ambitious Double Album ‘Day and Night’: ‘I Knew What Colors I Was Playing With’

It sounds like an obvious approach, but Carly Rae Jepsen began working on her new double album “Day and Night” with a simple ethos: make the type of music she would want to listen to. “Like, what do I have to offer to the musical landscape right now?” the 40-year-old tells Variety over Zoom, just weeks before her sixth album released this past Friday. “And that began with how I always begin every project, which is, what am I attracted to? What music am I listening to that I love?”

As evidenced by the album’s two-dozen tracks, split evenly between Laurel Canyon coffee pop and synth-glittered bops, “Day and Night” is an amalgamation of self-professed influences — a “mixed bag of chips,” she says — inspired by artists and styles spanning Blossom Dearie and Minnie Ripperton to ABBA and house music. The “Day” section of the album is decidedly folksy, packed with organic instrumentation across tracks like acoustic ballad “Wild Child” and shimmying “After All,” while “Night” slips into something a bit more mischievous on the smoky “Amalfi Coast” and effervescent “Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor.”

For anyone who’s followed her since her explosion into mainstream pop with 2012’s “Call Me Maybe,” it’s clear that Jepsen is a creature of creation, consistently amassing songs until they start to take shape as a project. (She famously recorded 250 songs for her seminal sophomore album “Emotion,” which she recently celebrated with a 10th anniversary show at Los Angeles’ Troubadour.) With “Day and Night,” Jepsen had been working on material and was a quarter of the way through the process when she presented her work to her guitarist, Tavish Crowe, who realized that she was making music in two distinct lanes.

“He said, ‘What if it’s like a house party, and as a thought experiment, we make this the upstairs and the downstairs?'” she recalls. “So we started doing that for fun. And then ‘Day and Night’ was born when I was just driving in my car here in LA. I loved its simplicity. It perfectly described this organic kind of dreamy thing, and then the nighttime, you immediately feel things get heightened and a little darker and more experimental. So then I would show up with sessions with a bit more intention and it became really fun because I knew what colors I was playing with.”

“Day and Night” is also a diary, of sorts, as Jepsen began to fall in love with her now-husband Cole Marsden Greif-Neill, known to the music world as Cole M.G.N., whose credits include Beck, Wallows and Christine and the Queens. They had previously worked together on “So Right,” included on her 2023 album “The Loveliest Time,” and on “Day and Night,” he contributes to a handful of tracks — some of which are directly inspired by their burgeoning romance.

Throughout the record, Jepsen sings of surrendering to this newfound love, of basking in the resplendence and joy that it brings. Mainly, she says, there’s an element of “how shocked I am that this is all happening.” She explains that she’s always thought of herself as an artistic observer of life, as opposed to a participant, and that in the past, she’d written about relationships that may have been doomed because she loved “an impossible situation.”

“I think that the idea of really engaging, saying yes to the whole thing — a baby, a child, a family, a forever — that felt like big stuff,” she says. “So it wasn’t until I really met Cole that I — and probably even before I met Cole — that I had done some of my own personal work to get to a place where I was ready to meet a man like Cole, where I was like, okay, this is wild. I want all the things. And even the first time I might have even admitted that to myself was when I was writing ‘After All,’ which is how I decided to open the album so boldly. Like, alright, here we go!”

Jepsen lights up when talking about the very first day she met Greif-Neill, when they ended up in the studio to write “Day and Night” cut “No Labels, I Love You.” “I was driving home from that session and I thought, cute guy, but [only] in there. Not gonna touch that hot stuff. And you know, don’t kiss the producer. Rule number one,” she says with a laugh. She pulled to a stop sign and saw he had texted her with questions about the song’s second verse and decided to save his number under a combination of his name and the track they had just worked on. “I put ‘Cole I Love You’ in my phone. Lo and behold, five years later, we’re married with a baby, and I’m like, oh. Well, that worked out. He’s still saved as ‘Cole I Love You’ because of that day.”

Shortly after marrying in October 2025, Jepsen and Greif-Neill welcomed their first child in March amid the completion of “Day and Night.” She had been prepping for the baby’s arrival while balancing the demands of being a pop star — at the “Emotion” anniversary show in August 2025, she says she was four months pregnant and wore a dress with “distracting lines” in hopes of making it an “optical illusion” — and is gradually learning how to delineate between family and career.

“I’m more of a planner than I’ve ever been before,” she says. “A big part of getting ready for this double album and mixing it and putting the art together and even preparing like what videos were shot when was all around the idea of like, baby’s on the way. It was like a different meaning for the word deadline… And there was a conversation of, am I doing this before the baby comes or after the baby comes? It was like, before, because after the baby comes, I’m gonna be focused. So it’s changed that in a really wild way that I didn’t expect. It was so obvious what the priority was, which was building a career around a life, not the other way around.”

That includes making time for the Broadway adaptation of the 1999 rom-com “10 Things I Hate About You,” set for previews in August 2027. Lena Dunham is adapting the musical’s book with Jessica Huang, while Jepsen is writing the music and lyrics with Ethan Gruska, whose credits include Ryan Beatty, Fiona Apple and Phoebe Bridgers.

“We wanted to handle with care, but not trepidation,” she says of the musical. “We wanted to feel emboldened to think about what would cause these characters to feel like words are not enough and they need to break into the song. So we began with playlists for each character. Bianca had like her ’90s playlist. And it became really fun to sort of think about, you know, what the message of our show is.” Jepsen stops short of giving too much away: When asked about how she plans to handle the iconic scene where Heath Ledger’s character sings Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” she demurs. “That one you’re gonna have to come and see. I know, disappointing answer, but I gotta leave some for the show.”

For now, Jepsen is enjoying the spoils of motherhood as she releases one of her most ambitious projects to date. In the past, she’s complemented her studio albums by releasing full companion records of B-sides, something she’s not entirely counting out for “Day and Night. “In a very elusive way, in a very non-sexy way, I’ll say I consider myself sort of like a chipmunk,” she jokes. “I like to store my ideas in my cheeks, save them for later. Who knows.”

But, as always, she’s looking for the next spark of inspiration. “A big part of my nature is to be in constant creation. I like to be making things. I don’t find it tiring,” she says. “It fuels and excites me. One of my greatest joys, even when I’m on the road is to pull up with Tavish and be like, hey, like late night tonight, let’s go to like your hotel or my hotel and we’ll get the office space and pull up some sound and just jam. That’s going to be different with a baby, but we’re going to figure out how to make that happen and fit it in between the cracks.”