One Nightstand With Carly Rae Jepsen

There’s new music in Carly Rae Jepsen’s life. “I sing [Baby Beluga] every night to him when he’s in the bath,” says the 40-year-old singer-songwriter of her child, who she welcomed with husband Cole M.G.N. in March 2026. “I feel like we need the Raffi of our time and I don’t think ‘Baby Shark’ is it. Sorry!”

Jepsen may now be immersed in the joys of motherhood, but when she started work on her new 24-track double album, Day and Night, she was somewhere altogether different. “When I look at where I began, it was me realizing that I wanted a lot of different things than what I currently had,” she says. “I had been a bit of a workaholic and I was proud of that… But I didn’t have a ton of balance. I didn’t have a relationship that felt serious or felt like it had the potential to become something bigger. And I definitely didn’t even have thoughts of a baby.”

Clearly, her life changed while making the record — and the album is thus about “the pretty profound experience of falling in love with my husband.” This required excavating around some of her previous romantic experiences. “I’m still processing how did I get here? So there’s songs about exes, songs about heartbreak and things that I went through,” she says, noting that she tries to remain sensitive when writing about real people. “The rule for me is don’t say the person’s name. Honor the fact that they don’t have a microphone and that you’re one side of the situation. It’s not super respectful to air so much of it when you’re the only one who gets to sing about it. I’m not looking to be like, ‘This guy did this one thing to me on this Tuesday at four.’ I’m more of just like, ‘What was the emotion behind this? Where did we both meet each other? Where did we lose each other?’”

Jepsen worked with some new faces for Day and Night, though many of the album’s collaborators are people she found in the years after “Call Me Maybe” became the song of the summer in 2012. “When I first came to LA, I was so excited to have access to these gods,” she says of the A-List producers who were lining up to work with her. “But I felt like in some of the rooms that there was almost a manufactured way of going at pop music that I didn’t feel was going to work for me long term. It was nice to understand how they were thinking about it, almost like an algorithm, but it wasn’t exciting to me. And it kind of killed the magic.”

Her second album, Emotion, which was released in 2015, is where she found her own path. “I was coming in from a place where I was like, ‘Well, this will just be for me,’” she says of the record, which underperformed commercially before becoming a cult classic. “I felt quite confident that it didn’t matter what happened. I was excited about it either way. I didn’t really know if it would find an audience or not, but then it surprised me, and when we found our little following, it felt like, ‘OK, I have a small but mighty crew and I’m going to feed this.’ That felt way more exciting to me than trying to guess and make everybody happy at once.”

Jepsen has stuck to that path since, with a prolific stream of studio albums, b-sides collections, and companion LPs adored by fans and critics alike. So when it was announced in early August that she would be co-writing the music for a theatrical adaptation of 10 Things I Hate About You, the internet was predictably ecstatic.

“It was none of my doing,” she says of the project, which will have a book written by Lena Dunham and playwright Jessica Huang. “I got a lucky phone call from [theater producer] Mike Bosner and I think he mentioned Lena Dunham and 10 Things I Hate About You in the same sentence and I was like, ‘Say no more. How can I help?’”

This will be Jepsen and Dunham’s first time working together, though they go way back. “I probably met her first through Jack Antonoff [during what] might have been the first time Jack collaborated outside of just his project with Fun.,” she says. “I think the first song Jack and I did was “Sweetie” [in 2012], and Lena was so sweet and really lovely. I had always hoped that one day me and her might work on something together. And now we are.”

The project may feel like a departure for Jepsen, but given a previous stint as Cinderella on Broadway in 2014, it was perhaps always part of the master plan. “If you saw my little [vision] board that Cole and I made in front of the fire, I was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m going to say this out loud, but one day I’d love to write the music for our musical.’ And I felt so stupid saying that. And he was like, ‘No, say it.’ And then lo and behold, this project has come to life.”

She is keeping quiet about what she and co-writer Ethan Gruska have planned creatively, though she does note she’s interested to explore Kat Stratford’s eternal resonance. “I feel like there is some rage she held for women everywhere that is still not completely gone and if anything has been enhanced,” she says. “And I'm so excited to get to honor the character with the rage that I wish I could rebel with.”

Keep reading to discover five of Jepsen’s favorite books.

Her first selection is Leonard Cohen’s 2006 poetry collection, Book of Longing. The book, written across India, Montreal, and California where the artist lived as Zen Monk, played an important role in the early days of her relationship with her now husband.

“There’s a particular poem in there, “Disturbed This Morning,” that I remember screenshotting and sending to my husband when he was still my boyfriend. I was like, ‘Hey, do you like poetry?’” she says. “He wasn’t into it. But then I sent him this poem and we started trading poems back and forth, and it took us both on a little bit of a journey. We would go to the bookstores and we’d look in the poetry section and now he’s really into it.”

At their October wedding at the Chelsea Hotel, the couple paid tribute to the artists who once stayed there by handing out copies of the poetry book alongside Patti Smith’s Just Kids. When Jepsen announced Day and Night in June, internet sleuths realized that the cover art includes a copy of Book of Longing.

“It was actually kind of a coincidence,” she says. “On the photoshoot for Day and Night, the creative director was like, ‘Do you have any books at your house that we could just have popped around the shoot today?’ And I threw that into the bag and it just made it onto the table.”

Her next pick is What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s reflections on writing, discipline, and aging. When asked if she’s a runner, Jepsen lets out a laugh.

“The title is about running, but I think it’s equally about his writing and how he approaches it, and it’s similar to how I approach songwriting” she says. “You show up every day and you’re as open as you can be. I get teased a lot for being an overwriter; there’ll be an album of 17 songs due and I will write hundreds, literally.”

Jepsen also read a lot of Murakami’s work while traveling. “Both he and Billie Holiday do this thing where they find a sad quality about something and they teach you how it’s beautiful, and he does that with loneliness,” she says. “He makes the idea of being alone feel really thrilling and beautiful. And for a woman who was in different hotels and on different elevators going in and out different places, I needed somebody who made it seem beautiful.”

Her third choice is Lena Dunham’s bestselling memoir, Famesick. For Jepsen, who came into fame at the same time as Dunham, the book was affirming. “I told her this too, but I felt there were some things that she put to words in a way that mimicked my own experience with just being thrown into the spotlight in a quick way that I hadn’t even made sense of yet,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Thank you for putting this into words.’”

Like Dunham, the sudden attention came with feelings of guilt. “I related to her feeling like she had to apologize for everything. I felt very much like I had been struck by lightning. I had songwriters to my left and right, and we’d perform our songs at the end of club nights in Vancouver. I remember thinking, ‘Why did this get to happen to me and this one song?’ I felt so like I had to almost apologize for it.”

That period of time also tested her physical and emotional limits. “I remember being at a label party, and it was an old executive — he introduced me to an artist that had just been signed there, and he was like, ‘This is Carly. She says yes to everything,’” she says. “I remember being like, ‘Was I allowed to say no?’ I didn’t actually know that I was allowed to have some agency over my own schedule and how tired I was.”

She continues: “I wrote personalized thank you letters to every radio station that played ‘Call Me Maybe.’ I went above and beyond, but to the point of absolute exhaustion. And I think now I’m like, ‘Did that need to happen?’”

Her fourth selection is Anne Rice’s gothic horror classic Interview with the Vampire. “Not anymore because we have a baby, but Cole used to read to me before I went to bed at night, and this is one of the books that I had him read to us,” she says. “I have insomnia, and so we realized that if he read me a couple chapters, I would fall asleep like a baby.”

The added benefit? “It’s extremely sexy to have your partner read to you at night, even if it’s a weird vampire book,” she says.

Her final choice is Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. “The writing is so good. I wouldn’t care what was being talked about because it’s just so beautifully put. It’s so cinematic, and you feel the visual,” she says. “I love when a writer is able to make me feel transported visually.”

Her husband also read this one aloud to her, but at over 800 pages, it took quite a while. “It was sort of like visiting an old friend every night.” she says. “We’d have craziness going on in our day and it would just be like, ‘Tonight we’re just going to check in with our friends in Russia.’”

Watch the full episode below: