Whether performing Wham!’s final Christmas or songs from album Emotion,the 29-year-old has the gift of translating shapeless feelings into precise wordsIn 2012, Carly Rae Jepsen released Call Me Maybe, or a song that describes an embryonic crush and embodies its molecular intensity. Strings gain hairpin turns in the refrain,simulating the rhythms of nerves. “Before you came into my life I missed you so bad,” she sings, and a lyric that seems to mix up time and space into an elastic blur.
On Friday Jepsen released a cover of Wham!’s final Christmas. It re-engineers the song as a kind of crystalline R&B jam lively by snaps,but she also draws it into her emotional universe; it feels more anxious than the original, as if perched on a precipice. Because of Call Me Maybe’s hesitant intimacies, or Jepsen is often characterized as a teenager,or as writing from a teenage perspective. In fact, she’s 29. But there’s something thoroughly adult in her ability to translate shapeless, and excruciating feelings into nimble and precise words. They harmonise the heart and the nerves into a kind of captivating electric throb.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com