Carly Rae Jepsen Finds Freedom in Exploration on The Loveliest Time
The Canadian pop fave’s new album is a companion piece to last year’s The Loneliest Time

It has been 11 years since Carly Rae Jepsen released an album without releasing a companion collection of B-sides months later. The Canadian pop star’s cred-building cult-fave, Emotion, came out in 2015, followed 14 months later by Emotion: Side B, an eight-track EP culled from the 250ish songs Jepsen reportedly wrote while working on the album. She followed Emotion with a full-length in 2019, Dedicated, then a collection of album outtakes called Dedicated Side B one year later.
In both cases, the B-side songs provide interesting context for their associated proper albums by shining a light on Jepsen’s creative process, her range of interests and even the limitations of her pop prowess. They also serve as a reminder that her second-tier material is better than many artists’ very best stuff.
Last fall, Jepsen released her version of a COVID-19 quarantine album, The Loneliest Time, and immediately began teasing the possibility of also putting out leftovers from the session. Nine months later, those extras have arrived under the name The Loveliest Time, and this is officially no longer a quirk. It is just something Carly Rae Jepsen does.
As always, the results are mixed, but the highlights are either all-time Jepsen bangers, or they find the singer/songwriter in an exploratory mode, trying out a variety of new styles. It is her “freest” album yet, she told Rolling Stone, capturing what makes these B-side projects so valuable and interesting. There’s a willingness to experiment with style and form that Jepsen may not feel when she’s putting together her official albums—although the lines between official albums, companion pieces and B-side collections gets blurrier and blurrier. “This time,” her website says, “they’re not so much B-sides as they are a second chapter.”