Those Lips Can Wear Me Out

Carly Rae Jepsen “Everything He Needs”

Carly Rae Jepsen has made “having a crush” her brand through rigorous determination – she’s barely ever off-message. Even the darker and more complicated feelings that bubble up in her songs are part of a fantasy of romance – it’s the way rom-coms always need a bit of drama and tension in the lead-up to make the sappy parts work the way they ought to. This makes some sense of why her modest but intensely devoted audience tends to be young adults rather than teens – the idealized melodramatic love she sells is a regressive notion, it’s about being an adult who is fully aware of how disappointing this stuff gets IRL and wishing it could all have the supposed simplicity of teenage infatuation. (Revisionist history, nearly always.) Actual teens are usually in a hurry to feel older and more mature and gravitate to more “adult” experiences, or whatever they perceive that to be with their frame of reference. Hence the current popularity of Billie Eilish.

“Everything He Needs” is light and blissful even in terms of the CRJ discography. Just hearing it will make your body feel a bit lighter – it’s like the whole thing is floating on a light breeze on a sunny day. Something about it just screams “listen to me on a boat, or by a pool.” The main hook is lifted from a song Harry Nilsson wrote for Popeye, which strikes me as a rather inspired place to lift, but the most appealing structural elements of the song are original – the chords, Jepsen’s relaxed and gentle phrasing on the verses, and the pitch-shifted countermelody in the chorus. It’s all so incredibly sweet that you can just sorta gloss over how much the lyrics sound like someone convincing themselves that the person they’re into is more into them than they probably are.

Buy it from Amazon.