Carly Rae Jepsen may identify as a hopeless romantic, but she never actually expected to meet the love of her life.
“I was excited to be in love forever,” she says. “Just with multiple people!”
The singer-songwriter and Cole Marsden Greif-Neill, a six-time Grammy-winning producer, were friends and collaborators first. But after meeting at a songwriting session in May 2021, they began dating the following year. As Jepsen puts it, she was “absolutely gobsmacked” to find herself falling in love with someone after years of navigating the Los Angeles dating scene.
“When I met Cole, I knew pretty instantly that he was the one,” she says. “Sorry to my exes, but everything before felt quite trivial compared to the real thing.”
You can hear the seeds of Jepsen’s blossoming romance on her latest release, a sprawling 24-track double album called Day and Night, out September 18. The first song she wrote for the album is also the first song she ever wrote with Cole, an uptempo track called “No Labels, I Love You.” Yes, Jepsen recognizes the irony of writing with her then-boyfriend, now-husband about pushing down feelings for a man she can’t help falling for.
Photo: Vince Aung
The pair got married at the Chelsea Hotel in 2025, and earlier this year Jepsen gave birth to their first child, a baby boy named Ilya. She’s in New York to do some press for Day and Night—including meeting me for a chai latte while Greif-Neill is on baby duty back at the hotel—and to take some meetings related to her musical adaptation of 10 Things I Hate About You coming to Broadway in 2027. Jepsen wrote the music and lyrics alongside her writing partner Ethan Gruska, while the book is being handled by Lena Dunham and Jessica Huang.
“I didn’t exactly plan on having a new baby the same time I was releasing an album and about to launch a Broadway musical,” Jepsen says. “But I’m making it work—I literally pumped on the way over to see you!”
Vogue: How did you first conceptualize Day and Night? Do you go into each album with a concept, or do you just start writing songs and an idea rises to the surface?
Carly Rae Jepsen: There were some songs on my last album [2023’s The Loveliest Time] that planted the seeds of this whole other world I wanted to play in: “Collage” feels quite day-ish and “Psychedelic Switch” is pretty night-ish. I was also in a very transitional place in my personal life when I made this album, partly because I met Cole. It was a very prolific time because whenever there’s a lot going on for me, I have to process it.