{"id":855661,"date":"2026-09-21T17:12:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T17:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/855661\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T17:12:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T17:12:09","slug":"carly-rae-jepsen-on-how-marriage-and-motherhood-fueled-day-and-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/855661\/","title":{"rendered":"Carly Rae Jepsen on How Marriage and Motherhood Fueled ‘Day and Night’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt sounds like an obvious approach, but Carly Rae Jepsen began working<\/a> on her new double album \u201cDay and Night\u201d with a simple ethos: make the type of music she would want to listen to. \u201cLike, what do I have to offer to the musical landscape right now?\u201d the 40-year-old tells Variety over Zoom, just weeks before her sixth album released this past Friday. \u201cAnd that began with how I always begin every project, which is, what am I attracted to? What music am I listening to that I love?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs evidenced by the album\u2019s two-dozen tracks, split evenly between Laurel Canyon coffee pop and synth-glittered bops, \u201cDay and Night\u201d is an amalgamation of self-professed influences \u2014 a \u201cmixed bag of chips,\u201d she says \u2014 inspired by artists and styles spanning Blossom Dearie and Minnie Ripperton to ABBA and house music. The \u201cDay\u201d section of the album is decidedly folksy, packed with organic instrumentation across tracks like acoustic ballad \u201cWild Child\u201d and shimmying \u201cAfter All,\u201d while \u201cNight\u201d slips into something a bit more mischievous on the smoky \u201cAmalfi Coast\u201d and effervescent \u201cDon\u2019t Leave Me on the Dance Floor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor anyone who\u2019s followed her since her explosion into mainstream pop with 2012\u2019s \u201cCall Me Maybe,\u201d it\u2019s clear that Jepsen is a creature of creation, consistently amassing songs until they start to take shape as a project. (She famously recorded 250 songs for her seminal sophomore album \u201cEmotion,\u201d which she recently celebrated with a 10th anniversary show at Los Angeles\u2019 Troubadour.) With \u201cDay and Night,\u201d Jepsen had been working on material and was a quarter of the way through the process when she presented her work to her guitarist, Tavish Crowe, who realized that she was making music in two distinct lanes.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe said, \u2018What if it\u2019s like a house party, and as a thought experiment, we make this the upstairs and the downstairs?’\u201d she recalls. \u201cSo we started doing that for fun. And then \u2018Day and Night\u2019 was born when I was just driving in my car here in LA. I loved its simplicity. It perfectly described this organic kind of dreamy thing, and then the nighttime, you immediately feel things get heightened and a little darker and more experimental. So then I would show up with sessions with a bit more intention and it became really fun because I knew what colors I was playing with.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDay and Night\u201d is also a diary, of sorts, as Jepsen began to fall in love with her now-husband Cole Marsden Greif-Neill, known to the music world as Cole M.G.N., whose credits include Beck, Wallows and Christine and the Queens. They had previously worked together on \u201cSo Right,\u201d included on her 2023 album \u201cThe Loveliest Time,\u201d and on \u201cDay and Night,\u201d he contributes to a handful of tracks \u2014 some of which are directly inspired by their burgeoning romance.<\/p>\n

\n\tThroughout the record, Jepsen sings of surrendering to this newfound love, of basking in the resplendence and joy that it brings. Mainly, she says, there\u2019s an element of \u201chow shocked I am that this is all happening.\u201d She explains that she\u2019s always thought of herself as an artistic observer of life, as opposed to a participant, and that in the past, she\u2019d written about relationships that may have been doomed because she loved \u201can impossible situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think that the idea of really engaging, saying yes to the whole thing \u2014 a baby, a child, a family, a forever \u2014 that felt like big stuff,\u201d she says. \u201cSo it wasn\u2019t until I really met Cole that I \u2014 and probably even before I met Cole \u2014 that I had done some of my own personal work to get to a place where I was ready to meet a man like Cole, where I was like, okay, this is wild. I want all the things. And even the first time I might have even admitted that to myself was when I was writing \u2018After All,\u2019 which is how I decided to open the album so boldly. Like, alright, here we go!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJepsen lights up when talking about the very first day she met Greif-Neill, when they ended up in the studio to write \u201cDay and Night\u201d cut \u201cNo Labels, I Love You.\u201d \u201cI was driving home from that session and I thought, cute guy, but [only] in there. Not gonna touch that hot stuff. And you know, don\u2019t kiss the producer. Rule number one,\u201d she says with a laugh. She pulled to a stop sign and saw he had texted her with questions about the song\u2019s second verse and decided to save his number under a combination of his name and the track they had just worked on. \u201cI put \u2018Cole I Love You\u2019 in my phone. Lo and behold, five years later, we\u2019re married with a baby, and I\u2019m like, oh. Well, that worked out. He\u2019s still saved as \u2018Cole I Love You\u2019 because of that day.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tShortly after marrying in October 2025, Jepsen and Greif-Neill welcomed their first child in March amid the completion of \u201cDay and Night.\u201d She had been prepping for the baby\u2019s arrival while balancing the demands of being a pop star \u2014 at the \u201cEmotion\u201d anniversary show in August 2025, she says she was four months pregnant and wore a dress with \u201cdistracting lines\u201d in hopes of making it an \u201coptical illusion\u201d \u2014 and is gradually learning how to delineate between family and career.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m more of a planner than I\u2019ve ever been before,\u201d she says. \u201cA big part of getting ready for this double album and mixing it and putting the art together and even preparing like what videos were shot when was all around the idea of like, baby\u2019s on the way. It was like a different meaning for the word deadline\u2026 And there was a conversation of, am I doing this before the baby comes or after the baby comes? It was like, before, because after the baby comes, I\u2019m gonna be focused. So it\u2019s changed that in a really wild way that I didn\u2019t expect. It was so obvious what the priority was, which was building a career around a life, not the other way around.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat includes making time for the Broadway adaptation of the 1999 rom-com \u201c10 Things I Hate About You,\u201d set for previews in August 2027. Lena Dunham is adapting the musical\u2019s book with Jessica Huang, while Jepsen is writing the music and lyrics with Ethan Gruska, whose credits include Ryan Beatty, Fiona Apple and Phoebe Bridgers.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe wanted to handle with care, but not trepidation,\u201d she says of the musical. \u201cWe wanted to feel emboldened to think about what would cause these characters to feel like words are not enough and they need to break into the song. So we began with playlists for each character. Bianca had like her \u201990s playlist. And it became really fun to sort of think about, you know, what the message of our show is.\u201d Jepsen stops short of giving too much away: When asked about how she plans to handle the iconic scene where Heath Ledger\u2019s character sings Frankie Valli\u2019s \u201cCan\u2019t Take My Eyes Off You,\u201d she demurs. \u201cThat one you\u2019re gonna have to come and see. I know, disappointing answer, but I gotta leave some for the show.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor now, Jepsen is enjoying the spoils of motherhood as she releases one of her most ambitious projects to date. In the past, she\u2019s complemented her studio albums by releasing full companion records of B-sides, something she\u2019s not entirely counting out for \u201cDay and Night. \u201cIn a very elusive way, in a very non-sexy way, I\u2019ll say I consider myself sort of like a chipmunk,\u201d she jokes. \u201cI like to store my ideas in my cheeks, save them for later. Who knows.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut, as always, she\u2019s looking for the next spark of inspiration. \u201cA big part of my nature is to be in constant creation. I like to be making things. I don\u2019t find it tiring,\u201d she says. \u201cIt fuels and excites me. One of my greatest joys, even when I\u2019m on the road is to pull up with Tavish and be like, hey, like late night tonight, let\u2019s go to like your hotel or my hotel and we\u2019ll get the office space and pull up some sound and just jam. That\u2019s going to be different with a baby, but we\u2019re going to figure out how to make that happen and fit it in between the cracks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It sounds like an obvious approach, but Carly Rae Jepsen began working on her new double album \u201cDay…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":855662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[210815,88,216],"class_list":["post-855661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-carly-rae-jepsen","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=855661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/855662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=855661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=855661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=855661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}