RAMBLE ON: "Run Away with Me" by Carly Rae Jepsen

  
Welcome, one and all, to the first premium edition of RAMBLE ON. If you are here you have chosen to pitch in a little extra to read my thoughts and for that I want to express my humblest thanks. And for this occasion, I have chosen to expound on one of the most beloved tracks of the 2010s, and why I’m slightly embarrassed to love it. Enjoy!
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RUN AWAY WITH ME – Carly Rae Jepsen
Carly Rae Jepsen’s best song “Run Away with Me” also has her best video. Not her most famous video –that’d be the one for her only real hit, “Call Me Maybe” – and probably not her most memorable either – that’d be “I Really Like You” which inexplicably stunt-casts Tom Hanks to lip sync the song through the streets. The video for “Run Away with Me” is a lot simpler; it’s just Carly tourist-ing her way through Paris, New York and Tokyo. There are shots of her going through airports, hotels, dancing in the streets and the metro stations. The flat description of it doesn’t make it sound very impressive but it moved me deeply. I don’t think I understood why it struck such a chord until I noticed the stinger scene, which helped me realize the trick. It’s all POV shots, filmed like home movies, with Carly talking to the unseen cameraman, even leading him by the hand at points. And then, in that final stinger scene: Carly Rae in a hotel room, playfully hitting the camera with a pillow. It probably wasn’t subtle before but afterward it becomes impossible to miss the subtextual message of the video: Carly Rae Jepsen is your girlfriend. 

I wish they hadn’t included that last shot; the button-pushing becomes obvious, and I’m embarrassed how easily I fell for it. I saw a colleague tweet out once that too many straight guys rhapsodizing over CRJ’s brilliance completely ruined the music for her -- and, most cuttingly, she added that naturally the pop singer that bro-dude writers fall for is the 29-year-old woman who sounds 14. 

Carly Rae's primary fanbase is not heterosexual males, obviously,  but it is true that when straight men get into the typically unmanly genre of pop music, they tend to gravitate to her. In particular, my friend was probably thinking of screenwriter/massive creep Max Landis’s long cringy essay where he described Carly Rae Jepsen as a uniquely brilliant game-changer who justifies the entire genre as if no one had ever made good pop songs before. I don’t blame anyone for being turned off by that, and I do wonder sometimes if my colleague had a point; as a fan I instinctively objected to her criticism, but Carly’s affected cuteness is the exact reason I never got on the hype train for “Call Me Maybe,” and the handful of her other songs I never felt. There’s no denying that Carly projects a certain vibe – sweet, innocent, approachable, literally a girl next door in the “Call Me Maybe” video – that she retains even now on her more “mature” latest album. (Camila Cabello tried the “vacation footage with your girlfriend” thing in the “Never Be the Same” video, and it failed utterly to have the same effect, partly because Camila is a charisma black hole and the song is terrible but also because Camila’s energy is that of a *pop star*, emphasis on “star.”) 

Speaking as a performer on YouTube, where relatability and accessibility is the name of the game, I recognize the technique (and it’s very much a technique). Upon rewatch of the “Run Away with Me” video, what seemed natural now seems very calculated to me – Carly Rae too perfectly adorable, too constantly smiling. No one’s that happy on vacation, not for all of it; all I can think of is that scene in “Community” about home videos of missing girlfriends (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZh6tnAXiHE). So, I feel pretty confident now that I’m wise to the trick. Recognizing it does nothing to stop its effectiveness, especially not with the actual song playing.

The first thing you hear in “Run Away with Me” is a wailing saxophone. That’s something I only found out recently; I honestly had no idea what that sound was. It could have been a guitar, a synthesizer, some instrument I’d never heard of (Carly describes it as “Celtic”; bagpipes maybe?). Whatever processing has been done to it, it sounds… otherworldly, I guess is how I’d describe it. Carly’s second album “E•MO•TION” was a critical darling immediately, and “Run Away with Me,” its opening track, has only grown in stature since; nearly every music site found a spot for it on their lists of best songs of the decade, including Consequence of Sound, Stereogum, Pitchfork and NPR’s listener poll (whose voters surely included more than just straight guys with a type, I have to believe). It’s hard to pick out what sets this particular silly love song so far above its peers, maybe the intense chorus, maybe Carly’s yearning vocals. But if I had to pinpoint it, I’d first identify that sax, which sets a tone of unreality to the entire track. 

Because “Run Away with Me” is essentially a fantasy song – not just of being in love but also being able to just fuck off from everything and everyone and enjoy being in love. I’ve seen this song compared to a lot of artists – Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Charli XCX, Tears for Fears of all acts – but the comparison that stuck with me is Springsteen. “Run Away with Me” is “Born to Run” (another song with great saxophone) but without the traces of desperation creeping in. “Take me to the feeling,” sings Carly Rae – feeling, singular; just one e•m•otion, without any others weighing it down. If this had been sung by, say, Robyn, or Sia, I think it’d sound sadder, lonelier, more aware that they were singing about a dream world and that messy inescapable reality loomed around the corner. It’d be heartbreaking, really. Carly doesn’t do that; I don’t know if I’ve ever heard her sound genuinely sad in her career. She sings “Run Away with Me” with pure, uncomplicated joy; she makes the dream sound real. Many cult-act pop singers at Carly’s level – Grimes, Janelle Monae, Charli XCX – use their second-tier status to their advantage and play up their hipster coolness. Carly Rae takes it in the opposite direction, deglamorizing herself to seem like someone you could actually know. “We could turn the world to gold,” she sings; a cynical person would say that lyric doesn’t mean anything, but when she sings it it just sounds so achingly plausible.