The Canadian singer-songwriter announced her pregnancy Monday in an Instagram post, sharing a few black-and-white photos of the couple and Jepsen’s baby bump that hint there may be some kicking going on.
“Oh hi baby,” Jepsen, 39, wrote in the caption along with a heart emoji. Her 40-year-old husband, whose full name is Cole Marsden Greif-Neill, is feeling so much love and excitement that he has been rendered speechless, if the multiple heart-eyes emojis are any indication.
According to the couple’s wedding spread in Vogue, Jepsen and the Grammy Award-winning producer tied the knot in October, and the couple had been trying to get pregnant while planning their New York wedding. The musicians first met as colleagues in 2021 and started dating in 2022 before getting getting engaged in September of last year.
In 2023, Jepsen told People that their first collaboration, the song “So Right” from her album “The Loveliest Time,” was in essence the couple’s “meet-cute.”
“This is our first little baby out in the world,” Jepsen told the outlet at the time. “I think you’ll see a lot more of our collaboration together for future projects.”
Known for her earworm 2012 hit “Call Me Maybe,” Jepsen most recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of the release of “Emotion” with a sold-out show at the Troubadour, where she performed the entirety of the 2015 album.
“‘Emotion’ was like an introduction to my authentic version of what pop music was,” Jepsen said of the LP in 2020. “I was itching to share something different, because I knew that ‘Call Me Maybe’ wasn’t the only color of what I had to offer.”
Almost 10 years to the day after a show at the Troubadour that marked the release of her album “Emotion,” Carly Rae Jepsen brought the 2015 LP back to the same West Hollywood club on Tuesday night for a sold-out one-off gig in which she played “Emotion” from beginning to end. The follow-up to Jepsen’s un-follow-uppable 2012 smash “Call Me Maybe,” “Emotion” wasn’t exactly the hit the singer and her team were hoping for. Yet over time, the album — which Jepsen made with a host of hip producers and songwriters including Rostam, Ariel Rechtshaid and Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes — became a cult favorite beloved for its squirmy ’80s R&B grooves and its tone of unabashed yearning. “We are blown away,” Jepsen, 39, said as the crowd loudly welcomed her and her band to the stage. Here are nine highlights from the show:
1. You knew the audience was in Jepsen’s pocket when, even before she came out, fans cheered the sight of a stagehand gripping a saxophone — the instrument whose silky wail opens “Emotion” like a siren call for unrequited lovers.
2. One of Jepsen’s most effective tricks as a pop sort-of-star is the modesty of her presentation, which lends a crucial believability to her many songs about feeling overwhelmed. Here, for instance, she used an electric fan — but a very small one — to blow her hair around just a little during “I Really Like You.”
3. After “Making the Most of the Night” — which, according to the internet, she hadn’t played live since 2018 — Jepsen talked about moving to Los Angeles from her native Canada when she was 26. “I had brought a little suitcase, and I kept calling my parents and saying, ‘Send more clothes!’” she said. “Five years later, I was like, I think I live here now. I’m very happy to say L.A. has become my home.”
Carly Rae Jepsen sang her 2015 album “Emotion” from beginning to end.
(Jasmine Safaeian)
4. In 2015, Jepsen’s celebrity guests at the Troubadour included Lorde and Tom Hanks, the latter of whom starred for some reason in the video for “I Really Like You.” This time, her mom and dad sat proudly in the balcony, shooting videos on their phones.
5. Can we give the bass player some love? Bobby Wooten III might have been Jepsen’s secret weapon on Tuesday, not least in the stretch from “Gimmie Love” to “All That” to “Boy Problems,” where his chewy pop-funk licks gave the music real bite.
6. “When I Needed You” climaxed with a moving a cappella singalong that had virtually the entire crowd belting Jepsen’s lines about discovering how far is too far to go to accommodate a selfish partner. (Say this for Jepsen’s faithful: They’ve got impeccable pitch.) The moment had big Robyn-fans-in-the-subway energy.
7. Jepsen famously said at the time of “Emotion’s” release that she’d written something like 200 songs for the album. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, so for me the only solution was to keep writing, and hopefully that would lead to something,” she told me that year. “It was a purpose, a hunger.” In 2016, she dropped eight of her outtakes on an EP called “Emotion: Side B,” and here she revealed that she’ll release half a dozen more — “C-sides,” she called them — on a 10th anniversary reissue of “Emotion” due in October. It’s hard to think of another artist who’s made such a deep vault of a single LP.
8. The strangest song Jepsen has ever written, according to Jepsen: “Store,” the improbably exuberant bop about grocery shopping that she sang at the Troubadour while two-stepping down an imaginary frozen foods aisle.
9. Tuesday’s show ended with Jepsen’s traditional closer, “Cut to the Feeling,” yet another “Emotion” outtake that’s taken on a second life as the subject of a durable internet joke about swords. (Say this for Jepsen’s faithful: They have memes.) Before that, though, she inevitably reached back for “Call Me Maybe,” delivering the song while pulling daffy faces that made her look like the star of some forgotten ’30s screwball comedy. “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad,” she sang — still an all-timer of a pop lyric.
