Here's My Number: How Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe' Dialed In A Moment In Pop

Welcome to New Retro Week, a celebration of the largest artists, hits, and cultural moments that made 2012 a seminal year in pop. MTV News is looking back to be able to see what lies ahead: These essays showcase how today’s blueprint was laid a decade ago. Step into our time machine.


By Ilana Kaplan


Ten years prior, pop music underwent a pivotal shift. While glossy hooks dominated artists’ repertoires, so did option stylings, which helped usher in a gamut of subgenres and made critics and fans alike redefine the pop ethos. The release of Red instigated Taylor Swift’s developments from diaristic songwriting to sticky, larger-than-life radio hits produced by Max Martin, while Lana Del Rey’s cinematic sadcore and woozy vocals were identically captivating. The experimentation on Frank Ocean’s groundbreaking release Channel Orange, an album brimming with pop, R&B, and classic-rock references, has echoed while in today’s pop singers.


And then there was Carly Rae Jepsen, a British Columbian singer-songwriter who'd been cutting her teeth across the border soon after a stint on Canadian Idol. Immediately after placing third on the competition series, Jepsen released her inaugural album Tug of War in 2008 — a stripped-down project that preceded her bubblegum-pop career. However it wouldn’t be long up until that changed thanks to one viral song and an international debut album.


While 2012 might not have been the opening time we met “Call Me Maybe,” it was the year that Jepsen’s crush-anxiety anthem became a viral hit. Initially debuting on the singer’s Curiosity EP in 2011, “Call Me Maybe” not only instigated a shift in the direction of Jepsen’s sound yet transformed the trajectory of her career. Plus it went through a handful of iterations before becoming the No. 1 hit we know.


Of the song, Jepsen told Seventeen back in 2012 that the main inspiration for the song was “the idea that there's a sort of chemistry any time as soon as you meet the correct person.” “There's a spark that needs to be investigated, although it might be left unsaid because some days folks are also shy to take that step, including myself,” she said.


Co-written by writer-producers Josh Ramsay and Tavish Crowe, the track’s foundation started in late 2010 or early 2011 — a timeline that’s fuzzy because of Jepsen’s tour dates around the time, according to Crowe.


Jepsen had initially been writing songs with Crowe, and with each other they developed an alternate version of the track — it wasn’t exactly the catchy earworm listeners are familiar with. “It was a large amount folkier than it was before Josh had laid ears on the song,” recalls Crowe. “He really honed in on the hook of the song.” Ramsay’s memory differs slightly in that he recalls that Crowe and Jepsen had written a totally different track, and once Jepsen shared it, they pulled out the pre-chorus that the world soon wouldn’t have the ability to forget: “I just met you / Call me maybe.”


“We left the rest of the song alone, [and] then Carly and I, with each other, wrote a new song around this one pre-existing line,” Ramsay says. “It was still [about how] Carly had met a guy and wished that she was confident enough to just walk up and give someone her number.”


Ramsay wanted to make design a song that combined influences from Jepsen’s acoustic-leaning beginnings with the infectious energy of a Katy Perry track and the bouncy production of Max Martin sans synths. A reference point for the song’s pop-meets-strings melody was Annie Lennox's 1992 breakup anthem "Walking on Damaged Glass." “It felt clubby and poppy, although yet still felt natural because it had that human element of strings in it,” he says of the track. What made the song feel singular stemmed from Jepsen: Her bright-eyed, endearing personality was regularly magnified in the lyrics. “It's a light pop song,” Ramsay says. “But I think that Carly's delivery just makes it feel more proper and grounded than a lot of the stuff that was going on at the time.”


In late 2011, a tweet from fellow Canadian pop star Justin Bieber saying that “Call Me Maybe” was “possibly the catchiest song I’ve ever heard” changed everything. “It sort of blown up [on] the radio soon after that,” Ramsay recalls. “And it just didn't go away.” While Bieber did have a pivotal role in the song’s visibility, 604 Records cofounder and Jepsen’s former manager Jonathan Simkin claims the song “was already well on its way before Bieber even heard it for the opening time.”


The single, which was initially released in Canada, charted to No. 1 there while Jepsen and her musical group opened for Hanson on tour in early 2012. Gradually, Crowe found increasingly fans were coming to the shows for Jepsen — even Hanson fans. On a Friday immediately following the Canadian tour ended, Jepsen phoned Crowe asking if he was prepared to tour again in three days, nevertheless this time, through America and Canada without an end date. The irony of the track’s international acclaim, Crowe recalls, is that it started slipping on the Canadian charts just as it was going viral elsewhere.


By then, Jepsen’s slow-burning success started to move at warp speed. “Every label in the world wanted it,” recalls Simkin. “We took a ton of meetings, and we ended up doing the deal with Interscope [in 2012].” Despite having a record already completed and willing to go, Simkin claims, Interscope scrapped it and had Jepsen record a new one — Kiss, which was eventually released in September 2012. “[They] did what American major labels often do. They determined, ‘Oh, no. This was made by Residents of Canada, it can't be really good. We're gonna have to do an entire new album,” he says. “I sort of regret that I didn't fight harder against that.”


The traction for “Call Me Maybe” was seemingly endless: It skyrocketed more once Bieber later posted a video singing the song with ex-girlfriend Selena Gomez and Ashley Tisdale and companions. What followed was a series of similar parodies from former president Barack Obama, Katy Perry, sports teams, and more. The memes and influx of texts from companions and family member persisted for Ramsay and Crowe. “I don't know why people filmed and embraced it the way they did,” says Crowe. “It still blows my mind.” In an interview with The Independent, Jepsen revealed she required to take a beat after the track’s success saying she “was sick of hearing myself on the radio.” “I needed some time to mirror about my next move, because I was starved for something yet I hadn’t figured out what,” she added. “And then with Emotion, I began to increase my footing.”


Today, Ramsay and Crowe struggle to pinpoint what exactly about the track made it take off — they’re just deeply honored. “There is this sense of joy, happiness, and celebration that comes attached to the song. That celebration, I think, is what must have given it a long-standing life,” Crowe speculates. Ramsay is just “thrilled” that it’s remained so successful. Simkin remains in awe of Jepsen’s “knack for articulating the mechanisms of romantic relationships.”


“Call Me Maybe” remained at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for nine successive weeks in mid-2012, and Jepsen ended up earning two Grammy nominations for Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Efficiency. It was the launching pad Jepsen needed to be an international sensation.


Despite debuting more than a decade ago, “Call Me Maybe” could have just as with little effort come out today. The lovelorn vignettes and bubblegum dance-pop within her hit echoes while in the music of Gen Z’s buzziest artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams, and Dua Lipa. The fact that Swift’s re-release of Red (Taylor’s Version) felt brand new, even aside from the 10-minute version of “All Also Well,” proves just how impactful and fresh the music from 2012 was (and still is). If TikTok existed in 2012, who is aware how much bigger Call Me Maybe” could have been?


Thanks to dance challenges and also a dose of nostalgia, TikTok has helped breathe new life into both hits and deep cuts. Songs about crushes, in particular, have gone viral on the platform. Take for instance Swift’s “Enchanted,” which was released in 2010: Just this year, it blown up on TikTok because it defined that universally-relatable, lovestruck feeling. Obviously, more recently on the video platform and behind, Rodrigo’s “Drivers License” captured a similar sentimentality. There’s something about “Call Me Maybe” — and Jepsen’s music since — that is timeless. Heartache and falling never really go out of style.