I went to a Christian liberal arts college in the middle of Indiana, and in spite of its focus on the liberal arts it was really quite conservative. There were parties, but more often than not the beverages on tap were sodas rather than alcoholic ones. My junior year, I went to a get together at a friend’s house. It was dark both inside and outside with a few Christmas lights in the living room for light. I stood in the center of the room, aimlessly talking to a friend of mine, dancing just enough so that I would not seem out of place in this mass of bodies. The playlist was very pop-centered. I distinctively remember Rebecca Black’s then famous YouTube hit, “Friday” playing. I also believe Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” played as well with the partygoers swelling with excitement as those distinctive strings filled the room. I danced because I was there, and that’s what was expected, but I was really just biding my time until the next song came on.

Pop music wasn’t really on my radar at the time — for me, that year was largely devoted to diving deep into the world of jazz music. The speakers in my apartment were almost always playing Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, or John Coltrane as I read for my classes or watched a sporting event on mute. I felt self-conscious about what music I liked, wanting to impress some invisible audience. Even when I started listening to Taylor Swift the summer before, I felt the need to write a thousand words justifying it, although no one read the document besides myself. I was just that desperate to feel as if I wasn’t betraying some amorphous and nonexistent principle by listening to bubblegum pop about boy troubles. In hindsight, there was a snobbery that is regrettable, at best. I pretty much refused to believe that anyone without similar music tastes to my own could truly be my friend or understand me in any deep way. It went beyond mere pretentiousness, becoming a bizarre sort of moralism that makes no sense to me now nearly a decade later.

I don’t know what kept me from pop music, or what made me feel the need to justify enjoying it. Whenever I talked about it, I tried to clarify to my friend that sure, I may like some similar stuff as them, but I liked it in a different way, for better and more refined reasons. It’s a wonder I had any friends at all, honestly. Pop just seemed disposable; the hits of one month vanishing in order to make room for the next wave of equally ephemeral nonsense. The lyrics all ran together — trite tales of teenage romance that seemed to lack any real insight into what I assumed were the unique complexities of my nineteen year old self.

There’s no definite moment I can point to when a shift occured in my music listening. Like seemingly the rest of the Western world, I was won over by Taylor Swift’s 1989 in the fall of 2014, and was nearly as charmed by Ariana Grande’s My Everything, also from that year. I don’t think that my fundamental tastes changed at all, or that there was ever a real shift in what I wanted from the music I listened to; I just learned to find it in more places. One thing I was looking for did shift, though. I stopped looking to music to define who I was, to give me a personality. Instead, music became an expression of who I was, my iTunes a strange collection of the songs that impacted me in a way nothing else could.

Three and a half years after that underwhelming party, I had graduated from college, and spent a few years in California for seminary. At the start of the year, I had gone through a pretty terrible break up. It was not a good or healthy relationship and we were particularly ill-suited for each other, which only managed to make the break-up, and its immediate aftermath, worse. Now, I was back in my hometown of Akron, Ohio. A new semester had begun and I was taking classes remotely while studying spiritual direction and aimlessly researching a masters thesis, the topic of which I had yet to decide upon despite my first draft being due in a few months. In the hours I spent avoiding my studies, meandering on the internet, I saw tons of praise for Carly Rae Jepsen’s latest album, E·MO·TION. My immediate assumption was that it was just a bunch of transgressive hipsters who had latched on to it ironically or something. A night soon after this, though, while doing some of my interminable reading, searching for some sort of uplift, a break from the monotony, I decided to go ahead and download the record and see what the hype was about.

The album opens with a saxophone part that sounds like something from one of those MIDI keyboards made to simulate the sound of every instrument imaginable. I was ready to write it off as silly and cheesy, but after about fifteen seconds, the song transforms into something more engaging, with a rumbling bass and half-sung, half-whispered vocals from Jepsen. Then the chorus hits and everything comes together in an overwhelming wave of noise. The sax from the intro subtly reappears, lending a delightful color to the background as Jepsen belts euphoric lyrics about wanting to run away with a lover, hoping to inaugurate something truly special. A smile came across my face and I had found a new favorite. I would have played it over and over if the second track hadn’t gripped me from its opening moments. And then the third song did the same thing. And the fourth. Then the fifth. Etc. Etc.

There is something so restorative about pop music. It brings back memories of past times, as these songs are the connective tissue of so many parties and get togethers and late night drives to get Taco Bell before the drive thru closes. It is more than just nostalgia, though. It doesn’t merely make one think of the past, but brings the past into the present. Pop is not my favorite genre of music. It is not what I listen to the most when I am alone, yet it is the most communal, bringing me into a group that is much larger than my own circle as millions around the world listen to the same song, finding similar joy in a larger than life chorus that soars oh so high. Even when the song is sad, it still pushes away the sadness it evokes by inviting us to sing along, to dance the troubles away, and find new meaning in the togetherness the song offers. For me, listening to music is usually an individual activity, but it is also the prelude to sharing together, whether at a concert or at a party or just in conversation as you effusively tell your friend about the song that broke your heart the night before. The moment the song comes on, even if we’re listening to headphones while lying in bed, we are no longer alone.

Part of my problem when I was younger was the isolating nature of my listening habits. At that aforementioned party, I was able to enjoy a few of the songs and dance enthusiastically (at least, for me). Even then, I had fallen for the majority of Rihanna’s singles, and putting on “International Player’s Anthem” was a surefire way to get me excited — but I wasted too many nights internally critiquing a party’s playlist instead of just letting go and enjoying it. Instead of wanting to participate in that community, dancing without self-consciousness to the hits of the moment, I had a desire I no longer understand to stand apart, to be interesting instead of involved.

I do not know what it is about Carly Rae Jepsen’s music that means so much to me. With many of my favorite records, it’s easier to pin down, but not here. It’s one of those things that I’d rather not inquire too much about, because I don’t want to strip it of its ineffable magic. It’s beyond merely liking it a lot — it’s about how much it means to me, how her songs burrow themselves deep in my heart and soul and bones, bringing me to tears. And whether these tears are of joy or sadness, I don’t even know because her songs walk that fine and tenuous line between joy of new love and fear of heartbreak so delicately.

Jepsen writes about love the way only the most innocent or the most resilent person can. The heartbreaks of the past have not embittered her songs. The remnants of love lost do not hang over the heads of her and a new lover, threatening to shatter the beauty they could share. At the same time, heartbreak is still calamitous. It is a new wound every time that cannot be prepared for no matter no much it is anticipated. Both heartbreak and a new love always feel like the first time, no matter how many times one has felt similar things before. Each is distinct, each is memorable, and worth celebrating or mourning in its own way.

I have been both empowered and comforted by her songs. They have provided the salve for a broken heart, or the ability to finally exorcise the ghost of an ex, or the language to express my euphoria at meeting someone who seems to be the one for me. When I first heard E·MO·TION, mere months after the aforementioned break-up that had left me desiccated, the final track, “When I Needed You” seemed as if it had been written just for me. I remember nodding almost violently in my excitement as I heard Jepsen ask her ex, and mine, just where they had been when they were needed the most. The night I downloaded E·MO·TION: Side B, a cat laid by my side after the dissolution of a different relationship, and “Roses” was the Rosetta Stone that unlocked my understanding of what had just happened. That same night, “Fever” captured the melancholy feelings I knew would pass in the coming days, but seemed all too solid at that moment. That evening, I knew the fever she sang about would pass and that song gave me the comfort I needed to make it until it did.

As I write this, I know that I may sound a bit emotionally underdeveloped using my relationship with pop songs to cope with and interpret the world. Although, I do think that pop songs, in their universality, in their striving to reach a mass audience, are often able to capture us at our most elemental, speaking to what makes us human in the most bare and complex ways simultaneously. There are more elegant ways of describing the pain that accompanies the end of a love affair than singing, “When my heart breaks, it always feels like the first time,” but there are none more true.

I’ve now found someone new, a partner I have every intention of spending my life with, and again, Jepsen’s music has been the soundtrack to this time in my life — a much happier time than those mentioned previously. The chorus of “I Really Like You” was our shorthand for communicating our feelings in that awkward stage before we told each other that we loved the other for the first time. And now that we live together, it’s rare for us to share a car ride to the store without one of us playing “Cut to the Feeling.” Jepsen’s discography is not quite a common language considering how much more I listen to her than my partner does, but it expresses something that often feels too cheesy, or too vulnerable, to speak aloud. I would feel very weird looking deeply into my partner’s eyes and telling her, “I wanna dance on the roof. You and me alone,” but dancing in the car on our way to Target, belting those lyrics together, the desire comes across loud and clear, and in our own small way, we’ve already cut to the feeling — her and I alone, sure, but also with thousands of others who feel the same desire, becoming a community bound together by our deepest longings being expressed by one Canadian pop star.