She has been around, in one form or another, for a long time, and by now her presence in pop music is like fluoride in water. Thanks to the success of her 1995 debut, Robyn Is Here, and its attendant Max Martin-produced smash hit “Show Me Love,” she was famous before anyone knew the name “Britney Spears.” Then she disappeared from American shores for awhile, struggled to free herself from a record contract, established her own label, and re-emerged triumphant around 2007, when Britney Spears was skidding out dangerously in public, and Beyoncé was just a pop star, not yet an icon. By 2010, Robyn was strutting the pop landscape alongside a wave of artists, like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, who seemed to have drawn direct inspiration from her early hits. She’s everywhere, but impossible to pin down.

One of Robyn’s acolytes this decade, Carly Rae Jepsen, says the singer is among her favorite pop artists ever. “She has created such a unique sound that is so specifically Robyn,” Jepsen explains over the phone. “It’s this little world that she has tapped into, and no one else can really do it. It’s a fantastical place, and empowering, and it makes you feel like tonight is the only night that ever was or ever will be.”

Like Robyn, Jepsen became suddenly, blindingly famous on the back of a world-eating pop song and then had to figure out how to exist in its wake. With 2015’s E•MO•TION, she delivered a forceful answer to that question: She was going to live inside that brave-yet-vulnerable, awestruck space “Call Me Maybe” cleared, and she was going to paint that world a thousand different shades. The sneaky economy of Jepsen’s language—“I’ll find your lips in the streetlights”—and the enormous pulsing heart beating beneath the surface testify to a deep and sturdy love of Robyn’s work.

Jepsen singles out Robyn’s iconic 2010 single “Dancing on My Own” as her favorite. The song whispered its way into the pop consciousness, falling short of the Hot 100 in the U.S., but it was a lingering whisper—over the last eight years, it’s never actually gone away. It pops up on television constantly, from “Gossip Girl” to “Girls” to “Orange Is the New Black,” and has been subjected to countless covers. This year, it even has a weepy, soft-focus piano ballad cover by a guy named Calum Scott —a dubious honor, but one that speaks to just how universal a property the song is.

Talking about “Dancing on My Own,” Jepsen notes that the lyrics are “very visual”: Robyn’s narrator is lonely enough to notice the stuff on the floor—“stilettos and broken bottles”—that most people try to ignore, choosing instead to dissolve themselves into the speakers. It’s the kind of hard reality that Robyn neatly embeds into each of her escapist songs—escape doesn’t feel nearly as sweet, after all, without visceral reminders of confinement.

When I ask Jepsen which of her own songs feels most indebted to Robyn, she picks the airy and yearning “Love Again,” a bonus track on E•MO•TION. “It has that same sad-but-hopeful message, that idea that you get back up and keep going even when it feels like you’re heartbroken,” she muses. Jepsen’s lovestruck, wondering songs on E•MO•TION are full of imprecations to take her to the feeling. That feeling, in her songs, seems closely related to the tropical-house vibe that shimmers out of Robyn’s songs like bodysuit spangles. This is, in many ways, the Robyn Feeling: sad, exultant, vanquished, triumphant. Human romantic longing as epic unstoppable tide, something that might start from within but quickly engulfs from without.