I ask Jepsen who she’s making songs for. She explains that she’s “writing for the feeling of connection,” from the place where things are authentic to her. She gets more specific. Also more vague. Take, for example, the experience of love at first sight. Then Jepsen backtracks. “I don't know that I believe in falling automatically in love.”

It sorta sounds like you do.

“But I have thought that I have fallen automatically in love before,” she clarifies. (Track 10 of Dedicated is titled “Automatically in Love,” after all.) “Songwriting is like indulging that feeling and hoping that you’re not alone in it. I believe that other people have felt the same way before.”

Her music gathers people into communities. Some might just call that fandom, but Jepsen’s stans are noticeably younger, often people who identify as LGBTQ or POC. I ask her why she thinks that is, and Jepsen says she’s not sure how to answer that. Then a second later, it becomes clear she’s actually thought about her answer to this question a lot.

“There have been times that I have felt too shy to express what I am feeling, or the emotions that I experience are too much and make people uncomfortable. That is a pretty universally felt thing that isn't talked about too much,” she says. “People often say to me, ‘You talk so much about love—how scary is that?’ And I am like, ‘Well, it shouldn't be that scary, it's kind of the most important thing in the whole world.’”

Pop music, when it works, does a couple things. First, it drills itself into your brain, to the point where the only thing more painful than hearing that hook for the millionth time is the thought of not hearing it one more time. But an enduring pop song achieves something else: it’s a blank slate, one that the listener can impose their own life onto—especially if that life has been lived in the margins. Jepsen’s best work often does this. It’s feelings-first music, ready to embrace you back.

“I think a lot of music can shy away and almost want to be a little too cool.” With a hint of pride, she declares: “I am unabashedly uncool.”

During her GQ shoot, Jepsen looks cool. She sports baggy high-waisted pants, then a long blazer, and later, a lot of black leather. The only constant across each outfit is her spiky blonde hair, a cut that looks like something Debbie Harry would sport if she were in a Final Fantasy game.

But later, during our interview, Jepsen is extremely chatty and very earnest, talkative in the way someone is when they spend a lot of time indoors. Her stories are winding. She talks about her friends and boyfriend constantly. She laughs at her own jokes. The whole thing is endearing, refreshing. In a world where musicians want to portray themselves as sexy, chilly, and largely apathetic, Carly Rae Jepsen is unafraid of being a big dork.

It’s why she writes dance songs for introverts. And she writes a lot of them, many of which you’ll never hear. Like E•MO•TION, the making of Dedicated involved a lot of songwriting, except this time, Jepsen was literally all over the place. For someone who admittedly spends a lot of time at their house in LA, she did quite a bit of traveling. She and producer Jack Antonoff met across three different cities. “The fun is chasing the song and chiseling until it feels right. And when it does, it's the best feeling in the world,” she says. The two of them wrote an entire record’s worth of material, which resulted in only one album cut, “I Want You in My Room.” (She’s hopeful those sessions with Antonoff might be released one day.)