“I need a happier start,” Carly Rae Jepsen admits to me. She’s just decided that the song she’s been using as an alarm for the past year and a half is too sad. “It’s a Dev Hynes song, which I love, but it’s so melancholy,” she says before taking a breath and wearily singing the first lines of “With Him”: “You chose to stay away from me/I chose to try to let you in.” As she takes off her jacket and gets comfortable on a couch inside Manhattan’s One World Trade Center, I briefly wonder if I could also pull off a faded, floral-print mock turtleneck before realizing that, duh, I cannot. “Every morning,” she adds, “I say out loud to my boyfriend, ‘I need to change that song.’” But as we continue to chat about the music Jepsen listened to most often during her childhood, the contemplative track stops sounding like such an odd choice for her to wake up to.

“I grew up in two different houses,” says the British Columbia, Canada native, whose parents divorced and married other people by the time she was 5 years old. Her mother played a lot of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen; her father, who first taught her to play the guitar, preferred John Denver and James Taylor. Later, when Jepsen became close to her grandmother, jazz vocalists like Billie Holiday and Chet Baker were added to the mix. Of her four parents, the only one who favored the sort of infectious pop that has defined Jepsen’s career since 2011’s “Call Me Maybe” was her stepmother, Patti. When the two of them had a night alone, they would dress up in leather pants, tie their hair up in ponytails, and dance to Janet Jackson, Paula Abdul, and Donny Osmond.

But those dance parties were a musical anomaly. Even as a teen, when Top 40 radio is often a great unifier, Jepsen wasn’t well-versed in pop. As a theater kid, she was more into the music of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Evita. And as the daughter of a Joni Mitchell obsessive, she found herself drawn to the songwriter’s ’90s acolytes, like Sarah McLachlan. There were moments in her youth when she found upbeat pop inescapable, though, like when she approached an employee at a record store and asked for help finding a song. This was before Googling lyrics was a thing, so she had to use her voice. “Tell me what you want, what you really want,” she sang to the clerk. “Come right this way,” he groaned before directing her to the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe.”

That slow journey towards embracing pop is a narrative that’s mirrored in her career, during which she’s gone from playing small venues in Vancouver (when she wasn’t working shifts at the coffee shop) to a stint on “Canadian Idol” that led to her first single (a John Denver cover) to the behemoth that was “Call Me Maybe.” Then came two critically beloved albums—2012’s Kiss and 2015’s E•MO•TION—defined by their pitch-perfect blend of earnest ’80s nostalgia and contemporary production. Dedicated, her latest LP, follows closely in those footsteps, with songs that alternate between helplessly-in-love and happily-out-of-it without losing a beat.

As our time together winds down, I circle back to the topic of her dreaded morning alarm. An idea for a replacement comes as she tells me how, while on tour, her crew sometimes plays a classic by Bob Marley & the Wailers on days she has to get up early to have meandering conversations with journalists. (“No offense,” she assures me. “Not you.”) Once again she sings instead of merely naming the track: “Is this love, is this love, is this love, is this love that I’m feeling?” Not a bad choice. Because when you listen to Carly Rae Jepsen, it usually is.