The best bit of Run Away With Me - Carly Rae Jepsen
If you wanna hear her sing you better play that sax
Overture
Hello! Happy Fake Spring 3 everybody! Yes, if you’re reading this in the UK or Ireland or that general neck of the woods: it’s still raining! The light, casual jacket is still dusty! The woolly hat and big coat are still out in full force! I hate it here!
But we won’t be deterred by the perpetually bad weather. If spring won’t come to us, we will simply have to force its hand – and the best way to do that is with the brightest, most unapologetically rapturous music imaginable. If you had to think of a music artist who is the physical embodiment of sunshine, who leaps to mind?
Today’s song | Run Away With Me – Carly Rae Jepsen
*Exhales* Oh Carly, the things you do to me with this song. Yes, today, we’re not overexerting our time machine, but simply nipping back quickly to 2015: a somewhat gentler time, pre-Brexit, pre-Trump and the whole cacophony of shit that went with it. Not to say 2015 was a blissful, peaceful Mecca (no years in our entire existence are, lol!) - just that there was perhaps slightly less insanity and people were, more often than not, just really, really into Hamilton.
Some may say the best track of 2015 was the uber-viral Hotline Bling by Drake, or Adele’s Hello. But they would be wrong. For the best track of 2015 was actually Run Away With Me; a god-tier synth-pop blessing from the Canadian angel of pop, Carly Rae Jepsen. Freshly delivered from her third album, Emotion, the always-smiling songstress was beginning to build up a repertoire of feel-good anthems that far surpassed her stratospheric megahit Call Me Maybe from 2012: a song so huge, she could’ve coasted off it for the rest of her days, Hugh Grant in About A Boy-style. But thankfully, kind Carly just loves making happy pop songs - and on this occasion - really wanted to do something cool with a saxophone.
The (whole lotta) history
It really shows the calibre of an artist like Carly Rae Jepsen that this track wasn’t even the lead single from her third album – this was following up I Really Like You, another hugely catchy contribution to her back catalogue that starred Actual Tom Hanks in the video, but sounded as edgy as a satsuma.
If anything, the promotion around the second single was more chill, featuring a more DIY, cinema verité vibe with the music video. But the song itself was anything but. With a show-stopping chorus dripping in nostalgia and a commanding intro that would send future Carly gig-goers into sensory overload, this was the song chosen as the opening track of Emotion. This song set the tone for a more alternative, layered sound brimming with 80s influences, possessed by the holy spirit of Swedish pop.
It's no wonder so many of the tracks from this album exude such unbridled melodic joy. Carly flew off to the toe-tapping motherland of Stockholm to work with several local producers and collaborators who specialise in blistering bangers. The magic of Run Away With Me was achieved by committee, with hit-making duo Mattman & Robin, record producer Shellback (who all worked extensively on Taylor Swift’s 1989) and Oscar Holter (Max Martin’s creative partner for The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights) all contributing. Every smart popstar knows this: if you want something done properly, take it to the Swedes.
The perfect moment
Let’s just say it.
🎷🎷🎷🎷🎷🎷 DOO DOOOADOOO DOOOADOOOOOOOO DODOODOOOOO. 🎷🎷🎷🎷🎷🎷🎷🎷🎷
Yes! But of course. It could only be that glorious opening saxophone riff, a saxophone so powerful, Pitchfork called it “yearning”, which is true – that saxophone certainly did have the horn. A saxophone blast so strong, it generated a storm of Vine memes in its wake ((#ComeAwayWithMemes) that featured the riff dubbed over just about everything, from dancing Pikachus to Simpsons clips to Ross from Friends – very much a precursor to the way big songs and TikTok work together today. Indeed, if the song *had* been released today, arm in arm with the dominance of the TikTokkers, would this song have had a bigger success story?
Talking to Spin about the virality the song did achieve, Carly summed it up perfectly:
“I think it’s dramatic, I mean it’s a Celtic saxophone riff! When I was in Sweden working on this song, we hadn’t even finished writing it yet and I already had the feeling that I wanted it to be the opening of the album. It was a bit of a punch in the face, a really happy punch in the face.”
And when all is said and done, isn’t this all we really want from our pop music?
Bringing Sax-y Back
Is it crazy to say that Run Away With Me boasts the best use of the saxophone on any contemporary pop song ever? Or am I about to be destroyed by every Careless Whisper fan on Planet Earth? Answers on a postcard please.
Final pop ponderings
There’s always been a curiosity for me around Carly Rae Jepsen - why is she not as big a star as the likes of Taylor Swift or Katy Perry? She certainly has the bops to deserve that level of success - arguably - moreso. Reddit has a few theories: as a Canadian artist, she’s not getting as big a financial backing as some of her competitors in terms of marketing, or that she started “too old” (she would technically have been in the X Factor ‘overs’ category when Call Me Maybe was released! Heaven forbid!) This very insightful Vice piece muses that perhaps Carly is simply too indie, too left-of-centre, to ever be as mainstream-famous as some of her peers.
There’s also the idea that during Carly’s ascent, happy pop music just wasn’t as sought after, as unpacked in this handy Jezebel article. It was not Carly, but the likes of Adele and Ed Sheeran who were the most commercially successful artists of the 2010s. Robyn’s Dancing on My Own was one of the biggest records of the decade. Lorde was still wearing dark lipstick. Lana Del Rey had Summertime Sadness. And in the year Carly released this track, it was Sam Smith’s gospel-led sad-ballad Stay With Me that won Song of the Year at the Grammys. Yeah sure, Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk was also one of the most popular hits of this time, but we are clearly seeing a very specific anomaly here with any music deploying saxophones.
Needless to say: what we love about Carly Rae Jepsen is, that in every sense of the word, this is an artist that lives and breathes optimism – with a seemingly never-ending string of joyful tracks that are just unashamedly happy, about being in love, or sometimes, simply wanting a shag. For Emotion, Carly told Elle that she was “looking to put a positive spin on, and embrace, this word.”
”I think a lot of people are very emotional. They’ve been taught that it's not cool, and you’ve got to tone it down or not feel too much. I was rebelling against all of that.”
Nearly 10 years on from this track (and after a global pandemic and many other bad things) it is thankfully far more cool to be happy in this day and age, with a worldwide craving for feeling more wholesome.
Our lovely, pure Carly is still flying the smiley face flag to this day, and that incredible saxophone from Run Away With Me will always blow through whatever mood it is ‘cool’ to be.
Here she is with a little orange cat in a bag to send you on your way.