LOS ANGELES — When Carly Rae Jepsen moved to Southern California in 2012, not long after Justin Bieber helped launch her song “Call Me Maybe” toward becoming one of that year’s biggest pop hits, the Canadian singer first touched down in family-friendly Woodland Hills. Jepsen was dating a guy who lived there at the time, and her plan was to camp out at his place briefly until she found something more in keeping with the tastes of a young star.
She ended up staying in the suburbs for two years.
“Because there was so much craziness going on, it actually kind of suited us to be away from it all,” she recalled in an interview near her new home in Hollywood. “But eventually I started to crave the opposite,” she added with a laugh. “That’s why now I’m living in the thick of it.”
The change of surroundings mirrors a shift on Jepsen’s surprising new album, “Emotion,” which finds the 29-year-old singer breaking from her once-wholesome image — “I threw a wish in the well,” goes the Disney-ish opening line of “Call Me Maybe” — with a hipper, more grown-up sound she developed over many months with a stylish crew of songwriters and producers that included Dev Hynes, Ariel Rechtshaid and Sia.
The set represents a canny attempt to move beyond the one-hit wonderdom that might have defined Jepsen, whose 2012 album, “Kiss,” almost inevitably fell short of the success of her smash single. At the same time that it adapts to an evolving pop sensibility, though, “Emotion” feels like a truer picture of the woman behind the ear worm.
“Carly this time could very easily have said, ‘Let’s make ‘Call Me Possibly’ or ‘Call Me Again,’ ” said Steve Berman, vice chairman of Interscope/Geffen/A&M. “But that’s not who she is as an artist.”
“Call Me Again” would likely have satisfied at least some of the people around her. A former musical-theater kid who later competed on Canada’s version of “American Idol,” Jepsen originally released “Call Me Maybe” in her home country in fall 2011. But the song, a coy flirtation set to zippy strings, didn’t really take off until Bieber heard it on the radio and tweeted his approval to his tens of millions of Twitter followers. Before long, Jepsen had signed a deal with Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, and together they watched “Call Me Maybe” explode in popularity, ultimately going to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 (where it stayed for nine weeks) and earning a Grammy nomination for song of the year.
“It totally changed my life,” Jepsen said of the tune. Yet the enviable ascent came at a cost: She felt rushed to complete “Kiss” in about two months to capitalize on what Braun called “the behemoth of ‘Call Me Maybe.’ “
“It was way too fast,” said the singer. “I mean, I was really proud of it when it was done, but I remember saying to whoever would listen, ‘Next album, it’s not going to be like this. I’m taking my bloody time.’ “
And so she did, spending much of last year writing an estimated 200 songs with a wide array of collaborators in L.A., Sweden and New York, where she temporarily relocated after accepting an offer to play the lead in “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella” on Broadway.
“I didn’t know if it was the most intelligent career move I could make,” she said of the acting gig, for which she received mixed reviews. “But it was a childhood dream of mine, and I knew I’d always wonder if I didn’t do it.”
Jepsen approached her album in a similar spirit of adventure, she said, creating every kind of song she could think of with every kind of partner she could find, from professionals responsible for huge hits by Katy Perry and Taylor Swift to quirkier, more underground types she reached out to directly based on her love of their work.
“I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, so for me the only solution was to keep writing, and hopefully that would lead to something,” she said.
