That Time I Couldn’t Stop Listening to “Call Me Maybe”

On a rainy Tuesday in December, something strange happened on the way to work: I started listening to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” and couldn’t stop. Each time the end approached, I quickly tapped my phone and started again. Eight times on the way to work; six times on the way home; then, after a Nicki-Minaj-assisted workout, seven times on the way to a performance of Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols. Had friends not accompanied me afterward, I would have returned to Carly: if anything, the subway ride felt diminished without her. All told, I listened to “Call Me Maybe” 21 times that day. Its magic had faded only slightly by the next morning. What was going on?

The song’s fantasy of heat, flirtation, and possibility served as the perfect antidote to the waning light of December, and the prospect of another day spent at an unfulfilling job.
The lyrical combination of reticence and bravado—”It's hard to look right at you, baby / But here's my number, so call me maybe”—is perfectly teenage-crush, but also, rather apt for a shy man in his mid-30s.
The notion of missing someone you haven’t met yet—“Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad”—is both confounding and super romantic (at least to this softie). And is this future longing, in that what’s missed is located in the future, or retroactive longing—in that the missing extends backward into the past? After all, the lyric isn’t “Before you came into my life, I wanted you so bad.” And what if the lack we feel now really is the absence of one yet to come? Wouldn’t that make the pain a little sweeter, a little more bearable?
“Call Me Maybe” has what may be a perfect chorus—I started pumping my arms in the air when that four-on-the-floor kick came into my life at about 7:37am, as I walked west on Eastern Parkway toward Franklin Ave. “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad,” indeed…

Getting to the Chorus

The verse’s melody sits low in Carly’s voice, circling reflectively around the B below middle C. Basically, the entire song unfolds over a repeated two-chord progression in G major—C major alternating with D major. (Technically, there are brief intermediate chords, making the full progression C major–G major–D major–E minor, but they’re so fleeting they hardly register. More on that later…) Taken together, these two main chords are the setup for a cadence that never occurs: what’s missing is the resolution to G major, the tonic. What this means is that the song seems perpetually on the verge of release, yet also always seeking more. It is yearning, reified. The lyrics traffic in familiar tropes—a wishing well, pennies for a kiss. Not especially promising…Yet, the verse’s banality only heightens, by way of contrast, the electricity that’s to come. As Carly gains confidence and directly addresses her crush—”Where you think you’re going, baby?”—the musical texture, dynamics, register, and rhythm explode.

The Chorus

Strings

Thus far, the synth strings have been relegated to the background, droning 8th-note pulses on the pitches G and D. But now they come to the fore. Crisp and syncopated, they move in compound parallel 3rds—unusually stark, in that they do not play full chords, but satisfying. The basic four-measure rhythmic pattern features hits on the “and” of beat 4, and the “and” of beat 1, with little repetitions after some hits:

Figure 1: “Call Me Maybe” chorus, voice and strings [trans. Shawn Jaeger]

Looking at the vocal line and strings together, what’s striking is the almost complete absence of rhythmic events on the downbeat. The vocal line either rests, or arrives “early,” on the “and” of beat four in the preceding measure. The strings have downbeat hits at the start of each four-bar phrase, but are otherwise syncopated. This gives the music a free, floating energy, and makes for strong rhythmic contrast with the four-on-the-floor kick drum. And because the downbeat is the most accented rhythmic position in the measure—functioning like a kind of anchor—deemphasizing it in this way runs counter to our expectations, leaving us satisfyingly unmoored.

Taking this a bit further, the vocal line’s “early” arrivals on the “and” of beat four, coupled with the strings’ shifts in harmony on the “and” of four, confuse our sense of meter—the pattern of stressed and unstressed beats. This confusion may even temporarily cause a shift in the perceived downbeat (see below). And the harmony helps here: the gravitational force of the tonic (in this song, G major) is so strong that putting one in this least-accented position can reorient our sense of where the beat is. This is true even when other musical elements are in conflict:

Figure 2: The rhythm and pitch changes of the strings cause a perceived shift in downbeat…

In the chorus, the four-on-the-floor kick keeps us from getting too confused, metrically—we do want to dance, after all. But in the song’s breakdown (2:20), the drums drop out, and we get the syncopated strings all by themselves. Without the kick as a kind of reference grid, the metrical confusion comes across more strongly.

Vocal Melody & Lyrics

Part of what makes the chorus feel so intense is the shift from the reflective, interiorized tone of the verse to an actual, exteriorized conversation. Carly really seems to be talking to her crush in this moment. What’s brilliant about the vocal melody is that the nervous “Hey” is not on the downbeat, but on beat 2.* Carly’s not off to the best start asking her crush out— singing “Hey” on the downbeat would be more conventional, but it would be too confident for this awkward moment. Going further, with everything in the pre-chorus pointing inexorably toward the chorus’s initial downbeat, the absence of the voice there is surprising. Everything in the music is saying “Get ready,” and when we get there, there’s just a hollow string hit: our attention is jolted, time expands. And then what follows is a kind of a dud—a nervous “Hey” on beat 2. This is incredible text painting.

The chorus’s melody perfectly fits the contours and emotional inflections of the words Carly sings. Note how the melody surges up to B for “this is cra-zy”—Carly can’t believe she’s doing this, and she wants her crush to know it. Though Carly’s clearly tentative, the beat certainly isn’t—there’s a feeling of exhilaration and drive. And the fleeting, bluesy B-flat in the vocal melody on “call me maybe” tinges this heretofore quite innocent convo with an undercurrent of sexual desire.

Some details: I just love how Carly articulates the 16th-note syncopation for the words “and all the other boys”—it’s so wonderfully crisp and clipped. It implies she can be confident, even taunting towards those other boys, while still struggling in this moment to ask her crush out. Also, the vocal line’s rhythms in the chorus are generally short and speech-like. Everything is equal to or shorter than a quarter note in duration, except for one note—the high B in the sixth bar (on the word “baby” in the first phrase, “chase me” in second phrase). This note lasts for three 8th notes (or a dotted quarter), and it’s also the only long note in the chorus that starts on the beat. After all the short, syncopated rhythm that precedes it, this long note really soars—it feels as though the other boys are extending their arms to “chase” Carly, but they can’t quite reach her. It’s another moment where musical rhythm (a fairly abstract compositional element) manages to palpably convey an emotion expressed in the lyrics.

Drums

The kick drum had been punching away in its four-on-the-floor pattern throughout the verse, but suddenly it’s super potent—compressed, large. What’s added now are backbeat snare hits and open-to-closed hi-hat patterns. The beat has a slightly disco flavor, and it bops. On the repeat of the chorus’s eight-bar phrase, the hi-hat double times, giving the music a shuffle feel. I also hear an extra hi-hat sound that seems overdubbed or from a drum machine—a little incursion of surreality into this otherwise fairly realist-acoustic production style? It’s worth mentioning that while writing this, I spent some time listening to the track on YouTube at 0.75 and 0.5 playback speeds. Do yourself a favor and try it—I kinda like 0.75 better? Now the original seems too fast to me…

The rest of the song

The non-transition from the chorus to the second verse is frankly awful—an abrupt shift in instrumentation, mood, and tone. However, this awkwardness is partially redeemed insofar as it makes the later continuation of the chorus into the bridge all the more satisfying. That bridge has a triumphant trumpet/guitar melody that descends from a high G in durations of three eighth-notes against the quarter-note pulse—a pattern of 3+3+3+3+3+(1) across two bars of four beats. This triumphant tone is short-lived, however. The song putters out, as though the vinyl record on which it’s been played suddenly slows down. It would seem this crush might not work out for Carly, but perhaps that longing is for one still yet to come.

*Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan’s amazing podcast, Switched on Pop, got me excited again about Carly Rae Jepsen. I encourage everyone to listen and buy the book. The episode on “Call Me Maybe” includes the insight about “Hey” on beat 2, as well as the observation that the strings in the chorus operate in dialogue with Carly, as though they are a stand-in for her crush’s responses.