Carly Rae Jepsen wants to party in Versailles. At least that’s how she kicks off her dreamy new single “Versailles” off her newly released, highly anticipated double album Day and Night.
“We’ll go all night just to feel / Just to feel something / And then we’ll lose our heads / For the people we’ve forgotten / Marie Antoinette but modern / Running naked through the garden just to feel alive,” she sings on the song’s opening verse.
The track, according to Jepsen, was partially inspired by Sofia Coppola‘s Marie Antoinette. It’s a great example of how many entry points the singer finds into her music. “I don’t always go in the same way for a song,” Jepsen tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Sometimes I’ll have a hook idea or a concept or an experience that happened that I want to get into or something that I’m actually just trying to process.”
With “Versailles,” which serves as the focus single on Day and Night, Jepsen remembers quite clearly what she was thinking. She’d been in Sweden on writing trip was holed up the Stockholm’s iconic Grand Hôtel for a while. “I was watching this Sofia Coppola version of Versailles — obviously the real history of Marie Antoinette was much darker — but I was enjoying this fantasy version for all that it is,” says Jepsen.
The next day she was walking to her writing session and was thinking about the indulgence of it all. She was about to take a month-and-a-half vacation with her now husband, producer Cole M.G.N. Jepsen says she was lovingly “pressured” into taking the trip, which she considers her first-ever long vacation, by her cousin. Versailles was on their list of places they were set to visit. “Coming from a true workaholic, it just seemed so indulgent. It seemed crazy to me,” the pop star explains.
“I get to the session, and I was just interested that day about this idea of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. The idea of living your life,” she says. “Versailles is such a metaphor for me for the most indulgence that you could ever be — almost in a bad way — where you hate those people but want to know what it’s like for one day. I was excited about just the time, the luxury of the time with him”
The singer worked on “Versailles” with collaborators Elias Kapari, Noonie Bao and Markus Krunegard. The group hadn’t done much together but gushes about the fun they had creating the song. The night after they made “Versailles,” they all shared a taxi to Bao’s mother’s place for pizza. They played the song in the taxi for the driver, who told them it was a hit.
“I don’t think I’ll ever listen to ‘Versailles’ with as much joy as I had last year with the taxi driver singing along. It was so cute,” she says. By the chorus he had.
Day and Night, released on Sept. 18, features 24 tracks. Half of the albums are the dreamy, sun-soaked tracks of Day, while the other half are the electro-pop goodness of Night. The album serves as a bit of time capsule in Jepsen’s life, as she was following in love with her husband and later, while mixing it, pregnant with their first child.
Jepsen jokes that so many of the songs on Day and Night have lyrics about sleeping all day. She adds, “It’s very romantic to me.”