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(Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine) |
If it’s possible to pinpoint the exact moment that Carly Rae Jepsen became something resembling cool, it might have been April 5 of this year. Jepsen, the chirpy Canadian best known as the voice of �Call Me Maybe,� was appearing on Saturday Night Live in support of her new album. For her second song of the night, she appeared on a darkened stage and, backed by a wash of woozily sparkling keyboards, began to sing: �I wanna play this for you all the time / I wanna play this for you when you’re feeling used and tired.� Next to her in the spotlight, a tall black guy with shoulder-length dreads in a leather jacket, cuffed jeans. and an embroidered rastacap played guitar and mouthed every word.
The song, �All That,� sounded sophisticated, sad, like a prom slow dance beamed in from some John Hughes movie of the future�all thanks to that guy playing guitar: the producer and writer Devonté Hynes. Hynes is not the latest protégé of the Swedish hit factory, nor is he part of the proliferating L.A. scene; he lives in the East Village and collaborates only with singers who are willing to meet him for a cup of coffee. But he has a way of transforming the pop singers he works with�like Solange Knowles, Jessie Ware, Tinashe, Sky Ferreira, and, now Jepsen. His songs are not slick pop juggernauts designed to conquer radio; they are atmospheric, layered productions that bring to the fore a voice worth listening to.
�Sometimes I think it’s fun to write music the way other people might imagine your music style. So for �All That,’ I was kinda going toward what I think people think I sound like,� Hynes says. �Maybe because I’m of color and playing guitar and singing, I get associated with Prince a lot. So for that song, I was like, �Well, I can do that, but I’m going to make it really fucking good.’ � Jepsen sought him out for the song (she was a fan of Blood Orange, his own band) and he added simple, nondigital instrumentation: Linn drum machine, Juno keyboard, bass guitar. Then he sent it to his friend Ariel Rechtshaid (a producer-�writer in L.A.), �to put his Ariel sheen on it. He had the idea of speeding it up�which makes sense because all of my songs are really slow,� Hynes says. It was a process emblematic of the collaborative approach that distinguishes Hynes’s work. �I think I’m actually better at ideas, and then people like, run with it?� he says. �I have my opinion of what makes something good, but I leave it open to another opinion. I get Carly’s input, I get Ariel’s input, and all of a sudden I’m like, Holy shit, this track is fucking good!�