15 Canadian Bright Young Things To Watch This Fall

Carly Rae Jepsen, 26

Hometown: Mission, B.C. 

Claim To Fame: The hit “Call Me Maybe”  



Carly Rae Jepsen is getting used to surreal situations. Take meeting her musical icons Feist, Norah Jones and Dragonette’s Martina Sorbara, or sparking the online phenomenon of lip-synching her breakout hit “Call Me Maybe.” Since sugar-pop super-couple Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez released a version, the movement has snowballed to include school kids, corgis and Katy Perry. Jepsen even performed a version with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots (she dinged the triangle).



But Bieber, whose manager Scooter Braun signed Jepsen earlier this year, isn’t the only Canadian rooting for her. For her upcoming album, due this fall, she’s had some unexpected writing partners—such as Nickelback front man Chad Kroeger (he heads her Canadian label). Despite her girl-next-door grin, Jepsen proved no pushover when she met Kroeger at his mansion. “I found myself

at one point in a passionate argument about some lyrics,” she says. “I had to go take a five-minute breather in the bathroom.” Even then, she couldn’t believe her crazy new life. “I’m passionately angry at Chad Kroeger right now,” she recalls, laughing. “This is very odd.”



And while she says she’s never actually given a guy her number, the much-belted-out lyric “before you came into my life I missed you so bad” is a message to her boyfriend of over a year. “I lived the first half of my life just being really happy and content, but when it came to my love life, it felt like something was missing,” she says. “Once he entered the scene, things changed. I realized he was the thing I missed.”