Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Run Away With Me' Is a 100% Perfect Song

By Jia Tolentino | July 28, 2015 | 2:15pm

Entertainment

This is the opener on Carly Rae’s new album Emotion, and on this day in the year of our Pop Lord 2015, it is the best song in the world.

“Run Away With Me” announces itself hard, with a synth-blistered uncanny valley of a saxophone riff that quite specifically conjures a final flare of neon light at sunset at the beginning of the first night you spent with the person you can’t help yourself around—and then, for the next four minutes, does what every love story and pop song tries to, riding a perfect, sustained tension between restlessness and release. Verse to (incredible) bridge, Carly Rae goes Donna Lewis to Robyn, and then that sax riff kicks back in to play against the chorus, which floats on sheer intoxication, weightlessness, triplets-at-the-club. God, isn’t it phenomenal?

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Like Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” “Run Away With Me” is a pastel-tinged nugget of wildly forceful longing, its magic engineered by an all-star team. Carly Rae-J has writing credits on all of Emotion, but this one was cowritten and produced by Shellback (who, among much more, structured Taylor Swift’s pop ascension starting at “Trouble”) as well as Mattman & Robin, the team behind the very best Tove Lo song “Moments.” The track’s also credited to Jonnali Parmelius, also known as Noonie Bao, who cowrote Charli XCX’s “Doing It” and “Need Ur Luv.”

And speaking of Tove Lo, she also posted a brief clip of a “Run Away With Me” acoustic cover on her Instagram, which got the CRJ thumbs-up.

Emotion, out in Japan now, comes out in the US on August 21.

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