Carly Rae Jepsen on the Song She Wrote About Mike Tyson That Didn’t Make Her New Album

Carly Rae Jepsen seen at the 2015 Much Music Video Awards at the Much Music HQ on June 21, 2015, in Toronto.

It starts like this: "Do you believe in dreams, do you believe in dreams? / The ones you have in your sleep"

It’s a sticky summer morning in Los Angeles, and Carly Rae Jepsen, 29, is sitting outside at a cafe, eating a bagel, her eyes shielded behind oversize sunglasses. “I feel like I’d turn really mean if I couldn’t eat carbs,” she says. “Like, horrible as a person.” She seems pretty relaxed considering she’s just a few weeks away from releasing E•MO•TION, the album she spent three years recording.

This is a critical moment for the Canadian singer-songwriter: the meteoric success of “Call Me Maybe,” which dominated the summer of 2012, didn’t translate into similarly huge sales for her underrated U.S. breakthrough Kiss, released that same fall. But her new album is less about capitalizing upon the popularity of a hit single and more about executing her artistic vision. “I wanted to be pop, but I wanted to be my type of pop,” Jepsen says. “I didn’t want to worry about anything other than that I love it, and I’m proud of it, and it feels like me.” That’s turning out to be a winning formula—critics have already begun hailingE•MO•TION, with its surging choruses and vibrant ’80s-inspired production, as one of the best pop records of the year.

Jepsen talked about the indie album she left on the cutting room floor (including a weird song about Mike Tyson), fangirling over legendary songwriter Max Martin and how she thinks she’s going to die.

TIME: Talk to me about the genesis of this record. How did you start conceptualizing it?

Carly Rae Jepsen: I started writing the moment that I turned in Kiss. I have this really annoying thing that happens to me—three albums in a row now, the week after I turn things in, I have a prolific month. It’s really inconvenient, because I don’t know if any of those ideas are still going to matter to me a year later. One of the first ideas we started in the back of the tour bus, my guitarist and I, was “Boy Problems.” Some of the stuff in the first week eventually made its own form later with Sia and Greg [Kurstin]. Then a lot of stuff came at the end. I have this little easel at home where I’d be artsy-fartsy and write out, “Here is the final track listing,” and then I’d go and have another session and come home and be like, “I don’t know.” I rewrote that thing probably nine times. It’s a big scribbled mess now.

I didn’t know at first what I wanted to do. I thought about it a lot. I talked about it with friends and family and anyone who would hear me. I think that was helpful in starting to decipher a mission statement, which was: I really want to make an album I’m proud of. I don’t want to feel rushed in it.

Did you feel rushed with Kiss?

Before I had any intentions with the label and “Call Me Maybe” was just in Canada, I was planning to put out my second release in Canada. It was going to be an album called Curiosity that I had written along with Ryan Stewart. We had this whole album ready to go. Then, the song took off, and everyone funneled in with, “Do you want to come down to LA and meet some writers here?” It was my dream to do that, so I threw all those songs into the abyss and went and started new. I had the security blanket that if I didn’t write anything I loved, I could go back and release bits of that album.