Call Me Melancholy

What Carly Rae Jepsen & Pink Can Teach Us About Love
FILE - This Aug. 23, 2012 file photo shows singer Carly Rae Jepsen performs on NBC's "Today" show in New York. Billboard says the 16-year-old Canadian's infectious pop song about infatuation love topped its Songs of Summer chart. The list annually ranks the overall performance of hits songs on the Billboard Hot 100 between Memorial Day and Labor Day. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, file)
FILE - This Aug. 23, 2012 file photo shows singer Carly Rae Jepsen performs on NBC's "Today" show in New York. Billboard says the 16-year-old Canadian's infectious pop song about infatuation love topped its Songs of Summer chart. The list annually ranks the overall performance of hits songs on the Billboard Hot 100 between Memorial Day and Labor Day. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, file)

Carly Rae Jepsen went from Canadian Idol also-ran to bearer of the summer-anthem torch with the instacrush chronicle "Call Me Maybe," a sprightly, spunky ode to love at first sight spangled with disco strings and an eminently meme-able chorus. Last month, she followed up that single's millions of streams with Kiss, a collection of pop confections not entirely as sugary as "Call Me Maybe" but filled with pep and vim even at its most melancholic.

On the day of Kiss's release, the relative veteran Pink—her first album came out in 2000, and "Don't Let Me Get Me," the single in which she declared she was the anti-Britney, went Top 10 in 2002—put out The Truth About Love, her sixth full-length. Lyrically, Pink has pitched herself as a Real Talk specialist, with songs like the plainspoken "Please Don't Leave Me," in which she tries to salvage a fight-filled relationship, and the bittersweet "Who Knew," which looks back on a lost love that once held promise. Truth continues in that vein; the title track, for example, is written as a 3 a.m. confession to a failed romance that delves into how love involves "the smelling of armpits."

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