The 2010s File Feature
This Kiss
Chart History and Recording Background of "This Kiss" by Carly Rae Jepsen "This Kiss" is an electropop and dance-pop track by Carly Rae Jepsen, the Canadian …
01 The Story
Chart History and Recording Background of "This Kiss" by Carly Rae Jepsen
"This Kiss" is an electropop and dance-pop track by Carly Rae Jepsen, the Canadian singer-songwriter born November 21, 1985. The song was released on August 14, 2012, as the second single from her debut major-label album Kiss, which was released on September 18, 2012, through 604 Records, School Boy Records, and Interscope Records. The album and its associated singles represented the culmination of a remarkable commercial ascent for Jepsen, who had become an international pop phenomenon following the extraordinary success of "Call Me Maybe" earlier in the same year. "This Kiss" was intended to maintain her commercial momentum and demonstrate that she could sustain audience interest beyond the phenomenon of a single viral hit.
The production of "This Kiss" was handled by Josh Ramsay, the lead vocalist and primary songwriter of the Canadian rock band Marianas Trench, who had also co-written "Call Me Maybe." Ramsay brought a melodic pop sensibility informed by his rock background, crafting a production built around bright synthesizers, a driving drumbeat, and melodic guitar elements that gave the track an energetic, celebratory quality. The arrangement was somewhat more guitar-oriented than pure electropop, reflecting Ramsay's own musical background and giving the song a texture that distinguished it from the predominantly electronic production dominant in mainstream pop at that moment.
The recording process for Kiss took place during a period of intense activity for Jepsen, who was simultaneously managing the extraordinary promotional demands created by the global success of "Call Me Maybe." That song had become one of the most viral recordings in pop music history, and Jepsen was navigating a level of commercial attention she had not previously experienced. The challenge for "This Kiss" and the broader Kiss album was to capitalize on the audience's interest while establishing Jepsen as a substantive recording artist with a broader creative range than a single massive hit could demonstrate.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "This Kiss" debuted on September 29, 2012, at position 86, which proved to be the song's only week on the chart. While this represented a significantly more modest Hot 100 performance than "Call Me Maybe" had achieved, the context of the comparison was important. "Call Me Maybe" had been one of the most exceptional commercial performers in pop music that year, reaching number one and spending considerable time at the top of the chart. Matching or approaching that performance with a follow-up single was an extremely difficult commercial challenge that very few artists in any era had managed successfully.
Internationally, "This Kiss" performed considerably better than its American Hot 100 run suggested. The song charted in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and several other markets where Jepsen had built a strong commercial profile through the success of "Call Me Maybe." In Canada particularly, Jepsen remained a chart presence throughout 2012, and "This Kiss" contributed to her continued commercial activity in her home market. The international performance of the single demonstrated that her audience remained engaged even if the American chart results were modest.
The music video for "This Kiss" depicted Jepsen in a colorful, visually energetic setting consistent with the song's celebratory themes, featuring performance sequences and narrative elements that showcased her personality and stage presence. The video was distributed through standard digital platforms and contributed to the song's visibility during the album campaign. Its production aesthetic was consistent with the broader visual identity that had been established for the Kiss album, with bright colors and a playful energy that matched the recording's upbeat tone.
Kiss as an album debuted respectably on the Billboard 200 and performed strongly on the Canadian albums chart. The project demonstrated that Jepsen had sufficient songwriting depth and a coherent artistic identity to sustain an album-length release, even if individual singles beyond "Call Me Maybe" did not replicate that song's unprecedented commercial performance. The album included contributions from several notable songwriters and producers, reinforcing the substantial creative investment behind the project.
In retrospect, "This Kiss" is understood as part of a transitional moment in Jepsen's career, a recording that existed in the long shadow of "Call Me Maybe" while pointing toward the more artistically ambitious direction she would pursue on subsequent albums. Its chart performance, brief as it was on the Hot 100, represented a genuine commercial effort in an extremely challenging follow-up context, and the song's melodic quality and production craftsmanship earned it enduring appreciation among fans of her broader catalog.
02 Song Meaning
Themes and Meaning of "This Kiss" by Carly Rae Jepsen
"This Kiss" is a song about the overwhelming and transformative experience of romantic passion at its peak intensity. The song captures the particular feeling of being so caught up in romantic attraction that ordinary reality seems to recede, replaced by an almost singular focus on the person who has inspired such powerful feelings. The title is both specific and symbolic, pointing to a moment of physical and emotional connection that crystallizes everything the speaker is feeling about the relationship.
The track approaches romantic experience with an enthusiasm that is characteristically exuberant and uncomplicated. There is no ambivalence or complication in the emotional landscape being described; the feeling is simply enormous and overwhelming, like something that has overtaken the speaker's ordinary experience of the world. This directness is central to the song's appeal and aligns with the broader aesthetic of Carly Rae Jepsen's pop songwriting, which tends to engage with romantic feelings in their most vivid and immediate form.
The production's energetic, propulsive quality mirrors the emotional content effectively. The driving rhythm and bright melodic elements create a sonic environment that feels celebratory and slightly intoxicating, as if the music itself is expressing the giddiness of the feeling being described. This close alignment between the sonic aesthetic and the lyrical content is one of the hallmarks of well-constructed pop songwriting, and "This Kiss" demonstrates this integration clearly. The musical and lyrical energy work together to create a complete emotional experience rather than existing as separate elements.
The song also engages with the theme of romantic novelty, the particular intensity of feelings that are still new enough to be dazzling. The experience being described does not seem to be one of settled, familiar love but rather of attraction that is still at its most acute and immediate, before the passage of time transforms passion into comfort. This emphasis on the heightened state of early romantic feeling is a recurring theme in pop music generally and in Jepsen's catalog specifically, where the electric quality of new love is a persistent subject of fascination.
Cultural reception of "This Kiss" positioned it within the context of the enormous commercial success of "Call Me Maybe," and inevitably comparisons were drawn between the two recordings. Critics noted that "This Kiss" shared the same fundamental optimism and romantic enthusiasm that had made "Call Me Maybe" so widely appealing, even if the later song did not achieve the same commercial ubiquity. The shared emotional territory confirmed that Jepsen's artistic identity was coherent and that these themes were genuinely central to her creative vision rather than circumstantially present in a single hit.
The song also resonated because of the universality of its subject matter. The experience of being overwhelmed by romantic feeling, of finding that a kiss or a moment of connection has temporarily reorganized one's sense of the world, is one that virtually every adult listener has encountered in some form. Jepsen's ability to articulate this experience with precision and joy, without reducing it to cliche through over-familiarity, reflects a genuine skill in translating common emotional experiences into specific and engaging musical moments. This skill would continue to develop throughout her subsequent career and is already visible in the construction of "This Kiss."
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