You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Carly Rae Jepsen released her third album, Emotion, in 2015.

The closing track on the record is when I needed you.

In this episode, Carly tells the story of how the song was made.

You'll hear the first demo for the song, a version she co-wrote with her longtime collaborator, Tavish Crow.

And you'll hear how that led to the album version.

Plus, producer Ariel Rekshide breaks down some of the parts that he created for the recording.

My interview with Carly Rae Jepsen was recorded live at the Noise Pop Festival in San Francisco.

I spoke to Ariel Rekshide in his studio in Los Angeles.

My name is Rishikesh Herway. You're listening to Song Exploder.

My name is Carly Rae Jepsen. I have found in my life I collect kind of song pieces and fragments as I go.

And then later on, even years later, I'll kind of plug them into a new idea.

The real beginning of this song, as it starts with a journey that began with me and Tavish in New York City at my Soho apartment.

And it was just kind of a late night to many whiskey sort of jam session.

Tavish is one of the co-writers of like Call Me Maybe, too.

We really kind of began every little idea together.

He's like my favorite writing partner in the world just because we've been through so much for so long together that any idea, no matter how stupid, I don't feel scared to share with him.

And this was just one of those times where we were jamming.

And I had just been through a really brutal breakup and was needing to process it with a friend.

The concept was just realizing that this relationship would be perfect and the guy that I was with was really perfect.

But in order to stay in it, I would have to be quite a different person than who I naturally am and was.

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