"Fake Mona Lisa" by Carly Rae Jepsen, Tuesday, July 26, 2022

In 2019, Carly Rae Jepsen released her fourth studio record, Dedicated. But the fifteen songs that made it onto the standard edition of the album were nowhere near the amount of songs the surprisingly prolific songwriter wrote for the album. Jepsen revealed that she wrote over 200 songs during the two album cycles of E-M0-TION and Dedicated. In an interview with Vox, Jepsen said that she turns to her friends and family with whom she has listening parties where she "feeds them and gives them copious amounts of wine so that they have opinions about the music." While many of these songs will never be released, in the tradition Jepsen set with E-MO-TION, she released a B-sides record for Dedicated, titled Dedicated Side B. 

HE WAS BORN IN VEGAS. Years ago, I was impressed when I heard that a band wrote 70, 100, 200, etc. songs for a record. Years later, through listening to more and more interviews, I found out that the myth was debunked. Several bands have said that they have written 50-200 parts of songs, whether a verse+chorus, a hook, a riff, a bridge, etc, but usually not complete songs. Today's song "Fake Mona Lisa" feels a little incomplete with a short second verse and an absence of a bridge. I thought maybe the tales of Jepsen's songwriting were also a myth, but then earlier this summer, I discovered in my YouTube feed a channel which featured tons of leaked complete unreleased CRJ songs. Many of the songs are just as good as the songs that made it to the studio and b-sides records, but they may have not met Jepsen's standards for the theme of the records. Speaking of themes, Dedicated Side B seems to be more than just a B-sides project. Jepsen talks about in the Vox interview that she had a fake title for Dedicated: "Music to Clean Your House To." Some of the songs on Dedicated Side B, though, are even more danceable. And while the songs on Dedicated are cute and almost adolescent, the songs on Side B, particularly "Fake Mona Lisa" are more adult, more sexual. 

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da 
Vinci. Source.

EVERY NIGHT I'M WEARING BLACK IN CASE YOU'RE COMIN' 'ROUND. I always wondered why Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is often considered the best painting in the world. In a world of brilliant colors, why was this dull painting considered the best. Don't get me wrong, da Vinci's symmetry and ambiguity is interesting. I always thought the background was more interesting than the subject. But the most famous painting? Vox made a video explaining why Mona Lisa is so famous in their Almanac series (see below). Drunk History also tells the same story about the art theft that made the painting so popular (see below). When the painting was stolen, it was propelled to international fame due to its likeness being printed in newspapers around the world. The exposure to the painting, in a way, made the painting an international icon, sort of like a pop song about a boy who may or may not call the singer of that song, which spread around the world in 2012! 

Read the lyrics on Genius.

Vox: "How the Mona Lisa Became So Overrated":

Drunk History "The Theft of Mona Lisa" see 12:54: