What Is It Like to See Carly Rae Jepsen Live?

The Saxophone Is the Starting Gun

You will know the night has really started when a saxophone cuts through the room. Jared Manierka, her longtime keys and sax player, has been blowing the intro to "Run Away With Me" since the E•MO•TION days: Stereogum noted the sax on stage at Irving Plaza in November 2015, and at the E•MO•TION 10th anniversary show at The Troubadour on August 19, 2025, he opened the night with keyboard trills before launching into that horn line. At Glastonbury in June 2023, Attitude's reviewer said the riff alone got a field of tens of thousands dancing on the Other Stage. It's the third most-played song of her career, 285 logged performances on setlist.fm, and the crowd treats it like a starting pistol.

A Band, Not a Pop Production

On the 2019 and 2022 tours there was no dance troupe at all: a four-piece band and two backup singers carried the show, and the Harvard Crimson's review of her Roadrunner show on September 26, 2022 named them: Manierka, guitarist Tavish Crowe, drummer Nik Pesut, bassist Abe Nouri, and backup vocalists Sophi Bairley and Julia Ross, some of whom have played with her for over a decade. The backup singers do coordinated choreography with her on select songs, and "Want You in My Room" turns into a full routine with her backup singers. BrooklynVegan, reviewing Radio City Music Hall on September 28, 2022, said the setup made the night feel like friends hanging out rather than a tightly scripted pop show. At the Troubadour, the band walked out one player at a time and it felt more like a rock band than a pop singer with hired hands.

She Talks Less and Hands You the Mic More

Don't expect long speeches. Reviewers at Showbox SoDo in October 2022, at UBC the same week, and at the Troubadour in 2025 all noticed the same thing: she says very little between songs. What she does instead is hold the mic out and let you sing the backing vocals, which the Crimson noticed her doing again and again at Roadrunner. At the Aragon in November 2022, the room sang so loudly that ANCHR Magazine's writer could barely hear her from the back. When she does speak, it's short: "I hope you will sing this next song with me," she told Radio City. "It's the law."

The Deep Cuts Are the Point, Mostly

The songs that get the biggest physical reaction are often not the hits. On the 2016 Gimmie Love Tour in Covington, Kentucky, album tracks "Gimmie Love" and "I Didn't Just Come Here to Dance" hit as hard as "Good Time," and most of the room seemed less interested in "Call Me Maybe" than in the E•MO•TION material, per It's All Dead. The Troubadour anniversary night played all 17 deluxe E•MO•TION tracks in order, then B-sides "Store" and "First Time," and the only non-E•MO•TION-era song all night was "Call Me Maybe." There's a minority report, though. At The Sylvee in Madison on November 4, 2022, two weeks after The Loneliest Time came out, the Daily Cardinal wrote that "the audience largely refused to lose themselves in her music," coming alive for "Call Me Maybe" but not for new songs many people didn't know yet. And the biggest hit isn't saved for the end. On the 2022 tour she played "Call Me Maybe" mid-set and walked out into the Radio City crowd during it, at Glastonbury in 2023 it came fourth, and WXPN called her early placement of it in Philadelphia a bold choice.

Two Audiences, One Dance Floor

Look around and you'll see two fanbases sharing the floor. A CBC Arts fan forum put it bluntly: her concerts "are filled with two distinct audiences: preteen girls who want to shout along to 'I Really Like You' and queer people (mostly gay men) in their 20s and 30s who can quote every letter of every song the woman has ever released." Metro Times saw exactly that at Saint Andrews Hall in Detroit in March 2016: early-20s men and women screaming alongside 10-year-olds and their parents. At the Troubadour in 2025, one attendee told Variety he was "one of eight straight men" in the room, and a dad brought his daughter on her first day of sixth grade. Nobody is gatekeeping. The kid in the light-up shoes and the guy who flew in for the B-sides are singing the same bridge.

Uncynical Joy, Delivered Gently

The emotional flavor here is safety, not spectacle. The 2022 tour opened with an animated moon telling the room, "I offer you a safe place to feel whatever it is you need to feel," and people took it literally. At Pier 17 in August 2023, a fan blogger's friend said the show "felt safe," and Carly cried mid-song during "Kollage." By "Call Me Maybe" at the Troubadour, Spinning Platters described the room as "a sweat-soaked, dancey mess." You leave lighter, not wrung out.