“Hey, I just met you and this is crazy…” 🎶
back in 2012 that the main inspiration for the song was “the idea that there's a kind of chemistry when you meet the right person.” “There's a spark that needs to be investigated, but it can be left unsaid because sometimes people are too shy to take that step, including myself,” she said.
Co-written by writer-producers Josh Ramsay and Tavish Crowe, the track’s foundation began in late 2010 or early 2011 — a timeline that’s fuzzy because of Jepsen’s tour dates around the time, according to Crowe. Jepsen had initially been writing songs with Crowe, and together they developed an alternate version of the track — it wasn’t exactly the catchy earworm listeners are familiar with. “It was quite a bit folkier than it was before Josh had laid ears on the song,” recalls Crowe. “He really honed in on the hook of the song.
“We left the rest of the song alone, [and] then Carly and I, together, wrote a new song around this one pre-existing line,” Ramsay says. “It was still [about how] Carly had met a guy and wished that she was confident enough to just walk up and give someone her number.” Ramsay wanted to create a song that combined influences from Jepsen’s acoustic-leaning beginnings with the infectious energy of a Katy Perry track and the bouncy production of Max Martin sans synths. A reference point for the song’s pop-meets-strings melody was Annie Lennox's 1992 breakup anthem." “It felt clubby and poppy, but still felt organic because it had that human element of strings in it,” he says of the track.