Carly Rae Jepsen to bring buoyant 'Emotion' to the Troc

I can't hide it. I am in love with Emotion by Carly Rae Jepsen.

It is a deliciously wonderful pop record, with zero filler. It's a fun, buoyant ride from track one ("Run Away With Me") to 15 ("Favorite Colour"). A week from tonight, when she plays the Trocadero, the seemingly unlikely Canadian pop star will turn 30. Her Troc show is one of only five stops on a short East Coast tour she has named after the fourth track on Emotion: "Gimmie Love." If you miss her Chinatown moment, you can catch her as Frenchy in Fox's live production of Grease, set to air next year. The musical-theater nerd in her was cultivated in Victoria, British Columbia, at the Canadian College of Performing Arts.

She is literally living her dream.

"I couldn't have written it out better," she says, speaking from her apartment in Los Angeles, where she lives out of necessity more than love for California. "I'm very lucky. I feel like very few people get to pursue their passion."

Oh, yeah, and then there's "Call Me Maybe," the earworm single from her 2012 album, Kiss. It topped charts in 20 countries worldwide that year, especially in the summer.

"Everyone kind of gets known for one thing, and it was a great gift, but I didn't want it to be the one thing that defined me," she says of "Call Me Maybe." She took her time with Emotion, she says, because she wanted it to be a complete and fully realized record, this time incorporating sonic landscapes from the '80s, an aesthetic she picked up on while writing "Run Away With Me."

She says her label told her, " 'Why don't we send you to the U.K. and Sweden, and you can meet some of the people who made that music and were alive for it?' " Two weeks later, she was boarding a plane.

In recording Emotion, she hooked up with a bunch of collaborators. Two were essential: songwriter Dev Hynes (a.k.a. Blood Orange) and Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend. Hynes cowrote the track "All That" and gave her the idea for a short, concentrated tour. "He is a little bit selective with his show, so they matter," she says. Her new friend Batmanglij cowrote and produced "Warm Blood," one of the album's best tracks. She calls it "one of my favorite songs to perform."

She was recently at a dinner for the American Foundation for AIDS Research where her tablemates gushed about her record. "It means everything to me. It was just so warm," she says. When she gets to hear that her record matters to people and how, it becomes clear - it's worth the work. "You feel," she says, "like you're connecting, and that's what music's supposed to be about."

Carly Rae Jepsen, with K.Flay, is to play at 8 p.m. Friday at Trocadero Theatre, 1003 Arch St. Tickets: $25-$100. Information: 215-922-6888, thetroc.com.