One song, several release dates
“Tonight I’m Getting Over You” is a Carly Rae Jepsen song from Kiss, her 2012 international breakthrough album. It first became commercially available as part of that album in September 2012, then received a staggered single campaign in early 2013. France began servicing it to radio on January 21; American mainstream-pop radio followed on February 19. Its official video appeared on February 22, and a separate remix featuring Nicki Minaj arrived on May 6.
Those dates are sometimes collapsed into one another, producing claims that the song was “released” in February, April or May. Each can describe a different stage of the campaign, but January 21, 2013 is the earliest documented single rollout. The May date applies specifically to the Minaj remix, not to the original recording.
Nor was the song an unreleased track or a leak. It was already track ten on the standard edition of Kiss before Interscope, School Boy and 604 Records promoted it as a single. The original and remix remain authorized but distinct recordings. Unofficial uploads that combine artwork, audio or credits from both versions should not be treated as label documentation.
The Max Martin session
Jepsen wrote “Tonight I’m Getting Over You” with Max Martin, Lukas Hilbert—later professionally known as Lukas Loules—Clarence Coffee Jr., Shiloh Hoganson and Katerina Loules. Hilbert’s own professional site confirms the six-person writing collaboration. Martin and Hilbert produced the track, making it the sole Kiss song jointly produced by the pair.
The record emerged during the hurried period after “Call Me Maybe” became a global phenomenon. Jepsen was moving from the folk-pop identity of her Canadian debut toward an international album assembled with numerous producers. Years later, she recalled meeting Martin in Sweden and finishing “Tonight I’m Getting Over You” during their session. In a 2015 interview with Time, she described the work extending late into the evening before she persuaded him to hear another idea.
That recollection is valuable because Martin’s reputation can encourage an overly mechanical account in which a superstar producer simply hands an artist a finished hit. Jepsen’s presence in the writing credits and her description of the session establish her as an active participant. The song’s subject—trying to convert heartbreak into immediate action—also fits a pattern that would become central to her later work: precise emotional uncertainty delivered through extremely efficient pop structures.
Some digital databases combine the original recording with remix information, producing credit lists that add Nicki Minaj or her legal songwriting identity to the base song. The distinction is simple. Minaj did not perform on the 2012 album master. Her additional verse belongs to the officially released 2013 remix, for which she receives the corresponding performance and writing credit.
A breakup song built like a club record
The original is among the most aggressive productions on Kiss. Jepsen begins inside a tense electronic arrangement before the chorus expands into heavy programmed drums, distorted low frequencies and bright, stacked vocals. Contemporary listeners frequently described the drop through the language of dubstep, then at the height of its influence on commercial pop. More precisely, the track borrows the genre’s dramatic bass transitions while remaining organized around a conventional verse-and-chorus pop song.
That structure turns the title into both promise and command. The narrator has not necessarily recovered from the relationship; she has chosen a night on which recovery must happen. Jepsen’s performance retains enough vulnerability to expose the difference. She does not sound serenely detached. She sounds as if volume, movement and a new encounter might force the desired emotional result.
This is an interpretive judgment, but it explains why the production’s early-2010s excess is integral rather than ornamental. The hard drop represents the willpower required to override lingering attachment. The song’s emotional engine is not closure but impatience with the absence of closure.
The combination also marks a revealing stage in Jepsen’s artistic development. E•MO•TION would later bring her wider critical recognition for synth-pop that made ambivalence feel ecstatic. “Tonight I’m Getting Over You” is rougher and more overtly tied to 2012 dance trends, yet it already treats the dance floor as a place where conflicting feelings intensify rather than disappear.
The official video’s unstable romance
Jepsen’s official artist channel published the rights-holder music video on February 22, 2013. The upload identifies School Boy/Interscope and 604 Records as the copyright holders. That provenance separates it from numerous fan-made videos and reuploads.
The clip follows Jepsen through an intensely photographed relationship: domestic play, physical closeness, arguments and separation. Instead of introducing an uncomplicated new partner, it visualizes the difficulty of leaving the existing one. Contemporary coverage from Capital documented the February premiere, while E! reported from behind the scenes.
The video’s polish matches the production, but its narrative keeps undermining the title’s certainty. Jepsen and her partner appear magnetically drawn together even as the editing frames the relationship as volatile. The result is less a literal illustration of recovery than a dramatization of why the recovery must be declared so forcefully.
The Nicki Minaj remix is a separate chapter
On May 6, 2013, Interscope released an authorized remix featuring Nicki Minaj. Spotify’s catalog preserves it as a distinct four-minute remix, and contemporary radio reporting treated it as a newly issued version rather than the original single. Minaj adds a verse that sharpens the song’s confrontation and gives the campaign a second promotional event.
The remix is responsible for some of the song’s most persistent catalog confusion. Pages headed only with the base title may list Minaj among the writers, while videos of the original do not contain her performance. A careful identification should therefore specify whether it means the 2012 album version, the 2013 single campaign or the May remix.
The remix briefly brought the song onto the American Billboard Hot 100, but its more sustained chart showing came in Europe. The Official Charts Company records a UK peak of No. 33, with six weeks in the Top 100 beginning April 27, 2013. That run started before the Minaj remix’s May 6 release, so it should not be credited entirely to the featured version.
A transitional single with a longer afterlife
“Tonight I’m Getting Over You” never approached the ubiquity of “Call Me Maybe.” That comparison, however, can obscure what the single accomplished. It demonstrated that Jepsen could carry a much heavier electronic production without losing the conversational quality of her writing. It also supplied an early version of a contrast she would refine throughout her career: devastating uncertainty expressed as physical exhilaration.
The track is now unmistakably dated to the peak of pop’s dubstep crossover, but datedness is not the same as disposability. Its bass design, rapid build and maximal chorus preserve the atmosphere of a particular commercial moment. Jepsen’s vocal keeps it from becoming a mere period production exercise.
The correct chronology begins with Kiss in September 2012, continues through the January 21, 2013 international single launch and February video, and reaches a separate branch with the May 6 Minaj remix. Nothing in that sequence requires a leak narrative. What it reveals instead is a song repeatedly repackaged for different markets—a breakup anthem whose complicated release history mirrors its refusal to make emotional separation sound simple.