What makes a good pop album? Now a decade into music-making, Sabrina Carpenter has a lot of published thoughts. Much like the radio stations bursting with verve into the 2010s in our middle-school minds, she makes hooks that’ll bop around in your head ’til the cows come home. I find myself collating through her most recent album, Man’s Best Friend.
As a reporter, it is my job to share my biases. In 5th grade, I played Carpenter’s first album Eyes Wide Open and remember relating heavyy when I was in my lover girl truth. Girl Meets World, the Disney Channel show she starred in alongside Rowan Blanchard, was wacky and very gay (at least to me and my associates, with whom I conferred in dinner discussion over this piece). Now her platform reaches girlies globally, fellow fans including a millennial African guy with whom I shared part of the album’s opening night as me and new friends joined his cab. She doesn’t know us well nor us her, and we race down the road with windows down together.
For Carpenter, her public persona partially speaks through lyricism littered with daily detail; when broadcasted to a body of listeners and accompanied by press outings, this public/private tension undoubtedly becomes a complicated one. I hear her speaking down-to-earth about relationships, highlighting the place fame and family has in her life. In her extended interview by Tracy Smith on CBS Sunday Morning, she recalls growing up loving music and performing to her three older sisters and parents, her mom “never making [her] feel like she was too much, ever.” She sees how misinterpretations become part of her story and uses interviews to share her processes—like the tenderness she is embracing for her past—believing that “you don’t get to see all those parts of a human being when you’re listening to a 2 ½ minute song.” And while we won’t . . . Man’s Best Friend helps me recognize parts of myself with more understanding, her music recycling effort, hindsight, and ridiculous plots.
Sonically, Carpenter bedazzles her pop with the voice of someone who not only loves music but also stage lights. With a team of music makers, she produces her truth, each song a decadent piece of cake. I daresay she’s rocking out to the Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way,” running a ribbon of fruity Italian pop, with an Abba cherry on top with songs “sonically different” (consider her riffy country twang popping up in Short n’ Sweet) “but the personality is mine.” Carpenter is perky, idealistic, and honest, with vocal clarity, bright and blunt. In this art form that shares a single sense, she uses sounds to express herself physically, letting her voice soar and zip around to paint a picture of her in a kickline with her friends, whooping through “Go Go Juice.”
Next up in the album, “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry” is my emo pick of the album. Its sudden turn into reflective mist, she whispers “hope you’re feeling lucky” in an admittance of emotional devotion, abstraction. “And even your mother agrees / That emotional lottery is all you’ll ever get with me.” And then we’re back into roller-rink-evoking pizzazz: “House Tour.” What’s she up to?
“I’ve been listening to it non-stop,” shares The Yale Herald Reviews editor Hudson Warm as we begin the editing process. Less than a week from our first listens, Hudson and I already have a common language of Man’s Best Friend phrases, visualized as we get ready, fold laundry, and sashay around campus. Carpenter’s collective effervescence is sticky.
As word nerds, we find her humor through figures of speech quite iconic. “And I promise none of this is a metaphor, I just want you to come inside” introduces her corporeal “House Tour,” making me question what Chips Ahoy could mean euphemistically. “Tears” comes on strong, “I get wet at the thought of you / being a responsible guy,” as she establishes some standards: “A little initiative,” “… communication, yes, that’s my ideal foreplay,” and “a little respect for women can get you very, very far.” As online audiences discuss and question her empowerment of women, I don’t see her as opposing feminism as either a misandrist or misogynist. “Oh, it’s the really horny one,” my roommate AJ identifies her album by its cover. Yup, she lays out dynamics via her viewpoint as a pretty white woman who is often viewed sexually, poking fun with specificity. Carpenter toys with reality as if playing in a doll house, treating a concrete “he [who] discovered self control this week” (“Nobody’s Son”) to fantastical lands of desire. From her studio, she is powerful in how she vocalizes having the last word, empowering her sassy lifestyle and continuing to live moment to moment capriciously and with articulated boundaries.
Sabrina doesn’t show letting go softly and why should she, as channels like CBS salaciously title clips of her interviews, often overlooking her as a person during interviews to ask how her ex feels about her music. Pretty bold inquisition for a news broadcast who refuses to speak outright for Palestinians, brazenly posting this week: “Israel advancing with Gaza City expansion as genocide accusations emerge” too many years into genocide. Little is subtle in today’s media, and the real point of human life is eluded by careless disinterest. Obviously Carpenter’s dramatized fame is a flicker when we turn our eyes to the millions of Palestinians fighting against scorched earth; I want to remind us there are adjustments we can neglect to make.
Watching her extended CBS interview, I felt affirmed by her sweet dedication to songwriting as her medium and alignment with past work being made for people to relate to, then and now, and for some people, never. “I used to be upset at having six albums, especially at the age of 25, because I knew that if I started later I creatively would have made very different choices,” she said, “but then when I look at it now, and I see how much those early albums meant to my fans when I was younger and I was the same age as them dealing with those things at that time, I don’t regret it.” She truly smiles, “I think it’s really beautiful that all of this is happening at a moment I feel very much myself.”
Who’s to say if I was more influenced to tune into expressing myself directly thanks to Zoom with my therapist or Sabrina Carpenter, but dang I feel encouraged to let out what I’m wanting to say recently. I believe this robust album bounced sound waves to my brain, cheerful in its clarity and comfort with jumping in—at this point, dipping my block of toes to greet the water before I dive! It’s freeing to be caring while not letting someone else’s perception stop you from waking up and creating as you. I greet my patterns with open breaths: songwriting makes visible the lenses we add on memory, revealing meaning artistically and emotionally. Musical artists like Carpenter buoy notes and choose to exude feelings in performance. Each time the record ends, we’ve taken a walk catching up with experience.
