What is Sabrina Carpenter, and why is she suddenly so popular? In our chauvinist past, women singers were automatically compared to other women singers, and this is worth reprising at a moment when the world is dominated by one of them. Carpenter supported Taylor Swift on several legs of her Eras tour, and has since had two number one singles in the UK. While Swift is bigger than presidents, her support act – a 25-year-old former Disney actress who has been around so long she released an album called Evolution at the age of 17 – is a more human prospect: a lively green shoot popping up in the tracks of the bulldozer. Carpenter sounds happier than Taylor: goofier, and much more horny. Most importantly, she has humour. Her new album title, Short n’ Sweet, is simply a reference to how small she is, the kind of thing Dolly Parton would do.
The Swift phenomenon suggests a feverish appetite for monoculture. While the hype is shared, the music need not be as catchy as it once was, because now you don’t just hear a song once on the radio and go out to buy it. In this respect, Carpenter’s first UK blockbuster, the slinky, faintly Latin “Espresso”, was an anomaly, because it was in the zeitgeist and number one as well. Old school. Its ungrammatical chorus (“That’s that me espresso”) was the kind of dropped stitch that makes a song stand out. Then several times this summer, while cleaning the kitchen floor, I became transfixed by sugary triple harmonies coming out of the wireless, downed my broom and ran to the radio display, to see, each time, that it was “Please Please Please”, her second number one. This sounded like country to me, though not the modern country pop of Swift’s early years, nor the statement hoedown of Beyoncé, or the arena-filling “new country” of Post Malone and Luke Bryan.
Much of the most interesting pop is on the sidelines now, in the LA indie worlds of artists like Caroline Polachek and Charli XCX, but Carpenter is fully of the mainstream – an old-fashioned prospect. Her origin story is no different to Britney’s or Miley’s: she starred, from the age of 14, in a kids’ TV show called Girl Meets World, and the job came with a recording contract. She had a dad who supported her music and built a studio in the basement of the house. She’s been in nine films, played the lead in Mean Girls on Broadway, has three perfumes to her name, and has created an espresso-flavoured ice cream.
At ten, she took part in a singing contest called The Next Miley Cyrus Project (hosted by Miley herself) and the audition tape is cute but not exceptional: a child that can carry a tune. But she worked hard. And, like Miley, she has an earthiness in her voice that gives her warmth and wallop. She reminds me of Juliette Barnes, the juicy, pint-sized troublemaker from the series Nashville.
Humour is of great value in pop, and under-employed these days: who didn’t change their view of Ariana Grande – so delicate, so glacial – when they saw the viral clip of her doing perfect impressions of Celine Dion? There were hints that Carpenter was a bit odd on her last, R&B-led album, Emails I Can’t Send, with the trap-style “Nonsense” and its ad lib fade out: “This song catchier than chickenpox is/I bet your house is where my other sock is…” There’s a song on the new album called “Bed Chem” (“Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?”) and in “Slim Pickins” she sings, “Since the good ones are deceased or taken/I’ll just keep on moanin’ and bitchin’,” sounding about 53.
The record’s length – 36 minutes – defies the vogue for visual and extended albums, conceptual wonders which feel designed to overwhelm the listener with a sense of the artist’s importance. Carpenter’s lightness of touch reminds me of Carly Rae Jepsen, who in 2019 worked with Jack Antonoff – Carpenter’s producer and co-writer for much of this record. As Jepsen will use an unfashionable saxophone, Carpenter will use an electric guitar, though I don’t think she’d write a song about Popeye’s girlfriend. She’s less eccentric than Jepsen, and more confident; mean in a “do you dare me?” way.
Carpenter isn’t doing anything wildly different to the pop “girlies” (oh, that phrase!) who’ve enjoyed moderate commercial success in the last few years, so when I wonder why she’s sold so many records, I assume it’s for the same reasons I like her: her humour and her vibe, which bring alive these smart, elliptical songs. A track called “Dumb and Poetic” (cf Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department) falls into an established genre of female songwriting: an ode to the draining effect of depressive, manipulative male behaviour and women’s tendency to chase “lost boys”. But it is striking in its economy, its musical starkness and its unusual one-two-three waltz-time rhythm: here is a timeless little piece of songwriting hidden in an apparent kiss-off. Carpenter’s resigned attitude to bad men, and the women who love them, is the wisdom of old country, of bluegrass: “Just ’cos you talk like a woman, doesn’t make you a man.”
[See also: Why we resurrected Oasis]
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This article appears in the 04 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Starmer under fire