Short n’ Sweet Summer

After "Espresso" and "Please Please Please," Sabrina Carpenter’s colossal success is bound to continue with her new album Short n’ Sweet, which came out on the 23rd of August. The pop queen is back with 10 more songs (the 11th - “Needless to Say” can be exclusively found on her vinyl), bringing her sharp storytelling and witty humor to tell us stories of relationships, friendships, breakups, and the aftertaste of those dumbfounded feelings.

Sabrina Carpenter / via The Times

Despite Short n’ Sweet being her 6th studio album, Carpenter only started getting the recognition she deserves with her previous album, Emails I Can’t Send. Her 6-leg tour, where she sang hits from “Because I Liked a Boy” to “Nonsense” with fans from across 4 continents, was followed by her opening for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour. These performances, along with some of her hit songs, are what put her in the public spotlight. Her immense talent and original songwriting are what kept her there.

The first thing that makes a great impression on this album is Carpenter’s authentic storytelling. Her songs feel like a short movie; they take you through the story from beginning to end. What’s key for Sabrina is that her stories can reveal her least proud moments that most artists wouldn’t prefer sharing. Through this naked truth, she inspires the audience to find what they are looking for within those lyrics, and, if they can, to learn something from her own mistakes. The great honesty is perhaps just what brings her so close to her fans - the lyrics are like a conversation with everyday phrases and quirky lines that no one expected could sound so poetic or catchy.

In order to convey these messages, a big part is played by her humor. “If something was funny enough to make me laugh, then maybe it belonged in a song,” shares Sabrina on her Instagram post celebrating the album. Witty jokes and genuinely funny lines that can make you sit and laugh in your living room while listening to the album can be found in many songs. Start with “Slim Pickings” and its famous line:

Jesus, what’s a girl to do?
This boy doesn’t even know
The difference between “there,” “their,” and “they’re”

It is clear that her great humor is more used as a bandage for her tears that would take over if there wasn't laughter. Yet, this is perhaps exactly what makes it so good - the sheer optimism, the confidence mask that will eventually stop being a mask, the light-hearted coping mechanism she has perfected. Or at least she appears to have, which is still enough for it to be contagious.

This confidence of going through things easily is contagious. “Heartbreak is one thing; my ego's another,” is a famous line from her hit “Please Please Please” and it can be seen as a motto for her artistic persona - more and more appearing as a steamy maneater. Going beyond pitying a heartbreak or expressing sadness, most of Sabrina’s songs focus on her ego and thus find the fault in the man (while still criticizing oneself), saving herself from the situation, unraveling manipulators for whom “love everyone” is a favorite quotation (check out “Dumb and Poetic,” you’ll thank me later).

What started with “Espresso” and now can be found throughout her whole new album, is how phonetically rich it is. This is the first time Sabrina has worked with Jack Antonoff as her producer (known also for being Taylor Swift’s producer) and his playfulness with various keys can be found in a few songs - “Please Please Please” being one of them where the second verse has a completely changed key, making the song lighter, as if you’re taking a new breath.

The richness doesn’t stop there. Today’s country obsession is rapidly taking over the music (just like it did with fashion, movies, lifestyle) and we can definitely hear bits plucking on those strings in some of Sabrina’s new songs. Both “Slim Pickings” (which was even compared to Dolly Parton’s early career by Zane Lowe in their Apple interview) and “Coincidence” lie within the genre of country-pop, and you would regret skipping them.

Overall, the whole album is made up of retro sounds, be it 80s country-pop or 90s pop-rock, we can’t escape the vintage (and we don’t want to). Just like “Espresso’s” melody is a slice of 80s music, this vibe can be found in her other songs such as “Bed Chem”. Her song “Juno” is yet another one with a retro style where her fans stated that it sounds like a 90s movie soundtrack!

And if you are wondering where she got the inspiration from, in her interview for Apple Sabrina stated past experiences, the way her childhood shaped her, her friends’ experiences, and France being part of her muse. Carpenter further shares that everyone around her knows that it has been a dream of hers to write in France and this is just what she did for this album. Going to a small town for a bit more than a week, some of her songs were inspired by that time period and those feelings of going insane when there is nothing or no one around you so you just end up letting it all out. “Don’t Smile” is one song that she picked up during her stay in Saignon.

In her new album Short n’ Sweet, Sabrina Carpenter experiments with different genres within pop, yet stays true to the vintage aesthetic and sounds of the album, making it sound whole and cohesive. Her signature songwriting style of mixing vulnerable experiences met with confidence and lots of humor is present here again, yet with even bolder man-eating lines. The only thing we could complain about is the whole album being less than 40 minutes; one simply needs more. We are crying 'cause it’s over, but we are smiling 'cause we can put it on repeat (iykyk)!