Sabrina Carpenter’s Smart N’ Funny Short N’ Sweet Skewers Male Misbehavior With The Best Of ’Em

Sabrina Carpenter is funny – funny on purpose. A lot of people have suddenly realized this at the same time. This isn’t news, though, to people who saw her steal scenes as a snarky tween in Disney’s sitcom Girl Meets World. (The character-actor-to-pop-girlie pipeline is real!) Nor is it news to people who’ve attended Carpenter’s shows recently, where she’s been cranking out raunchy city-themed outros to her single “Nonsense” for almost two years. My sense of humor is juvenile enough to appreciate bars like “Only use my mouth, that’s a cappella” or “Then he made me come to Brazil,” but my favorite of the lot isn’t sexual at all: “Calgary, you do not rhyme with jack shit!”

She’s also got great stage banter. Another running segment in her concerts is “UnSABscribe,” a choose-your-own-cover game in which Carpenter hands the mic to a fan who’s Going Through It, then plays surrogate therapist. For example, as she asked a Salt Lake City fan: “Would you say that you are pretty angry? Would you say that you are sad? Or – wait, how old are you – would you say that you are horny?” (The fan was 19. She chose #3.) Then Carpenter curates a song for the night’s dumpee based on their stage of breakup grief. You might get Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” Or you might get an unexpected deeper cut like Jazmin Sullivan’s “Bust Your Windows” – she really does have good taste!

Carpenter is such a funny songwriter and such a sharp skewerer of male misbehavior that most reviews of her record Short N’ Sweet have centered on her lyrics, not her music. To be clear, this is indeed Carpenter writing. She’s credited on every song, and her main collaborators on the topline are Amy Allen – who is prolific but not necessarily known for being funny – and Julia Michaels, who is funny but in a distinctively awkward way that’s easy to identify. (I’d guess the chorus of “Good Graces” was Michaels; the skittering rhythm and spoken-word adlibs are a lot like the charmingly goofy stuff she’s written for Selena Gomez.) And given that Short N’ Sweet is Carpenter’s sixth(!) album, she’s had plenty of time to develop her own signature voice.

I’ve followed Carpenter’s music ever since her days as the acoustic teenage troubadour of Disney’s Hollywood Records. Her output there was mixed: cloying acoustica like “Can’t Blame A Girl For Trying” or “Seamless” (the latter of which coffee shops everywhere seemed in cahoots to make happen in the mid-2010s); the Makes U Think-ish but also guilty-pleasure banger “Thumbs“; the monstrous if vanilla pop of “Sue Me.” She departed Big Disney in a cloud of Olivia Rodrigo drama with “Skin” – in retrospect, its wonky phrasing foreshadowed the grammatical contortions on “Espresso.” Then came the sneakily good Emails I Can’t Send, when the general public first started to catch onto the fact that there’s more to Carpenter than Disney ditties and Joshua Bassett-related beef.

Short N’ Sweet feels like the synthesis of all Carpenter’s past work, refining the souffle-light appeal of singles like “Feather” and revisiting her teenage love ballads with a more mature voice. Bubblegum this is not; even the purposely airheaded disco of “Espresso” has a surprisingly robust musical foundation. The record almost reminds me of Haim in how it curates the most crowdpleasing-est hits of the past few decades in soft-rock into a few-skips collection. “Please Please Please,” in its self-deprecating wryness and and coquettishly pleading vocal, is all Cardigans. (I’ve seen Carpenter compared to Dolly Parton and Laurel Canyon songwriters, which isn’t wrong, but allow me to throw another potential influence out there: not only has Carpenter covered “Lovefool” live, but there are points on this album where she sounds spookily like Nina Persson.)

The chamber-pop arrangement of “Sharpest Tool” evokes a feathery soprano version of Nico’s “The Fairest Of The Seasons” – bear with me – while “Slim Pickins'” and “Coincidence” channel the winsome vocal charm of Golden Hour-era Kacey Musgraves and Sheryl Crow respectively. Sometimes she pastiches several hits in the same song. “Bed Chem” starts out like Toto’s “Africa” and ends up like Ashanti’s “Foolish,” and “Good Graces” is a can’t-lose pop melange: the melody of Nelly Furtado’s “Say It Right,” a few of Britney Spears’ vocal quirks from “Hold It Against Me” (the Sabrina-est Britney song), and a She’kspere-esque guitar intro that TLC or Destiny’s Child could have used back in the day. Carpenter is nowhere near the first artist to throw it back to this era of R&B, but she gets real playful with it, harmonizing with the guitar lick on the bridge.

All of this, however – the elevated takes on dance pop, the aesthetics of ’70s folk – is pretty common nowadays, and Short N’ Sweet is not much of a departure from Carpenter’s musical peers. The record even has several Jack Antonoff productions. (To his credit, you can’t really tell.) What makes Carpenter stand out is, yes, her lyrics. Her combination of pinup presentation and self-aware wit is part of a tradition that stretches back at least as far as Mae West and Lorelei Lee, and Carpenter happily joins those ranks. The other big influence here is Taylor Swift. Like many of her generational peers, Carpenter found solace from her teenage emotions in Swift’s work. And like many of her main-pop-girl peers, Carpenter found her way into Swift’s orbit, going from Eras Tour opener to squad buddy. Short N’ Sweet harmonizes with The Tortured Poets Department, another album full of disappointing “dumb and poetic” dudes. Take “Sharpest Tool”: Like “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” it’s full of desperate justifications for a man ghosting and will surely get a lot of people through a lot of heartbreak. Lines like “A bird flew by and you forget” would slot right in alongside “Were you a sleeper cell spy?”

But to risk some critical sacrilege, Carpenter kind of does this schtick better. She’s endlessly quotable here: mocking one crap dude for “holding space” for someone else’s tongue, promising another that “the mushrooms won’t change your life,” or, in the album’s best jab, accusing him of “jacking off to lyrics by Leonard Cohen.” (Honestly, Cohen would approve.) Some of this does come off forced. The otherwise solid weepie “Don’t Smile” reveals some writing-to-formula in lines like “[my heart]’s falling faster than the way you shut me down,” and “Slim Pickins'” tries a little hard, pandering to the stans with “the lord forgot my gay awakening” and throwing in grammar-police aside for which there’s really no other word than “cheugy.” The near-entirety of “Juno,” an alarming ode to rawdogging that skews a bit tradwife for the current climate, could probably have been avoided – though it does have a good guitar solo and nice Dixie Chicks-y harmonies. The vast majority of Carpenter’s writing, though, is both witty and authentic, coming off like the kind of corny-horny jokes you’d devise on the spot to tease someone you really, really like. (She apparently does this IRL too; in an interview with Paper she described a recording session with a sultry, purred “there was a lot of steam in the studio,” then broke out laughing.)

I can think of no better way to honor this record than with a “Nonsense” outro of my own:

I’m workin’ late, ’cause I’m a writer.
(Insert a spicy rhyme for “writer.”)
As stardom goes, this expedites her.

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