0.3.1 - It's no surprise to me, I am my own worst enemy
I should have known better. I should have known before I opened my mouth. Sometimes you just start typing and your brain looks for some kind of apt comparison, and without any kind of research, or even the most cursory of fact checking, you say some dumb shit out loud and then you find out 3 weeks later how wrong you were and you feel obligated to make amends.
Here we go.
In my post about late-era R.E.M., the second ever post proper in this newly revitalised version of Record Reconstructor, my statement about there not being a ten album deep back catalogue of Sabrina Carpenter albums to go through was technically correct, but if I am honest, I thought the number of studio albums she had released prior to Short n' Sweet was zero-to-one; certainly not FIVE. She's only twenty five years old! You know who else has six studio albums released by the time they were 25? Prince! Bob Dylan!
Obviously, I hadn't counted on her prior incarnation as a Disney channel alumni or I might have known better. While some people have accused me of having the music taste of a teenage girl, I don't have their viewing habits and I'm very rarely aware of the revolving door of Mickey Mouse Club / Disney Original Programming hopefuls looking to start a music career until that happens, and they achieve some measure of success. But between Sabrina and her pop megastar/real life love triangle enemy Olivia Rodrigo, the Disney-show-to-pop-megastar pipeline has been on a heater for the past few years.
And if you don't think she's a megastar, here's the cold hard numbers. Espresso has more than 1.85 billion streams on Spotify. The earliest version of the track hit Spotify on 12 April 2024, which means in the 279 days its been available, it's been streamed 6,636,500 times PER DAY since release on average. Because large numbers often need context, imagine if the entire population of Rio De Janeiro, the 40th largest city on the planet, all had their own spotify account, and every day without fail, they arose as a population and listened to all 175 seconds of Espresso for basically a calendar year. That's what it takes to get 1.85 billion streams.
I take weird pride in knowing about these super-mega crossover hit phenomena before they reach the point of cultural saturation; I don't expect to be ahead of the terminally online / total target demographic for this kind of stuff, but I try and keep my ear to the ground in a number of different musical venues just so I don't end up like my father, dismissing all music made after 1983 as just inferior reruns of the music from my youth. So long before Espresso ended up as the song of the summer in 2024, I had heard Nonsense and thought it was fun and catchy through another ToddInTheShadows video here where he calls out Sabrina as destined for big things in 2024 in his wrap up of 2023 (sidenote here: I love end of year wrap-up lists and articles, from friends on social media to music influencers to whatever exists in the place of music media these days; they exist as both a way for me to feel good about having caught some of the big musical trends of the year while they were happening, and as a useful safety net allowing me to harvest all the ones I did miss in one place and work my way through them. Please never stop posting your Top 20 Albums of the Year or similar, someone out there is getting great value from them).
I never really thought it would go beyond that though.
It was shortly after the first time I heard Espresso that I knew it was undeniable. It was already rampaging through the musical landscape by the time it came across my radar, and I deliberately sought it out to learn what everyone was talking about. I listened to it, and at the end, I shrugged to myself, not understanding what all the fuss was about. I didn't immediately think it was better even than Nonsense. I went and made a cup of coffee. And as my kettle boiled, I leaned against my kitchen counter and under my breath went "thinking bout me, every night oh, something something 'spresso". I made my coffee, went back upstairs, and listened to it again. And again,
It might be easy based on that to dismiss Ms Carpenter as a one-hit-wonder in the making, but don't be fooled; there entirety of Short n' Sweet is filled with incredibly catchy pop songs, where's she's carved her niche firmly in whatever the opposite position to the Phoebe Bridgers of the world is; she's a spring in contrast to the Sad Girl Autumn vibe, and her lyrics (or rather the lyrics of her and her songwriter Amy Allen, who's hitmaking chops have helped launch other successful musicians like Halsey and Selina Gomez) take a far more tongue in cheek than confessional and vulnerable approach.
There's also something to be said for staying power, and an undeniable feeling that she has star quality, but she just needed to find the right way and time to express that. Eyes Wide Open and EVOLution were released when she was 15 and 16 respectively, put out by the wing of Disney that releases records for the fans of their TV shows, and apart from her obvious vocal chops, there's really nothing here of note; this is much more traditional "I'm sad about the boy I like who doesn't like me" music and stands in sharp contrast to her more modern work. For the record, marketing executives, any time your album title shares conceptual space with the Ron Paul 2012 presidential campaign, it's time to explore your other options.
In Sabrina's case, her other option was a pivot towards Dance Pop Divadom with her albums Singular Act I and II. First, this is another terrible marketing fail - you simply cannot release an album called Singular, make it a double album, then split it into two 'acts' and release them a year apart from each other. Also, I thought the album was called 'Singular Act' and it was like a Led Zeppelin I / II / III thing before I puzzled my way through the album title. Secondly, she's too talented and charismatic to be singing boring hooks over trap beats and electronic warbles. There's nothing on either Singular which is worth pulling from the wreckage - just more evidence of having someone with vocal talent and star quality, but still not finding the correct presentation.
emails i can't send (all lower case styling, including lower case proper noun I, once more reducing the grammar enthusiast in me to tears) is where the formula starts to come together. This isn't as fun and amusingly dismissive as Short 'n Sweet, she hasn't quite reached her Cher-in-Clueless/Mean-Girls final form, and there's several songs on here which sound much more inner turmoil and raw emotion - Spring is not yet in bloom. But Nonsense is on here (1.17bn streams, comfortably lapping the next most popular song because i liked a boy, the song about her side of the Olivia love triangle nonsense, four times over) and set the marker for what was to come.
After five shots off target, Short 'n Sweet finally found the perfect presentation to launch Sabrina into the mainstream. Really, the whole album is great, and I'm particularly partial to album deep cut Slim Pickins as it's funny, and well observed, and belongs in conversation with Beach House by Carly Rae Jepson (we will get to CRJ and The Loneliest Time in due course) as the wittiest, best observed song about the difficulties of modern dating for young women in the internet age. She is a star, and I don't know who gets the credit for persisting with this project for ten years before it finally bore fruit; has she always known she could make it? Was there a team in a boardroom somewhere, a whiteboard on the wall with "How do we make Sabrina a big star?" written in block capitals across the top, unwilling to give up until they'd accomplished their goal?
Whatever kept her going, she's made it now, at least for this year. She's inherited a huge number of notoriously fickle pop fans, and now there are that most dangerous of obstacles, expectations, strewn across her path. Can she refine the formula which made Short 'n Sweet so successful, or will it end up being an unintended prophecy for the duration of her career as a megastar?
Final note; people might think this was always coming, the REM article comment was a plant - trust me, I'm not that organised or clever. People might also think that listening to six albums with an average runtime of 33 minutes is stat padding - again, I didn't do this on purpose, but I'm also not complaining about being able to check off six albums in three hours. Also yes, I am counting Singular Act I and Singular Act II as separate albums, that is what they are listed as on Spotify and you can't tell me that releasing two sets of 8 tracks a year apart is one album.
