Sabrina Carpenter sits down with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 to celebrate the release of her album Short n’ Sweet. The popstar talks about writing the album in France, her Espresso avoidance, dealing with stardom as a child and the personal growth she has experienced since then.
Sabrina Carpenter tells Apple Music when she felt she had finished her album...
Sabrina Carpenter: Very different from my last album where I questioned it until the day before it came out, like, "Is it done?", and, "Could I have changed it?", and, "Could I have written another song?" And to be fair, I do have a hard time with the fact that I do feel like life doesn't stop so it's really hard to tell when a chapter of your life should be book-ended.
Zane Lowe: What is time?
Sabrina Carpenter : Yeah. It doesn't really make sense other than the fact that you just have a feeling. I know it sounds very cliche, but you just know… And there was a moment where I just knew. And it wasn't even like, "Oh, and I wrote the 12th song." It was all of these things that I had been trying to put into words for a brief chapter in my life that I was like, "You know what? I'm good for the next week and then I'm going to write another album." It's like I was just ready to close it.
Sabrina Carpenter tells Apple Music about ordering Espresso at Cafés now...
Sabrina Carpenter: You stopped drinking coffee four weeks ago? Not that you espresso. That's... That is not that same Zane espresso
Zane Lowe: I'm not that me espresso, but I was me espresso for a long, long time. I had a lot of me espresso.
Sabrina Carpenter: Okay.
Zane Lowe: So I'm okay with that.
Sabrina Carpenter: Those days are over.
Zane Lowe: They're over, yeah. But real easy too. No, not... My coffee is not about you.
Sabrina Carpenter: Feels like a personal attack.
Zane Lowe: My coffee is not about you.
Sabrina Carpenter: I didn't invent espresso. The Italians are so mad.
Zane Lowe: The song is not about me. My espresso... You don't own espresso.
Sabrina Carpenter: What's so crazy, this is the part of me that feels like an idiot. Every time I see a cafe, there's just a sign that says espresso, and I'm like, "Yes." Nothing to do with me.
Zane Lowe: You're a monster.
Sabrina Carpenter: I know I'm a monster.
Zane Lowe: You're literally walking around every single cafe now just like, "That's that me espresso."
Sabrina Carpenter: No, I don't do that, but I do have to question ordering it a lot now. I'm just like...
Zane Lowe: Oh, have you had moments where the barista's just like, "I can’t.”
Sabrina Carpenter: They're just waiting for me to say it and I'm like, "Tea."
Zane Lowe: Can I see your herbal tea menu please? Oh, fucking brilliant. I love it. That's so good.
Sabrina Carpenter tells Apple Music on the thread running through the album...
Zane Lowe: I do feel a thread running through this album of not just self-discovery, but also getting through the heartache and heartbreak that can often ... Man, it can really break you for a long time. And I get the feeling, even with the humor and with a healthy dose of judgement in some of these songs, that you were hurting real bad.
Sabrina Carpenter: Thank you. Yes. I called it Short n' Sweet for multiple reasons. It was not because I'm vertically challenged. It was really like I thought about some of these relationships and how some of them were the shortest I've ever had and they affected me the most. I think about the way that I respond to situations, and sometimes it is very nice and sometimes it's not very nice. And again, the thing about albums, projects, writing songs, it's all moments. So harder for other people to understand that when they're listening to something that's going to take them through maybe a lot of years, hopefully a lot of years, is that I'm not the same person that I was when I wrote that.
Zane Lowe: Yeah. We love to timestamp you at this moment when we hear this record, like, "Who's breaking your heart right now?" And it's like, "Wait a minute." If it's a good one, you'll never let it go to some degree, I think.
Sabrina Carpenter: Yeah, and I yearn for that. And I've always yearned for that. I've always yearned to care enough about a person or a situation or a relationship in my life that it provokes that much feeling in me, because I think that's why we're here, I think, you know?
Sabrina Carpenter tells Apple Music about allowing herself to make mistakes...
Sabrina Carpenter: It says a lot about my own character in moments and mistakes that I openly allow myself to make.
Zane Lowe: Oh, that's an interesting way to phrase it, because most people make mistakes and then they pay penance for it later, and they almost reject the concept of allowing yourself: "It was in the heat of the moment. I lost my temper. Something happened." But what you're saying is that there are moments in life when you allow yourself to have that experience for reasons only you know.
Sabrina Carpenter: And maybe that happened because, I think about this a lot now, because I started working at a young age. And so I never went to prom. I never went to ... I don't know, I never had a crazy summer school trip in France. I never did those things. And so I think about life right now as even though I'm writing songs, I'm still 25 and I'm still living a life as a human being that I want to feel everything.
Zane Lowe: Yeah, and that's got to be an interesting line to walk, because as a songwriter and someone who's becoming more and more visible, people talk about how that affects your freedoms or your curiosities because you have to check yourself at the door, but you don't strike me as somebody who wants that. You strike me as somebody who wants to actively try to reject those boundaries and those restrictions.
Sabrina Carpenter: I just don't want to live out of fear of trying to make sure that I don't upset anyone.
Sabrina Carpenter tells Apple Music on where Espresso came from...
Sabrina Carpenter: I was in between tour, which is even crazier. My mind was in a place where it was like, there is just no concerns right now, I just need to write as I'm feeling. Because I had just finished, literally the night before, I played a show in Paris, and then right after I was done, I went to Japan. And it was high, low, high, energy environments that were just ... It took me a couple days to sink back into writing. And then when I did, it ended up being all this stuff that was so honest, so emotional, so important to me, because I was going actually crazy.
Zane Lowe: Is that where you said goodbye to a lot of the old stuff?
Sabrina Carpenter: Weirdly enough, said hello to a lot of things, I think. That's where I opened up what ended up being the album.
Zane Lowe: That's where Espresso came from?
Sabrina Carpenter: That's where Espresso came from. Yeah. Stupid little song.
Zane Lowe: But what a beautiful stupid little song it is, my God.
Sabrina Carpenter tells Apple Music how she has personally grown and evolved throughout from stardom as a child...
It's interesting to reflect on it now, because I don't feel like I've changed that much. I feel like the seed was always there, of me always kind of having a direction, and having an opinion, and having an idea, and steering a ship, that was always there. Whether people want to believe that or not. It was there, with a lot of obstacles in the way, and a lot of walls that had to just be ripped down. I think through, obviously, life experiences, through being humbled, through making the wrong jokes, I really have found this place right now where I definitely don't have it all together, and I don't know it all, but I'm really happy with the current state of feeling like I'm comfortable in my body, and feeling like I'm comfortable in my mind, and allowing moments to be the moments that I'm in. I think, for a long time, there's this idea of you have to come out the gate and smash it. And if you don't do that, it's almost like you don't know who you are, or you don't know yourself. And I think I'm just one of those artists that it took a few tries. And I don't even think of it as it took a few tries to be good, or to be successful. I just think maybe for people to understand it, and catch on to who I am.
Sabrina Carpenter tells Apple Music about finding and connecting with her fans...
Zane Lowe: What we don't need is for artists to get into a place where fear drives truth out of the picture. And I feel like the year between when you made your last album, and the touring you did, and this album was the area, the period of time when you came face to face with your audience for real. I remember seeing the YouTube videos when they were just theatres, and you'd sit on the end of the stage and talk to the fans. I'd watch these clips because we'd come in here and we'd follow whatever our favourite artists or people are doing because we can't be there. I was like, oh, she's finding her people. She's actually out there finding them one by one, finding her people, and they're telling you it's okay. We really appreciate you and you don't have to be scared.
Sabrina Carpenter: There's probably more than just this group, but there's a really beautiful group of young girls that have been fans of mine since I was 14 that just have genuinely stuck with me through everything from the very, very, very beginning, and they're still at my shows today. They still come to every, I just did the Grammy Museum, they came. I just think that that's such a special feeling when it takes them through life and breakups and love and family and college.
Zane Lowe: Because they're growing up too.
Sabrina Carpenter: Yeah, so it makes me feel like, oh, we're literally just doing this together, and that's a really, really beautiful thing that I'm super grateful for, which is also the reason why touring has, everyone has their own feelings about it. But for me, I think it's created the space for people to understand that there's a human behind songs. There's a human behind music or there's a human behind big hair and crazy outfits. It is, and I'm just having fun and they're really, really supportive of that.
Sabrina Carpenter tells Apple Music about the role her mother has played in her career...
Sabrina Carpenter: I mean, my mom, I want to give her a shout out because I love her, one. Two, a couple of weeks ago I was like, it was a lot for me and I wasn't doing too great. She was like, you need to go outside and I want you to put your feet on the grass and the dirt as, stupid. Yeah. She was like, your feet need to touch ground.
Zane Lowe: Mom.
Sabrina Carpenter: Your feet need to touch ground. They've been touching the inside of your house or the plane or hotels. They need to touch the actual earth, and read. She was like, read a book, read a couple of chapters.
Sabrina Carpenter: She was literally, just be a person. I was like, stupid. I don't want to do this. I'm going outside taking my shoes off so mad. Okay, my feet are in the dirt.
Zane Lowe: Clean up the dog shit. Okay?
Sabrina Carpenter: Yeah. But it was so sweet and it really did, it helped me.
Sabrina Carpenter tells Apple Music who she is listening to right now...
Zane Lowe: Can we talk about what you love to listen to? Can we share a few things?
Sabrina Carpenter: Right now, I listen to Bee Gees every day. The Bee Gees are my safe place right now. And my mom was talking a lot about them yesterday, because I was like, "Well, I don't think any of them were all that attractive, but their voices were so stunning," and she was like, "No, no, no. When they were young, they had a little something going on."
Zane Lowe: Well, and sadly, Andy, who passed away young. He was the heart-throb, yeah.
Sabrina Carpenter: She brought up Andy. She said Andy was her crush. She said Andy was her literally celebrity crush.
