Whether it’s via her Nonsense outros or earwormy syntax - that’s that me Espresso, anyone? - Sabrina Carpenter has always been keen to inject a little humour into her music. And, according to songwriter Julia Michaels, who worked with the star on her 2024 album Short n’ Sweet, that’s what makes her stand out from the rest of the pop crowd.
Discussing Carpenter on the Zach Sang Show, Michaels says: “I think what makes her so unique is she has an incredible sense of humour, and she knows exactly how to channel that sense of humour. A lot of the time - not all the time - I feel like it’s hard to tell someone’s personality through their music, and with her you know exactly what you’re getting. You’re getting this silly, funny, quirky, beautiful woman, and she really knows how to articulate that so well in songs.”
Michaels goes on to reveal what it’s like to write with Carpenter, as she did on the likes of hit single Taste and the cheeky Bed Chem, also from Short n’ Sweet (sample lyric: “Come ride on me, I mean, camaraderie/Said you're not in my time zone but you wanna be/Where art thou? Why not upon-eth me?/See it in my mind, let's fulfill the prophecy.”)
“It’s so funny,” says Michaels. “Some of the things that come out of her mouth, you’re like, ‘What? How did you even get there?’ But you’re like, ‘Wait, that’s so funny as a lyric, like, we have to do that.’”
When it’s put to Michaels that Carpenter will end up being viewed as “one of the greatest artists of our generation,” meanwhile, Michaels is in total agreement.
“I knew the first day we started writing together that she was incredibly special,” she says. “I will say that she is genuinely so talented and so smart and so funny, and knows exactly how to put all of that into a song.”
Elsewhere in the Zach Sang Show interview, Michaels reveals that she and Justin Tranter wrote the majority of Justin Bieber’s 2015 single Sorry in about an hour.
“It just came really quickly and we didn’t think anything of it,” she says. “We wrote it really quick and then we were like ‘I think this is cool - all right, see you later.’ And then like all of three or four weeks later it was out and then it was everywhere. And we just, like, had no idea that it was going to do what it did.”
