For the past 18 months or so, Sabrina Carpenter has been on the hottest of hot streaks, releasing hit after hit after hit. As such, she’s a worthy winner of Variety’s Hitmaker of the Year award, but speaking as she accepted it, Carpenter reflected on how long it took her to learn to write the kinds of all-conquering pop songs that she’s become famous for.
As has been well-documented, Carpenter had released a lot of music before she made her big commercial breakthrough with 2024’s Espresso, and she admits that, for a while, she was flailing.
“This award is so funny to me because when I think about it there was a good eight to ten years of my life where I was the literal opposite of a hitmaker,” she said (via Variety). “I was barely a ‘bubbling under maker’ - I was kinda just makin’ shit, so I was just a maker.”
Carpenter went on to explain that she started writing songs when she was just 10 years old, but that it was when she started to forget that initial childlike approach to the process that she temporarily lost her way.
Remembering the pressure she felt from her original record company to come up with a hit, she argued that actively trying to write one is “no way to approach creativity” and caused her some “issues” in “making something that felt authentic to me.”
“The easiest way to write a bad song is to try to write a hit,” she noted. “Write the opposite of what you think a hit is. Write what speaks to you, write something that only you can write. Write the music you want to listen to yourself. Add the weird chord progression and key change, and call men stupid in as many ways as you can.”
Carpenter also took the time to praise her co-writer, Amy Allen, and received her award from another of her collaborators, Jack Antonoff, who said that one of the star’s strengths as a writer is that she begins by respecting the intelligence of her audience.
“If you really believe people are smart, you can get away with things,” he argued. “That key change in Please Please Please that is so thrilling - that is the kind of stuff that matters and is interesting.”
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