Pop superstar Sabrina Carpenter has been discussing her musical inspirations, and explaining why some of these artists informed her decision to release a new album, Man’s Best Friend - which was preceded by a new single, Manchild, last week - just a year after 2024’s chart-topping (and still big-selling) Short n’ Sweet.
While it’s common these days for big stars to have lengthy ‘eras’ and squeeze as much juice as they can out of a successful record, Carpenter says that, when she realised that some of her heroes kept the new music flowing much more frequently, she wondered why she shouldn’t do the same.
“I went back to some of my favourite artists growing up,” said Carpenter in an email to fans, “listening to a lot of Stevie [Wonder], Dolly [Parton], Donna [Summer, presumably] etc, and was surprised to find so many of those artists I loved put out a new record every year for a long time.”
Discussing this kind of release schedule in a new interview with Rolling Stone, Carpenter says: “I’m like, ‘When did we stop doing that?’ Writers write, they make music, and they release music.”
Producer and co-writer Jack Antonoff, meanwhile, suggests that Man’s Best Friend will take what people liked about Short n’ Sweet - which featured hit singles Espresso, Please Please Please and Taste - and ramp it up a notch.
“The things we did on the last album - things that people really loved - were just the start of places we wanted to take it,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, you like that? Well, just you wait.’”
Elsewhere in the interview, Carpenter takes time out to praise Abba, of whom she is a genuine superfan.
“I don’t know if there’s any other artists in the world [who] make me so happy,” she gushes. “They just understood how to make fun music without it feeling cheesy or corny. And even when it does, you’re into it, because they just sell it.”
Carpenter says that her love for the band extends to taking stage outfit inspiration from ABBA Voyage, the band’s critically acclaimed ‘virtual’ show. “I almost did a glow-in-the-dark look, because they had light-up outfits in their show,” she says. “And I was like, ‘You know what? It’s a lot easier to do this when you’re a hologram.’”
We also learn that Carpenter has met the real (as opposed to hologrammatic) Björn Ulvaeus, and the Abba man has kind words for the younger star. “The production is … oomph! It’s up there,” he says of Espresso and Nonsense - his two favourite Sabrina songs - in particular. “She sings so well, and the hooks are irresistible. It’s true pop music.”
Other artists who soundtracked Carpenter’s youth include Etta James, Patsy Cline, Whitney Houston, and Aretha Franklin, who her mum introduced her to, and both Queen and The Beatles, who were beloved by her Dad. Perhaps more surprisingly, he also gave his daughter an appreciation of prog titans Rush.
“The Trees is the longest song I’ve ever heard,” says Carpenter. “I heard it my whole childhood.”
Man’s Best Friend will be released on 29 August.
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