Promotional Image // Sabrina Carpenter
By: Sam Simons
Media Writer
Sabrina Carpenter has left quite an impression with her latest album “Short n’ Sweet”. With her delivery of sassy and cheeky lines, fans can’t resist the sweetness of it all. For those who haven’t tried it yet, you have to get a taste of it.
Carpenter kicked off the summer with “Espresso” and later followed with “Please Please Please.” Both singles seem to reference Carpenter’s current relationship with Irish actor Barry Keoghan. In “Espresso”, Carpenter keeps things upbeat and makes the point that she is like a shot of espresso that is being bathed in sunlight for Keoghan.
However, in “Please Please Please” Carpenter begs who we can assume is Keoghan to not embarrass her. Specifically, Carpenter references Keoghan’s profession through the lines, “I heard that you’re an actor, so act like a stand-up guy.” Also, in the music video for “Please Please Please”, Keoghan makes his debut in a Sabrina Carpenter music video and is the first man to survive one!
At one point, fans speculated that Carpenter and Keoghan broke up, fearing that he did something to embarrass her. Luckily, those rumors were false, and hopefully he doesn’t do anything to embarrass her like somehow making another movie like “Saltburn”.
In the first track of the new album, “Taste”, we get a taste of Carpenter’s alleged past relationship with fellow singer Shawn Mendes. Carpenter might be the only one who knows what Mendes did last summer, as she takes us through a campy, horror movie-inspired music video which sets up the scene of the crime.
She also makes it clear to her ex’s new girl that she has a flavor that lasts. Alongside Carpenter, the music video features “Wednesday Addams” star and fellow Disney alumna Jenna Ortega. Throughout the video, the two go back and forth killing each other in a “Tom and Jerry” style, only for things to go so far that Ortega’s character really does kill the boyfriend who Carpenter disguised herself as.
Looking at the bigger picture here, the video suggests that the man is at fault, not the new girl. In the end, the two realize how dumb it was to go after a man that really wasn’t all that great.
Moving on to track six, Carpenter slides back into singing about her relationship with Keoghan in “Bed Chem”. The song begins by referring back to Carpenter’s meet-cute with Keoghan and describes the outfits they wore, like her “sheer dress” and his “white jacket”.
The song goes on to convey Carpenter’s newfound crush, and how she thinks the two will have really good chemistry together. And just to be clear, when Carpenter talks about chemistry, she does not mean her career as a woman in STEM!
In track nine, Carpenter serves up “Slim Pickins,” a ballad that has a touch of yeehaw. Through the country motif, she expresses that her options of finding a good guy are slim. Also, she says that she just wants a “boy who’s nice that breathes,” but since she can’t find that, she will just have to work with what she has. In the meantime, she’s just going to stay serving complaints in the kitchen.
The final track, “Don’t Smile”, makes it safe to say that not many of us are smiling because the album is over. Carpenter flips the line “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened” to mean the opposite in a relationship. Through this, Carpenter also references “Taste” in the line “…you’re supposed to think about me everytime you hold her.”
But unlike the sassiness seen in “Taste”, Carpenter now conveys a sadder undertone, knowing that her ex has moved on and that she doesn’t know if he still thinks about her, wondering if he’s smiling now.
We are definitely not smiling now due to the history of Carpenter giving commands to the listener, and because we don’t want to end up like the majority of men in her music video – but we don’t have to cry, because Ms. Carpenter has been working late, so there’s a possibility she will fix something else up in the future to ease our cravings.
