Pod Insights Pop Culture Happy Hour Sabrina Carpenter Man’s Best Friend About this episode Sabrina Carpenter is following her breakout album Short n’ Sweet with a new collection of cheeky earworms called Man’s Best Friend, which includes the breakout singles “Manchild” and “Tears.” Carpenter explores many of the same lyrical themes as she has in the past — winking innuendo and wry commentary on being a woman in the dating scene. But she kicks it up several notches while playing around with more retro-heavy sounds.
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0:19 Aisha Harris? Now, if you're anything like me, you've probably still got Sabrina Carpenter's breakout album, Short and Sweet, in steady rotation. Just over a year later, she's already back with a new collection of cheeky earworms called "Man's Best Friend."
0:33 Stephen Thompson? Carpenter explores many of the same lyrical themes as she has in the past, winking innuendo and wry commentary on being a woman in the dating scene. But she kicks it up several notches while playing around with more retro-heavy sounds. I'm Stephen Thompson.
0:49 Aisha Harris? And I'm Aisha Harris. And today, we're talking about Sabrina Carpenter's latest album, "Man's Best Friend," on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
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2:22 Aisha Harris? Joining us today is NPR music critic and correspondent Anne Powers. Hey, Anne.
2:26 Speaker 04 Hey, friends. So fun to be with you to talk about the dirtiest gal in show business.
2:33 Aisha Harris? Yes, it's going to be very, very fun to chat about this album with you both. So Sabrina Carpenter's been very busy since 2024. Her global Short and Sweet Tour is still going strong. It's scheduled to conclude later this fall. She put out a holiday special, picked up a couple of Grammys, and released a duet of Please, Please, Please with Dolly Parton. Anne, somehow during all of that, she found time to record her new album, Man's Best Friend. The lead single, Man Child, peaked at number one on the Billboard charts in June.
3:18 Aisha Harris? This is her seventh studio album, and she's retained with her frequent collaborators, Amy Allen and Jack Antonoff. Stephen, I'm going to start with you. How much did this album make you blush?
3:30 Stephen Thompson? A little bit. You know, the second single from the album is called Tears, and the vibe that I scribbled down in my notes was horny Dua Lipa. It is a very kind of retro, kind of disco-based, very, very horny song. And hilariously, like, looking kind of on Spotify, there are three songs from this album that do not have explicit tags. Tears is one of them, and it is the song that by far made me blush the most.
3:55 Speaker 04 It should make you blush because, you know, this song is built around a metaphor that goes all the way to the beginning of 20th century popular music. It reminds me of Bessie Smith, but Sabrina has a different way of saying it. Maybe we should hear it.
4:25 Speaker 04 You blushed. I cringed a little bit, I have to say. I am a huge Sabrina supporter, and I actually love songs about women's sexuality, but that line, I don't know.
4:37 Stephen Thompson? But on balance, I think this record feels very much like a continuation of Short and Sweet. I was an extremely strong proponent of the song "Man Child," which, for me, really livened up the kind of "song of the summer" conversation. Even the excerpt that we played kind of at the top of this segment, there were like five jokes in 10 or 15 seconds, right? And I appreciate the fact that she continues to make songs that are not only extremely hooky, extremely catchy, you know, kind of vibrant and shimmery and playful, but they're also funny. And I think, you know, her background as a comic actor really has translated well to her as a major pop star. And one thing that I do appreciate
5:19 Stephen Thompson? kind of thematically about this record compared to Short and Sweet, one of the big hits from Short and Sweet was called Taste. And it was really directing vitriol at the woman who was dating her ex. And there has been, I think with this record, a huge pivot off of that way of approaching bad love, right? Like, these songs are all directed at men. You can kind of make a taxonomy of Sabrina Carpenter, man's best friend songs of like, "men colon dumb," "men colon hot," "men colon see ya," "men colon sex, please." In that way, it kind of functions almost as a concept album, and it's directing the vitriol exactly
6:03 Stephen Thompson? where the vitriol belongs, sometimes inward, but mostly at dudes.
6:07 Aisha Harris? Yes, yeah.
6:08 Speaker 04 I'm glad you used the phrase "concept album," Stephen, because I definitely think this is a concept album. And maybe this gives us a chance to briefly talk about the cover controversy. So, long before this record came out, Sabrina Carpenter was teasing it with several different versions of her cover. The first album cover that came out is the one that I see on my streaming service right now. She is "On All Fours on the Floor." In a little black dress and a man whose face you can't see is holding her hair.
6:38 Aisha Harris? Maybe a man. We don't know. Apparently, there are some rumors that it could be also Serena Carpenter, but like, that's going down the deep well of fandom.
6:46 Speaker 04 Here's why I'm almost sure it's a man, because just to finish the story for those who don't know, she subsequently released several other covers because this cover did cause a controversy because she was in a subservient, quote unquote, position. But for me, that image is so much like a Robert Palmer
7:05 Aisha Harris? Yes.
7:05 Speaker 04 covered album from the 70s. I'm talking about the guy who did Addictive to Love with the all-model band in the background. It's this loosh 70s, you know, sexy, but in a degraded way, reference point that she's getting at. She's being historical here. And just like the sound of this record is reaching back into the past, in a sense, the imagery around it is also, to me, it's very 70s.
7:32 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
7:32 Speaker 04 People compare, because Serena Carpenter to Dolly Parton. I think she's like Erica Jong, the author of Fear Flying. That's who I think she's the most like. This album, to me, is so much like, kind of sexy feminism of the early 70s.
7:46 Aisha Harris? Yeah. I love that you brought that up because that whole controversy, and who knows? For all we know, the way artists roll out now, they always have like 18 different covers
7:56 Speaker 04 Yes.
7:56 Aisha Harris? already unlocked. It's like, yeah, we have to sell more copies. So who knows if that wasn't like, an intentional pivot or she was already planning to have those album covers out. But it seems so obvious to me that she is being cheeky and making a point about it. Even the title of this album is "Man's Best Friend."
8:11 Speaker 04 Right, exactly.
8:12 Aisha Harris? And yet, as Stephen has noted, this entire album is like, basically, all the ways men disappoint us. And occasionally make us hot, but also disappoint us.
8:21 Speaker 04 Sometimes simultaneously. I think simultaneously is the point, honestly.
8:26 Aisha Harris? Yeah. That whole controversy felt just not really important, but also proved a point in a way that we still don't really know how to deal with, you know, women, and especially younger women, who are asserting their sexuality in a certain way, and doing so in a political way, very blatantly political way. I found this album to be very fascinating because I've listened to it now. So we're recording this Friday afternoon. We've had a few hours to sit with it. I got to listen to it a few times. And it didn't quite hook me as quickly as Short and Sweet did. All of those songs on Short and Sweet felt like immediately, oh, I'm excited for this. And this one, it took me until the like, the third round where I was like, okay, I'm feeling this.
9:10 Aisha Harris? I do have to kind of throw this idea out here, and I know, Anne, this is something you wanted to talk about, which is this idea of her really leaning into like, the comedic side of her. There were multiple songs here that I kept thinking, this feels like an SNL digital short. This feels very Lonely Island. Like, it went from Short and Sweet feeling as though, oh, yeah, she's being cheeky. But like, I think part of it is the songs, even though some of them did feel like throwbacks of a certain era, they still felt modern and contemporary, whereas here, we're getting a little bit more retro. Tears have already played, that kind of sounds like a seventies disco sound preset, like, you know, on a keyboard. It's not like it's doing anything particularly fancy with the music.
9:53 Aisha Harris? Like, it's very basic disco. And this also comes out of her being such a visual storyteller. She's telling stories, and these are often stories that feel as though if this was 2005, 2006, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig would be performing these songs. And specifically, this came up for me with "When Did You Get Hot?", which is a great concept. But I want to play a little bit, a little bit of this, and tell me you cannot see some SNL people performing this and doing this entire bit.
10:38 Aisha Harris? Like, I don't know, I can see Sabrina being the guest host, and then like, you've got Andy Samberg playing Devon.
10:45 Speaker 04 You know what, it's like Sabrina Carpenter would be the female member of The Lonely Island. That is really a perfect role for her. I totally agree. I mean, As you were saying, Stephen, and I think our colleague Hazel Sills also wrote about this, she is essentially a comic artist at this point. I mean, maybe it's too early to talk about this, but does the comic role like limit her? Do you feel like this is like getting a little narrow with this record?
11:12 Stephen Thompson? I don't think so. And one thing that I was reminded of several times listening to this record was kind of classic country music, you know, kind of song lyrics that are doing big wordplay. Like, Anne, you and I have listened to a lot of, you know, vintage country music over the years. You live in Nashville. I was reminded of a lot of classic country songs where like women would sing these takedowns of men that were so catchy and so quotable.
11:39 Speaker 04 Stephen, I think you're absolutely right that she connects with classic country music. Loretta Lynn, you know, songs like "You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My Man." Sabrina is often compared to Dolly Parton, and I definitely hear that. But I think it's really about her connection to contemporary country music.
11:55 Stephen Thompson? Interesting.
11:56 Speaker 04 And y'all, this is why I was so happy you asked me to be on this episode, because I get to test out my new theory, my new ruling theory of what's happening in pop music. Are you ready for it? Yes. It's called Critique from Within. And it's really happening in country music right now. There is a whole class of young woman artists in country music. Megan Maroney, Ella Langley, Priscilla Block, Jesse Murph, who write songs that are so much like the songs on this record. You hear these kinds of themes that are on this record, like, "My man is so obsessed with self-improvement, he's ignoring me," or "My man turns me on by doing the chores," or whatever. Like, those themes are definitely in there. But
12:40 Speaker 04 it's all about, we're not trying to have a feminist revolution. We're not trying to create, you know, a queer utopia like last year's pop girly Chapel Rohn was. Yeah. We are women embracing traditional femininity and heterosexuality, but only
12:58 Speaker 04 If we are also allowed to critique it while we do it.
13:02 Aisha Harris? Yeah, I love that you brought that up because that came to mind when I also watched the video for Tears, which dropped at the same time the album dropped. And that video is playing with one of the most iconic, you know, dualities of heteronormativity and, you know, queerness and the other, and specifically Rocky Horror Picture Show. She is the damsel who lands outside the house, the mansion, and then brilliant piece of casting here, Coleman Domingo, basically kind of playing the Frankenfurter character. And he's great, fabulous to watch. But as I was watching it, I was like, you know, this is also just kind of, it's both ambitious, but unlike a chaperone, she still looks very conventionally heterosexually
13:47 Aisha Harris? hot, right? Like, she is, you know, in lingerie, she's got her big blonde hair wig, I don't know, whatever it is. And like, everyone else around her, they are the queer ones, they are the weird ones, they are the outside the box ones. And she's hot, but she still looks, you know, very quote unquote "normal."
14:05 Speaker 04 And not only looks it, but also she, in the song, she plays that role.
14:09 Aisha Harris? Exactly.
14:10 Speaker 04 Like, she's not gonna be running off with her best friend or whatever, who's
14:14 Aisha Harris? Right.
14:15 Speaker 04 Like, she's very driven toward men.
14:18 Aisha Harris? Yes.
14:19 Speaker 04 Listen, I just want to say, I'm not talking smack about that. Like, it's cool.
14:23 Aisha Harris? Yes.
14:24 Speaker 04 As a cis-hat person myself, you know, we need these kinds of figures to poke fun at heterosexuality, to embody our ideals while taking them down a notch, which is what I kind of think she's doing.
14:34 Aisha Harris? Yeah, I completely agree. Stephen?
14:37 Stephen Thompson? Well, and appropriately with that, I think a lot of the musical signposts here, you know, we've acknowledged Dua Lipa, we've acknowledged kind of 70s country. The various eras being thrown back to on this album, the one that I don't know if it's gonna get discussed enough when people talk about it, is a certain vein of 80s pop and R&B that has like a tinny quality to it and is not necessarily what is considered the classic songs of that era. Names that came up, there's a track on this album called "House Tour."
15:06 Aisha Harris? Yes.
15:07 Stephen Thompson? Let's hear a little bit of that.
15:08 Speaker 05 Do you want the house door? I could take you to the first, second, third floor. And I promise, I know this is a metaphor. I just want you to come inside. But never enter the back door.
15:26 Aisha Harris? Because opposites attract.
15:28 Stephen Thompson? I mean, you mentioned Paula Abdul, three names that I wrote down. And Aisha, you might not even remember these. Samantha Fox.
15:35 Aisha Harris? Yes, I know her.
15:36 Stephen Thompson? Stacy Q.
15:37 Aisha Harris? Stacy Q, yes.
15:38 Stephen Thompson? And Lisa Lisa and Colt Jam.
15:40 Aisha Harris? Of course, yeah.
15:41 Stephen Thompson? Now, these are not necessarily artists who get played. You hear some of their songs on retro radio sometimes, but they're not necessarily synonymous with what people talk about when they talk about 80s music.
15:51 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
15:51 Stephen Thompson? And to me, this song just taps right into that specific kind of fizzy, bubblegum, R&B-inflected pop of like 1986.
16:03 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
16:03 Speaker 04 Definitely. I mean, Dan Charnas actually wrote a great piece about this for Slate about Espresso. But it's exactly what you're talking about, Stephen. It's like early, mid 80s hip hop affiliated, but not exactly hip hop, but definitely urban feeling, but also very feminine, ingenue.
16:20 Stephen Thompson? Right.
16:20 Speaker 04 Feeling. But I want to say, I feel like the sonic palette of this record isn't completely confined to that. Let's hear just a tiny bit of the beginning of Never Getting Laid.
16:43 Speaker 04 See, like, to me, that's really like a discofied ballad kind of 70s sound.
16:48 Aisha Harris? I was getting a little yacht rock. Like, I was hearing like, I keep forgetting.
16:52 Speaker 04 You know what it is? It's yacht rock in a quiet storm.
16:58 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
16:59 Speaker 04 And the song changes, but that beginning took me right back to the 70s.
17:03 Aisha Harris? Yeah, I mean, this is sort of what was fascinating to me. And again, this kind of goes back to where I'm a little bit mixed on this album, which is that I don't want to ding her for, you know, continuing to sort of not drill it into the ground, but you know, like, she is playing this part. And again, at the end of her video for Tears, she has a whole bit where Joe Apollonio, the actor, shows up and she's like, you're supposed to be dead. And like, sorry, everyone in my videos dies. And she's like, we have to give the people what we want. And that seems to be kind of the thesis statement for this album is, y'all like Short and Sweet? I'm going to give you shorter and sweeter. I don't know if it's actually shorter, but like.
17:45 Speaker 04 Longer and brighter, shorter and sweeter.
17:48 Aisha Harris? Yeah, or not even sweeter, but just like. Saucier, I guess.
17:52 Speaker 04 Saucy is the word.
17:53 Aisha Harris? It's varied enough where not every song sounds like it could be a Lonely Island song, but then some of them do. Like, in fact, there's moments where I was kind of surprised that we don't just get yacht rock, we don't just get country, we don't just get like New Jack Swing light, but we also get like banjos and it's sort of a jig at some point.
18:11 Speaker 04 I think Sabrina Carpenter might play the banjo. I think she actually might be a banjoist.
18:16 Aisha Harris? Yeah, you might be right. Whenever we're getting, we're getting lots of different things. And I both appreciate how sonically this feels different from short and sweet. But then sometimes that sort of retro, looking back and this pastiche of things, it's hard for me to take it as seriously sometimes. It just seems like they're kind of butting up against each other. And I worry that she could be teetering on shtick versus like actually deconstructing all of these ideas. And I think it works more successfully on certain songs than others. And I think that's where I kind of end struggling with this album. But I still really enjoyed it at the same time.
18:52 Speaker 04 I mean, this is always an issue when you're approaching the subject of sex in a comic way, you know?
18:59 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
19:00 Speaker 04 Because frankly, I'm just gonna say Americans mostly. Maybe it's not just Americans, but you know, we're never really comfortable talking about sex. If we make a joke out of it, it's easier. And it's easier, especially for a woman, to be explicit if she's comical.
19:14 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
19:15 Speaker 04 And this goes all the way back to like classic Hollywood, someone like Jean Harlow, you know? Or in the seventies, I think my friend Carl Wilson, in his Slate review of this record, talked about Lonnie Anderson from WKRP in Cincinnati, you know? And I think that's a very down the middle way to approach the subject. And I do appreciate the songs on this record that are a little more open to other emotions, like "We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night."
20:03 Speaker 04 There's a tenderness to that song. There is a little bit of, I don't know, like she's not putting on the armor of laughter as much.
20:11 Aisha Harris? It's vulnerable. It's more vulnerable.
20:13 Speaker 04 Exactly.
20:14 Aisha Harris? At least on the surface. Yeah.
20:15 Speaker 04 Exactly.
20:16 Stephen Thompson? I do think there is an element with this record of just looking at it in the trajectory of her career as kind of striking while the iron's hot, while at the same time lowering the stakes a little bit. You know, I feel like with a lot of pop star trajectories, there's this sense that like you have to top what you did before. There's almost a certain amount of sequel bloat, you know, that comes up. You certainly see it with people like Taylor Swift where it's like, oh, this album's two hours long. You know, because it has to kind of build on something and be even bigger than the thing before. And for me, like, there's an enormous amount of work that goes into this music. Not only this album and all the sonic touches that we've talked about,
20:58 Stephen Thompson? but how hard she leans into making really excellent videos and videos that are really superior to most videos being made. But at the same time, the album is, you know, 12 songs in 38 minutes. And it's a little more than a year after the last one. This is her seventh album. She kind of deals in volume. So in a sense, there's a little bit of like a lowering of the temperature going on where she doesn't necessarily feel the need to top what she did a year ago.
21:25 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
21:26 Stephen Thompson? So much as find new ways of looking at it.
21:28 Speaker 04 I think it's always important to talk about quote unquote, pop girlies, a term I have some issues with, but to think about pop girlies as musicians and as actually caring about the music they make. And Sabrina Carpenter is a consummate crafts woman.
21:45 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
21:45 Speaker 04 I think she's the perfect foil for Jack Antonoff. You know, like Jack Antonoff, she is fascinated with period pieces. She's fascinated with pastiche. She enjoys playing a role, you know, we think about Jack Antonoff with his Bleachers projects, right? He's got this fictional scenario in which that band exists. And I think him as a producer, someone who's so skilled at evoking the periods you mentioned, Stephen, the early 80s and also back into the 70s, matching with him, she can really fully flesh out this role. And unlike Taylor, who some might say is Jack Antonoff's perfect foil, she's not also
22:25 Speaker 04 being like, I have to make a huge statement about my heart, my soul, and how it relates to all of the billions of women in the world or whatever, you know?
22:35 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
22:36 Speaker 04 She's just having fun in the studio. I imagine a lot of laughter happening during the recording of this record. So that's part of it I like. I actually almost like it if I tune out the higher concepts a little bit.
22:48 Stephen Thompson? Mm.
22:49 Speaker 04 Or the lower concepts, if you want to call them that. And just enjoy the flow.
22:54 Aisha Harris? Yeah. We also like, can't forget that Amy Allen is a huge part of this tune. I think having-
22:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, the songwriter, Amy Allen.
23:00 Aisha Harris? Yeah, having two women in that room, or however many women were, I don't know. But like, having those two specifically, it gives it a little bit more of a tone, especially considering the concept of this album, which is, you know, men. Disappointing.
23:14 Stephen Thompson? Men, colon, sheesh.
23:16 Speaker 04 Well, Ayesha, I think we're in a very interesting moment for women in pop right now, women artists right now, working in the mainstream, because it's a little unclear where the culture's going. Are we swinging more conservative? I'm trying to get my head around, if we're in like a post-liberation moment, but there's also all this kind of resurgence of traditional values, right?
23:43 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
23:44 Speaker 04 This is something that pop artists are having to deal with, you know? And I think Sabrina Carpenter is consummately equipped to deal with that, you know? It's, as we've been talking about, it's the comic side of what she does, it's the enthusiasm about men. It's not just men sheesh, it's also men woo.
24:03 Aisha Harris? Yeah, this is true. Again, Devin, you're hot now.
24:08 Speaker 04 Exactly. She's not leading us to some kind of new horizon of gender roles or intimate relationships. But I think for a lot of people, she's providing kind of lessons on how to cope. And if not cope with your partner, who's like, not doing what you want, not delivering what you want, at least to, you know, have a little chuckle about it.
24:33 Aisha Harris? Yeah, roll your eyes while you accept less than you deserve.
24:36 Speaker 04 Exactly. Roll your eyes above your perfectly rouged apple cheeks.
24:41 Aisha Harris? Well, we want to know what you think about Sabrina Carpenter's Man's Best Friend. Find us at facebook.com/PCHH. That brings us to the end of our show. Anne Powers, Stephen Thompson, this was a lovely conversation. Thank you so much.
24:55 Speaker 04 Thank you so much.
24:56 Aisha Harris? Thank you. And we want to take a moment to thank our Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus subscribers. We appreciate you so much for showing your support of NPR. And if you haven't signed up yet, you want to show your support and listen to the show without any sponsor breaks, because who doesn't? Yes. Head over to plus.npr.org/happyhour or visit the link in our show notes. This episode was produced by Carly Rubin, Janaye Morris, and Mike Katsif, edited by our showrunner, Jessica Riedi, and Halukamun provides our theme music. Thanks so much for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Aisha Harris. We'll see you all next time.
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