Allen said that even Carpenter’s language is more uniquely her own, more specific to her. “The way she talks and the way she is in person is exactly how she writes,” she said. “I think that’s really what made her music cut through this year. Because she says everything in her songs exactly the way she would say it in conversation.”
Allen and Carpenter are close friends, and if you listen closely to Short n’ Sweet, it shows. There’s a shorthand to the writing, as though the lyrics were plucked from a private text thread. “There are so many inside jokes,” Allen said. “We were really writing just for who was in the room, not thinking about the reaction that the world would have to it. I think that’s what allowed it to be so personality-driven and so intimate.”
“I remember very specifically when she walked in the room with the concept for ‘Lie to Girls,’ ” Allen went on, referring to the penultimate track on the album. This was at a writing session at Electric Lady in New York, with Jack Antonoff. “I felt so taken aback at how emotional I felt at just that concept alone,” she said. “I relate so wholeheartedly to the lyric ‘You don’t have to lie to girls. If they like you, they’ll just lie to themselves.’ Every woman I know can relate to that sentence. And it’s said so cleanly.”
With Allen and Antonoff, Carpenter wrote two other songs that same day, including “Please Please Please,” the country-inflected disco-pop song that has Carpenter pleading: “Heartbreak is one thing. My ego’s another / I beg you, don’t embarrass me, motherfucker.” (It’s her second global No. 1 on Spotify and first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.)
The rest of the songs were written in California. The seed for “Juno” came out of a long night at the Chumash Casino in Santa Ynez. Again, Carpenter had rented a house in the area, with Allen and Ryan. At some point, they needed a break. “We were like, We gotta get out of here and go play some blackjack and mess around,” Ryan said. When they got back later that night, Ryan made a loop and they started writing melodies. “Sabrina said this lyric, ‘Make me Juno.’ Like, pregnant. We all sort of laughed, and that was it.” The next day, they were playing around again. “Sabrina was like, What about that Juno line? ” They planted the seed in an entirely different set of chords. By five o’clock, the new song was finished.
Island Records wanted the first single to be “Please Please Please.” Carpenter felt strongly that it should be “Espresso.”
She knew she would be debuting the single at Coachella. “There’s something about this song that, if I’d never heard it before, and I heard it live for the first time, I would understand it,” she said. “I was definitely being swayed in another direction, but I knew deep down that it was this song. I was afraid of disappointing people for, like, five minutes. And then I was like: No.”
