Sabrina talked to Teen Vogue about her new song, “Skinny Dipping”, the process and memories of writing it and moving to the city (New York). Photos from the photo diary styled post have been added to the gallery. The full article can be read by clicking “continue reading”.

The singer-songwriter opens up about moving on, letting go, and her new single. It’ll be a Wednesday when Sabrina Carpenter will hear her ex’s name and drink order at a coffee shop and look up. They’ll make cordial small talk, Sabrina will share a casual update on her sister: “Shannon’s being Shannon”. And suddenly, years after a tumultuous end, they’ll no longer be swimming on the edge of the cliff they’d soon spill over. Instead, they’ll just be existing among hindsight and therapy and time, splashing around in water under the bridge.

The moving image is from Sabrina’s newest single, “Skinny Dipping”, a first taste of her forthcoming album — which will also be her first on Island Records, a deal she signed in January of this year after four albums through Disney’s Hollywood Records. But “Skinny Dipping is also a manifestation of sorts, a wish for future peace after a breakup.

“I didn’t feel in that moment that I was at a place where I could literally be skinny dipping in water under the bridge”, Sabrina tells Teen Vogue. “I didn’t feel like I was healed and fully out of a place where I didn’t hold any anger or resentment”. Instead, writing with collaborators Julia Michaels and JP Saxe, she dreamed up a scenario where she had worked through those feelings.

She explains all of this while sitting in a different café, Martha’s Country Bakery in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, where she’s spent most of her summer. It’s 11 a.m., and we’re splitting a piece of her cake of choice from the popular (though deserted in the morning) dessert destination. The slice is called the Napoleon, a pastry cake with layers of cream and fresh berries. Breakfast cake, we joke. She’s wearing a cropped t-shirt she cut herself, printed with the face of her friend and creative partner, the actress Danielle Fishel, as her character Topanga from Boy Meets World.

Sabrina starred in the Disney Channel spinoff Girl Meets World for three seasons as the confident, chaotic Maya Hart, best friend to Cory and Topanga’s daughter Riley Matthews (Rowan Blanchard). The show ran from 2014-2017 and was her breakout acting role, leading to more Disney parts and bigger films like The Hate U Give and Netflix’s 2020 dance comedy Work It. But music was the beginning.

As a homeschooled kid growing up in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, she posted YouTube covers of pop songs; she told Marie Claire that her dad built her a purple recording studio in her childhood home at age 10. She released her first single “Fall Apart when she was only 11, signed her first record deal at 12. Reflecting on that first song, she’s disbelieving, a bit self-deprecating. “You’ve seen those TikToks where people are talking to their 10 year old self? And they’re like, ‘Do we marry Justin Bieber? No, we find someone else,’ she laughs, before turning more introspective. “Listening to that song specifically — which I don’t recommend anyone does, but since you already have — I really don’t think at 10 years old I realized what songwriting would become to me, and how much it would bring me back to sanity”.

Each of her album eras — Eyes Wide Open, Evolution, Singular: Act 1 and Act II — has seen her wield more creative control as she searched for her own sound in a crowded pop landscape. Her next album is “as close to total control as she can get, she says, without literally playing the drums. She backtracks — “Actually I do play the drums on one song, so that’s a lie”. Taking back that power has made her cognizant of what she gave up early on. “I signed with my first label when I was 12. Like I don’t know what the f*ck I’m doing at 12”, she says. “I was just like, I wanna make music, I wanna perform and be on stages. That’s all I knew. Then I found myself in a situation where it was very tricky to be who I wanted to be, and I didn’t realize I would be giving away a lot of that freedom at such a young age … If I could go back in time, I don’t know if I would have released an album [around age] 13, if I’m being honest with you”.

 

She recalls being sent to songwriting camps at age 17, in rooms where she was expected to say a few words to inspire writers and then duck out for lunch. “They didn’t realize I was the person that was gonna get there 30 minutes before everybody, and then not leave until an hour after, and be cutting vocals and backgrounds for hours”, she says. “Whatever it takes”.

The album she’s wrapping up now, her first since 2019, was created with just two producers, John Ryan (best known for working with One Direction) and Leroy Clampitt (Ashe, Phoebe Ryan, Justin Bieber). Her playlist while writing the album is stocked with songwriters: Stevie Nicks, Dolly Parton, The Beach Boys, Imogen Heap, Carole King, Taylor Swift, Joni Mitchell. She pulled in her friends Julia and JP — who she recently called her “musical mom ‘n dad — as co-writers, handwriting a contract to make sure they made time to finish the album together in New York this past summer. It was a more intentional album-making experience. Previously, she’d collect songs scattered over days, weeks, months until an album came together. Now, there was time to take risks and hole up in the studio with delivery food and champagne, to take to the roof when they needed to look out at the city for inspiration.

Meanwhile, she got to have a classic New York City summer after a year of quarantining with her family in Los Angeles. (She has three older sisters — Sarah, Shannon, and Cayla — who she calls her best friends.) She and Sarah, who is two-and-a-half years older, moved to Manhattan’s Financial District in June after Sabrina filmed a project in Atlanta last spring. She told herself she’d spend the summer in New York. “I just needed a change of pace in general”, she says about getting out of L.A. “But there’s few places you can go that feel as energetic. Then I realized everyone had the same idea, and my friends were like, ‘Yes summer in New York!’ She deadpans, “I thought I was being creative, I am not creative”.

The change of pace made sense. As the pandemic began last year, Sabrina was already well acquainted with grief. Her friend, the late actor Cameron Boyce, had died suddenly that past July. Then, in April 2020, Sabrina’s grandfather passed away. If you’ve been mourning people during COVID-19, you might know the complexity of the feelings, a multilayered grief that can be hard to wrap your head around.

“That’s like a part that doesn’t ever fully… she trails off. “There’s a difference between letting go of someone and knowing that one day you might have answers, and a difference in letting go of someone and knowing that you never will … Being present, that’s another thing I learned from those particular experiences of loss. If you’re not present in the moment, you just never know what you’ll be missing out on. Now, those memories I hold so close to my heart, and that’s all I can do. For the rest of my life, knowing that those people have changed me”.

“Everybody deals with it in a different way, and the way I’ve always chosen to deal with it is knowing that now I have people that are looking out for me no matter what. I’ve had that in past experiences as well, but all of it happening during such a ferocious time for everyone mentally, was not cute”, she continues. “There was nothing pretty about it and nothing I wanted to do except hide and be in a shell and cry. It’s definitely something I’m still working through”.

And then, of course, Olivia Rodrigo released her overnight hit “drivers license in January 2021, and Sabrina found herself embroiled in the storyline of the burgeoning pop singer-songwriter. Fans speculated that Sabrina was the “blonde girl in the song, which seemed to reference Olivia’s breakup with her High School Musical: The Musical: The Series co-star Joshua Bassett. Exactly two weeks later, Sabrina released a rebuttal of sorts, the pointed single “Skin”. Among some of the more skeptical lines – “Maybe you didn’t mean it, maybe blonde was the only rhyme — and the barbed ones — “don’t drive yourself insane — is another manifestation. The bridge sets a new scene: “I just hope that one day we both can laugh about it, when it’s not in our face, won’t have to dance around it”.

The song provoked mixed responses, but to Sabrina, it felt wrong to ignore the situation altogether — and to wait to release it. “I felt like in that moment, the most honest thing would be to put it out when it was accurately reflecting what was going on in my life”, she says. “Because that’s literally all I ever do is write about my life and my situations, not just my life, but the way I see the world through situations I’m experiencing, people I’m experiencing. Then it’s kind of on everyone else and what they choose to make about it. You know what I mean?

I tell her it sounds kind of similar to one way Olivia talked about “drivers license”, about how once you release a song, it’s no longer yours. It’s somewhat of a contradiction to one of the lines in “Skin — “Maybe then we could pretend there’s no gravity in the words we write — but it’s also pretty vital to being able to continue to write songs. If you’re overanalyzing every way something could be perceived or gossiped about, you might not write anything at all.

“I think a huge thing that I set out to do when I started writing my next album in general was the fact that I was like, ‘If I start getting in my head about when people hear it and what they think about it, I’m not gonna be honest, I’m genuinely just not gonna write what I actually wanna write,’ Sabrina says. “Because I’ll be considerate and think about people that I love and care about, which is good and bad at the same time … I can write about other people’s experiences, but I just don’t think I would be able to understand other people’s emotions the way I can try to understand my own. And yeah, I think there’s some truth to once you put a song out it’s not yours anymore, but I also think that there’s a lot of different truths, and I think every situation is so dependent on the situation. It changes, it varies”.

She and Olivia share a mutual admiration for Taylor Swift, an artist who has also had her music picked apart for celebrity characters and real-life inspirations. “When I think about songs that maybe I’d read about in Tiger Beat as a kid, like, ‘Oh this song’s about this person.’ Even in the moment I’d be like, ‘Oh wow, on with my day,’ Sabrina says. “It’s not the focus. I would always listen to Taylor’s songs and literally have these movies in my head of my life and the people who were in it and the way I related. That’s what I hope to do with my songs, is to be able to not have people care so much about who or why or what happened in my life — that’s a secret I’ll never tell”, she laughs, making the Gossip Girl reference. “They can conspire all they want, but they’re wasting a lot of time because it doesn’t matter”.

This idea of writing as if no one is listening ties in to what sparked this album: a long-winded, “chaotic email from an unnamed ex a couple years ago, in which he vented about their breakup using very little punctuation. The structure inspired her. Instead of a beleaguered work tool, she saw an opportunity to do some venting of her own. She began writing emails she’d never send to people, to situations.

Later, she’d look back at the emails and be shocked at how candid she was, but little lines or thoughts would stick out and become lyrics. “A lot of it came from the humor side of things. I would be reading it and being like, ‘Oh my god, that’s so terrible, how did I say that?’ she says. “Then it would turn into a song. Most of the songs that happened were me going like, ‘Oh my god that’s terrible I can’t say that,’ and then I say it, but for three minutes”.

One of those efforts is a song she labeled “intro” with an email emoji when she tweeted out part of it in August. In the video, she sits at the piano, baring some brutally self-aware lines about herself that also allude to her parents’ relationship: “Thanks to you, I can’t love right”, goes one. “I get nice guys and villainize them”. When she started writing the song, she says, she was thinking about no one ever hearing those things.

Sabrina has spent her New York summer being present, working in the studio and spending evenings with old friends and new ones, like Gossip Girl star Whitney Peak. She’ll play her friends songs from the album when they hang out — they always have requests, since Sabrina doesn’t share links, only playing them in-person. “I’m not the type of person to be with my friends like… she puts on an affected bro voice, “‘You’ve gotta listen to this new track I just wrote.’ But she’s always enjoyed sharing these parts of herself with her close friends and seeing how they interpret them for their own experiences. Recently, she played Whitney a song she was considering for the album, and the actress started “fully sobbing”. Though the album references the past and the future, it also reflects the city and the season in which Sabrina made it: “It’s been sort of a weird unexpected soundtrack to our summer”.

As the summer ends, Sabrina has a slew of projects on the horizon in addition to her album — she launched her production company At Last Productions at the start of the pandemic, and she’s producing and starring in an upcoming musical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for Netflix. She’s also working with Danielle Fishel to star in and executive produce the YA adaptation The Distance From Me To You for HBO Max. She loves a coming of age story, and sees them as evergreen: “We’re always coming of age”.

That feels true. We age, and we revisit the past, and we manifest the future. We let go of childhood a little bit in order to realize that people are human, that we make mistakes. For now, the sun is shining on a beautiful Brooklyn day. Later, she’ll head to a studio session. But first — she’s wrapping up the half-melted leftover Napoleon to take home to her sister.

Source: Teen Vogue