Sunday Music: "Please Please Please" By Sabrina Carpenter Is Smarter Than I Thought

My bad. I thought it sounded like 100 Gecs if they were Michelin 3-star bakery’d into pure pop perfection. I thought it was just commercially too cool for school, somehow too unabashedly self-aware of it’s own saccharine sweetness, and stuck in the pop music slipstream.

I’m all for empty calories, but I want to sense you’re hiding some brutally earned rejections beneath the sheen of the surface. Chappell Roan and Charli XCX hit me, I felt it straight away. But, Sabrina Carpenter, not so much.

I don’t have all the answers, I never do. But, for this edition of Sunday Music, I am ready to admit that I was very wrong about “Please Please Please,” and even if the everywhere-ness of this song had to get it stuck in my head enough times for me to finally notice, the thing that finally pushed me over the edge into an “I get it moment” came when I heard Sabrina and Jack Antonoff on Song Exploder. I’m ready to talk about it. Enjoy.

When I hear a song and I have questions about choices, it’s usually a signal to listen closer.

Sometimes, as has been the case with Sabrina Carpenter, I write the questions in my head off by saying, “Bah, it’s not for me anyway. Stay away. It’s safer.”

But in in the back of my head there’s a nagging, “That key change is so weird.” And, “How did they decide to warp that melody so it kept going down, only to have her warble out a m***********?” “Who is really making these choices?!”

And then I talk myself out of it again, thinking about how Sarah Shook did the best “M***********” already, plus, Shook is just so much more my vibe, until I walk into some normal human arena and hear that “Please Please Please” song again (and again, and again, like she’s Chappell Roan or something), and start to talk myself back into being curious about it.

Jack Antonoff and Sabrina Carpenter came onto Song Exploder to break down “Please Please Please” and personally win me over in full. They deserve a round of applause. (You should know, I stopped writing, stood up, and clapped before sitting back down to continue.)

They explain how the song is all about putting perfect against imperfect.

In layers.

The straight Linn drum machine against a live-room human drummer.

The arpeggiated Juno and Jupiter synths against the loosely arpeggiated acoustic guitar.

The jangliness of the dyad’d strings bends juxtaposed against her flawlessly stacked harmonies.

The more I listened to it, the more I’m willing to admit: this song is a masterpiece in musical tension at every level - melodically, harmonically, dynamically, frequency-ly(?), rhythmically, and even lyrically.

Wow. Bravo. And, wow.

I don’t want a million copy cat failures of this, but I do want to hear every inch of this song through the lens of the language it’s created unto itself.

“Please, Please, Please” contains the rare combination of master-level creativity and editorial arrangement decisions. You could create college courses around studying it. And, you can only make something like this if you’re schooled in the college of a musically-obsessed life.

When we’re making art, we can’t plan any of this out, and have it feel organic. Which makes for my favorite part of the Song Exploder interview. Jack and Sabrina fess up to going by whatever “felt” right, and not by what any formula dictated.

Then, only once they understood the languaging they were playing with, they were ready to move beyond feeling and into the logic of leaning in deeper and deeper.

Take this message to heart (and work): Make it feel great, then refine and align until it’s done.

This is mastery.

Apply it to anything you create.

Start with the feeling, get that right, and then reflect on how to make it even more meaningful to your audience.

(the self-aware sense of humor in this too, does anybody know if Dolly Parton has thoughts on this? It kind of feels like some of the stuff Miley Cyrus swung for previously. These post-90s Disney factory kids are such an interesting alumni legacy case study in transitioning to any form of artistry. WHAT DO YOU THINK???)