Review of “Short n’ Sweet” by Sabrina Carpenter: Short, sweet and clever

“I’m stupid, but I’m smart,” sings Sabrina Carpenter in “Lie to Girls,” a song from her sixth studio album. Short and sweet. The line is a key phrase for the character the singer plays across the album’s 12 tracks: a girl-next-door pursued by clueless guys (“A boy who’s pumped up and nice/Can’t find his ass to save my life,” she quips on “Slim Pickins”), the kind of guys you might dismiss as “normal” before discovering she has something unexpected to say. “Lie to Girls” offers a slyly astute commentary on the pointlessness of puffing yourself up, because women, when they’re truly interested in them, are happy to make excuses for their inadequacies.

On Good Graces, Carpenter presents himself as someone who tends to swing from admiration to hatred. This emotional volatility is reflected in the album’s music, which switches between a wide range of genres and styles throughout its 36-minute runtime, never lingering on one for too long. “Lie to Girls” and “Slim Pickins” lean toward lush folk-pop, while “Bed Chem” has a hint of G-funk in its synth whistling and “Espresso,” of course, offers a disco-tinged groove.

Carpenter and her collaborators, which include Jack Antonoff on a third of the songs, deftly integrate an evolving web of sound to create a nearly seamless pop experience. Despite the buzzing pop-punk imitation of the album’s opening track, “Taste,” Carpenter is more interested in acoustic styles Short and sweet: Lightly plucked guitar sounds underline the elegant “Please Please Please” and “Coincidence”, which is subtly reminiscent of “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell.

The album’s cohesion is also largely down to Carpenter’s confidence on the mic. The singer turns potentially cumbersome lines like “This boy didn’t even know/The difference between ‘there’, ‘their’, and ‘they are'” into loose, effortless snippets of dialogue. And the choruses and verses meld together in a way that belies the songs’ strict pop structures.

Carpenter’s acceptance of her sexuality through Short and sweet is refreshingly open-hearted rather than predictably coy. In “Taste,” she makes candid references to “the whole package” and “tongue-in-cheek images,” and she anticipates our own preconceptions about a woman’s sexual empowerment when she advises us not to “confuse her niceness with naivety” in “Good Graces.”

At a time when that autonomy is under attack, it seems downright subversive that Carpenter recasts “Juno,” a song about maybe being okay with having her partner’s baby, as a treatise on how “fucking awesome” she is. “I’m sorry if you feel objectified… give it to me, baby,” Carpenter explains—“it” means both a good time and (of course, why not) a child. These surprising flashes of wit make the skillfully crafted Short and sweet much more than just a polished piece of pop.