Superproducer and Bleachers frontman Jack Antonoff's influence has been a touchstone of pop music commentary for years now, with him repeatedly working on multiple albums with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and Lorde, among others. Antonoff stands accused by, uh, many, of flattening these singer-songwriters' sounds with his monotonous, gently-whirring-traffic approach to filling songs out with glimmer-bloop keyboards.
However, Sabrina Carpenter has a Short n' Sweet message for his detractors: "Fuck them all."
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the pint-sized pop star revealed that Antonoff worked on "about half" of her upcoming fifth album, including latest single "Please Please Please."
"I think he's one of the most talented people I've ever met," Carpenter said. "When he's in a room, he's able to literally touch every instrument in the room and make it sound magical. He also works very fast, which I really appreciate because I work very fast."
She remembers having initially met Antonoff outside of a comedy club in New York City a few years ago. "I was peeing my pants because I wanted to work with him for my whole life," the artist told journalist Waiss Aramesh. "After that, we, luckily enough, became friends; personalities meshed, and it was only a matter of time. He heard some of the stuff that I was working on for this album, and we just started to make magic."
Carpenter called her time collaborating with the producer "some of the best days of my life," finding ease in combining what she and other collaborators had created with Antonoff's work. "At first, I was wondering if it was separate projects or if it felt like one, and then, as everything came together, I was like, 'This is one album.'"
Antonoff told the publication, "I think that the aesthetic of not giving a fuck or the aesthetic of telling it like it is has become so popular that there's a lot of people who pander to that concept rather than are that concept. Sabrina actually is."
"There's like an Olivia Newton feeling, there's a Dolly feeling, there's an incredibly super modern pop feeling," he added of "Please Please Please," which is now the soundtrack to every single video on TikTok. "The little vocal runs she does are so bizarre and unique — they're doing this really odd, classic, almost yodel-y country thing. She's becoming one of the biggest young pop stars, and that song is such a statement of expressing yourself, not just lyrically, but sonically."