Credit: The New York Times
Some well-played profanity can make a pop song sizzle.
But few expletives in recent memory have had the potentially career-altering crackle of the one let fly by Sabrina Carpenter, a former Disney Channel star, on Please Please Please, her Dolly Parton-meets-Abba confection that became a surprise No. 1 hit this summer.
"Heartbreak is one thing, my ego's another," Carpenter flutters, before a plea to a new fling: "I beg you, don't embarrass me, little sucker" -- except instead of little sucker (the radio edit), she rhymes an unprintable four-syllable term of tongue-in-cheek endearment, dropping her voice low and lathering it in a knowing hillbilly sass.
Carpenter sells it. But she had help -- a playful, foul-mouthed voice in her ear insisting that a pop star these days might as well-run Dolly through a TikTok-friendly system update or sneak a Dada phrase like "that's that me espresso" into the cultural lexicon.
"Five years ago, I would have never thought it was OK," said Amy Allen, the hit songwriter credited on Please Please Please, along with "Espresso" and every other track on Carpenter's breakout album, Short n' Sweet, which debuted atop the Billboard chart this week. But Top 40, in no small part thanks to Allen, is entering a much-needed era of quirk, in which regular jolts of the unexpected are cutting through a sludge of smooth-brained content.
"Now I feel scared of generic things that sound like No. 1s," said Allen, 32, who landed her first chart-topping hit, "Without Me" by Halsey, five years ago. "Listeners are just getting smarter and smarter now," she added. "They want something to be odd, something to be off, something to be really catchy and unexpected about a lyric or melody. The days of really polished pop are shifting out."
Now a fixture in pop's A-list backrooms after years of hustling in every corner of the industry maze, Allen would know.
She has been a small-town aspirant in the coffeehouses and barrooms of Windham, Maine; a Boston College nursing student and unsuccessful contestant on The Voice; a Berklee College of Music transfer fronting a pop-rock band in search of a record deal; a major label prospect as a solo performer; and today, an indie singer-songwriter releasing an eponymous debut album herself on Friday.
Along the way, Allen has become the tone-setting, behind-the-scenes pop writer of the moment, aiming to join a lineage with varying degrees of staying power, name recognition and sonic trademark that includes Max Martin, Dr. Luke, Esther Dean, Sia, The-Dream, Benny Blanco, Julia Michaels and many more who never peeked out from the shadows.
In relative anonymity, Allen wrote songs for and with Selena Gomez, Lizzo, Olivia Rodrigo, Justin Timberlake, Shawn Mendes and others, winning an album of the year Grammy for her work on Harry's House by Harry Styles, and earning a nomination for songwriter of the year, for tracks with King Princess and Charli XCX, at the 2023 ceremony. (The award went to Tobias Jesso Jr., another indie singer-songwriter turned hitmaker.)
Allen's musical fingerprints, along with her public profile, had stayed nearly unseen until they piled into an unmistakable, welcome smudge on mainstream music's surface sheen: Starter hits for Carpenter ("Feather") and Tate McCrae ("10:35" with Tiësto) were sugary with subtle bite ("Your signals are mixed, you act like a bitch/you fit every stereotype, 'Send a pic'"). Those made room for stranger, vowel-heavy breakthroughs, as McCrae's Greedy, and Carpenter's Espresso and Please Please Please, made down-the-middle (notably white) pop fizzy again.
"She is an obvious master of pop, but her drive is to make something that's a little bit more unique, always," said Ethan Gruska, a songwriter and producer who has worked with Allen on her solo music. "What's cool is that sometimes in the sphere of Top 40 pop, if that's your instinct, people feel the need to dumb it down. But she just walks in and she does her instinct."
Gruska highlighted Allen's sense of "melodic contour" -- the way she weaves unexpected notes and jumped intervals into something with an "unusual shape" -- citing the swerve of that "Please Please Please" chorus. "That's such an Amy melody," he said. "Because Amy's in the room, those kinds of shapes are allowed."
Allen's two professional modes are separate but complementary. Inspired by the 90s girls -- Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette, Melissa Etheridge -- and also Cocteau Twins and Edie Brickell, Allen tends to write her own moody songs longhand in a notebook as poems, starting with the verse. As a hired gun, she is more economical, usually typing into an iPhone and going chorus-first (because otherwise what's the point?).
But both kinds of collaborative songwriting often start with the same nonmusical skill: gossiping about each other's personal lives, or in industry parlance, being "good in the room."
At a recent low-key writing session at a friend's home studio after a morning walk on the Venice Boardwalk, Allen -- who is petite but with alpha presence, voluble and disarmingly conspiratorial -- was deciding between two strands of romantic turmoil and intrigue in her extended universe as potential topics.
She had her barefoot producer and engineer, Jake Weinberg, play Twelve Thirty by the Mamas & the Papas as vibe inspiration and pulled up a rough a cappella Voice Memo she had sketched in the car.
"It's either really cool or it sucks," she said -- a songwriter's in-the-moment mantra.
As the pair found chords to match the melody, Allen quickly filled in the rest of the lyrics, landing on a run-on hook with indie-folk curlicues and pop punch. Within two hours, it was being recorded.
"As self-deprecating as she likes to be, it's never been a struggle," Weinberg said. "We've never been stuck -- ever. The train is moving. And there's not really any anxiety, which is so awesome."
Jack Antonoff, the songwriter and producer who worked on Carpenter's album with Allen, called her "just unfazed and self-possessed," egoless in pursuit of a song. "There's something kind of stoic about her," he said. (Allen, who prefers to treat songwriting as a 9-to-5, in defiance of the industry-standard all-night sessions, said: "I also get 'militant' a lot.")
Another collaborator on Carpenter's album, Julia Michaels, recalled Allen lighting up in the studio when she really liked something, "moving her cute little hips around," and invoked the character Penny Lane from "Almost Famous" "in terms of how beautiful and carefree and full of life she is."
At the same time, said Michaels, a songwriter whose own studio hot streak led to a run as a major-label pop star, "she's a very sturdy and capable grown woman. I have more faith in Amy navigating this moment than I would for myself."
That Allen was afforded the opportunity to write an entire album alongside Carpenter was not a given, and her rise as a songwriter in many ways reflects the recent arc of her profession.
At first, Allen succeeded via pitch songs -- demos written and recorded with producers that were then shopped around to various acts who could cut their own version. "I wasn't in the room with artists at all," she said. Much of the job was to stay invisible, allowing existing pop star narratives to sell the song to fans.
But the success of tracks like Selena Gomez's Back to You, Allen's first Top 40 hit, and Halsey's "Without Me" moved Allen into an upper echelon as more pop stars were deciding that they should have a hand in their hitmaking. Allen cites the continued demystification of pop songwriting via streaming, stan culture and social media -- all of which yank back the curtain -- and the pandemic, which pulled acts off the road (cutting off an income stream in the process).
Spending time in the studio with Mendes and Styles "changed the game for me in terms of what it means to be a songwriter and how much of it is being a student of the artist that you're working with," Allen said. "There's so much more longevity in doing it with the artist and getting to figure out how to tell their story while you're also telling your own. And obviously if it's something that they've helped create, then they're more excited to promote it."
The conversational specificity of her work with Carpenter could only have come from a real bond sharpened over time, the enabling that occurs between friends to be more and more idiosyncratically oneself.
The results, like Please Please Please, are phrasings with an off-kilter stickiness -- "I might let you make me Juno," goes another chorus, alluding to the nearly 20-year-old movie about a teen pregnancy -- that "would be impossible to write in a session and pitch to an artist," Allen said.
"When I think back on it, it's weird, because Dolly is so much personality and quirkiness and jokes -- same with John Prine," she added. "So many of my influences have done that, and I've never really implemented it until meeting Sabrina. I think it took the right artist to see how they executed."
Still, Allen remains disciplined, diplomatic and even a little paranoid about the "minefield" of claiming credit for songs, or even specific melodic or lyrical hooks. She said she couldn't remember who among the four credited writers of Espresso -- including Carpenter, Julian Bunetta and Steph Jones -- came up with the money line: "say you can't sleep/baby, I know/that's that me espresso."
"No clue," Allen repeated with expletives. "It was just banter line after banter line in the room, people yelling things out. I wish I had a Voice Memo of that one."
Not every song that makes it out of the room is a hit. Despite her heat, the reception to Allen's work on the comeback album from Justin Timberlake, "Everything I Thought It Was," was tepid, and its singles failed to spark. "Everything has to line up perfectly for something to be a hit," Allen said. "So much of it is out of your hands."
She said that she has probably averaged writing seven songs per week every week for the last seven years. "And we're talking about big songs I've had -- that's like, what, six?" Allen said. "The batting average ain't strong. But that's enough to have a career."
It also takes the pressure off Allen's own work as an artist, a personal outlet that now allows her to "shake off the big scary pop music machine without having to compete in any way." As a result, her solo debut, some five years in the making, is without big hooks or quippy lyrics, opting for an alternative singer-songwriter palette, like Phoebe Bridgers doing a sparer "Folklore."
"It's really good for my brain to work at those two different speeds," Allen said. "I think taking on so much of other people's emotional things every day, all the time, I almost forget I have my own things to work through."
Allen is also aware of the risks of representing a trend cycle, noting that, outside of Diane Warren, "there's not a lot of women that have a ton of longevity as songwriters, which is really upsetting," she said. "I will do everything in my power to break that stereotype."
"I would definitely never claim to have a superpower, but if I were to say that I had something that is really helpful, it's that my stylized thing is pretty subtle," Allen added. "I don't feel like there's ever going to come a time when people are listening to a bunch of different genres on the radio and they're like, 'Oh, another Amy Allen song.'"
She is dabbling in rap, R&B and even Latin music sessions, and her name popped up recently in the credits for the new album by Koe Wetzel, a country-rock singer with Top 40 potential. There are only a few rooms left to break into.
"I'm waiting for Beyoncé and Adele to hit me up, but like, I'm getting a lot of actors who want to sing," Allen said. "Maybe Rihanna will decide to do an album and, you know, 'Espresso' is on her mind."