
Bed Chem
Sabrina Carpenter
·
20242024
Some people kill their nemeses with kindness; Sabrina Carpenter, the breakout pop star of summer 2024, takes the opposite tack, shooting withering one-liners at loser exes via featherlight melodies, a wink and a smile. The former Disney Channel star began her music career at age 15 with her 2014 debut single “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” Now 25, the singer-songwriter is making the catchiest, funniest, and most honest music of her career at a moment when all the world’s watching. But on songs like “Please Please Please,” on which she begs her boyfriend not to embarrass her (again), she’s poking fun at herself, too. “A lot of what I really love about this album is the accountability,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I will call myself out just as much as I will call out someone else.”
It’s not because Carpenter’s “vertically challenged,” as she puts it, that she named her sixth album Short n’ Sweet. “I thought about some of these relationships, how some of them were the shortest I’ve ever had and they affected me the most,” she tells Lowe. “And I thought about the way that I respond to situations: Sometimes it is very nice, and sometimes it’s not very nice.” Hence songs like “Dumb & Poetic,” a gentle acoustic ballad that’s also a blistering takedown of a guy who masks his sleazy tendencies with therapy buzzwords and a highbrow record collection, or the twangy, hilarious “Slim Pickins,” on which she croons: “Jesus, what’s a girl to do?/This boy doesn’t even know the difference between there, their, and they are/Yet he’s naked in my room.”
With good humor and good taste (channeling Rilo Kiley here, Kacey Musgraves there, and on “Sharpest Tool,” a bit of The Postal Service), Carpenter reframes heartbreak through the lens of life’s absurdity. “When you’re at this point in your life where you’re almost at your wits’ end, everything is funny,” Carpenter tells Lowe. “So much of this album was made in the moments where there was something that I just couldn’t stop laughing about. And I was like, well, that might as well just be a whole song.”
Carpenter wrote a good deal of the album on an 11-day trip to a tiny town in rural France, where the isolation unlocked her brutally honest side, resulting in unprecedentedly vulnerable music and one song she readily admits shouldn’t work on paper but hits anyway: “Espresso,” the song that catapulted her career with four delightfully strange-sounding words: “That’s that me espresso.” “There really are no rules to the things you say,” she tells Lowe on the songwriting process. “You’re just like, what sounds awesome? What feels awesome? And what gets the story across, whatever story that is?” Still, she’s painted herself in a bit of a corner when it comes to placing an order at coffee shops worldwide: “They’re just waiting for me to say it,” she laughs. “And I’m like, ‘Tea.’”
Lyrics
[Verse 1]
I was in a sheer dress the day that we met
We were both in a rush, we talked for a sec
Your friend hit me up so we could connect
And what are the odds? You send me a text
And now the next thing I know, I'm like
Manifest that you're oversized
I digress, got me scrollin' like
Out of breath, got me goin' like
[Pre-Chorus]
Ooh (Ah)
Who's the cute boy with the white jacket and the thick accent? Like
Ooh (Ah)
Maybe it's all in my head
[Chorus]
But I bеt we'd have really good bеd chem
How you pick me up, pull 'em down, turn me 'round
Oh, it just makes sense
How you talk so sweet when you're doin' bad things
That's bed (Bed) chem (Chem)
How you're lookin' at me, yeah, I know what that means
And I'm obsessed
Are you free next week?
I bet we'd have really good
[Verse 2]
Come right on me, I mean camaraderie
Said you're not in my time zone, but you wanna be
Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?
See it in my mind, let's fulfill the prophecy
[Pre-Chorus]
Ooh (Ah)
Who's the cute guy with the wide, blue eyes and the big bad mm? Like
Ooh (Ah)
I know I sound a bit redundant
[Chorus]
But I bet we'd have really good bed chem
How you pick me up, pull 'em down, turn me 'round
Oh, it just makes sense (Oh, it just makes sense)
How you talk so sweet when you're doin' bad things (Bad)
That's bed chem (Oh, that's bed chem)
How you're lookin' at me, yeah, I know what that means
And I'm obsessed (So obsessed)
Are you free next week?
I bet we'd have really good (Bed chem)
[Bridge]
And I bet we'd both arrive at the same time (Bed chem)
And I bet the thermostat's set at six-nine (Bed-bed ch-chem)
And I bet it's even better than in my head (My)
[Chorus]
How you pick me up, pull 'em down, turn me 'round (Ooh)
Oh, it just makes sense (Oh, it just makes sense)
How you talk so sweet when you're doin' bad things
That's bed chem (Oh, that's bed chem)
How you're lookin' at me, yeah, I know what that means
And I'm obsessed (So obsessed)
Are you free next week? (Are you free next week?)
I bet we'd have really good
[Outro]
Ha (Make me go), ha
No-no-no
Ha (Make me go), ha
No-no-no, no, oh no, oh
Ha (Make me go), ha (Yeah, yeah)
No-no-no, oh
Ha (Make me go), ha
Ooh, oh, baby
(A little fade-out?)