Melissa Kacar

Following the release of her Grammy winning album   Short n' Sweet last summer, Sabrina Carpenter is giving us a taste of something even sweeter - five new deluxe tracks! Every single song on the standard edition of  Short n' Sweet   is pure pop perfection, the deluxe tracks only further enhance the original album. Of course, all five additions also carry through so much of Sabrina's signature charm and humor that is very present throughout all of the music she makes.  Across these five songs, she worked with all of the same collaborators as the rest of the standard edition, Amy Allen , Julian Bunetta, John Ryan, and Jack Antonoff . Short n' Sweet  was one of my favorite albums of 2024 and I've been continuously obsessed with every single song on it since it was released.  "15 Minutes" is the first of five new songs on the deluxe edition of the album, which gives the listener a glimpse into her life following the release of Short n' Sweet   and the...

Coming just a year after Short n' Sweet , Sabrina Carpenter is already back with a follow-up record and it's clear she's striking while the iron's hot. Man's Best Friend  feels like a playful extension of the persona she's been building, with a level of her signature humor and self-awareness that lies within each song. Much of the inspiration behind this album stems from her on-again-off-again relationship with her ex-boyfriend. It chronicles the emotional highs and lows she was experiencing in real time, and  Man's Best Friend  feels like it was a creative outlet born from that turbulence. It also became a space for her to experiment with sounds she hasn't explored before. Sabrina worked on the entirety of this album with her frequent collaborators, producers John Ryan and Jack Antonoff , as well as songwriter Amy Allen . Her previous releases were made with a much bigger team of songwriters and producers, but it's clear that this was a much more ...

Does it ever drive you crazy just how fast the night changes? One Direction 's fourth album, aptly titled Four , marked significant beginnings and ends for the band. In many ways it marked a new era for all five of them, as they were able to have significantly more creative freedom with the overall creation of these songs. In turn, that elevated the band's sound to something much closer to their own personal influences and life experiences.  It is the best album they made as a band, between the release of  Midnight Memories  in 2013 and  Four  in 2014, they showed such a huge leap in personal growth and were fully solidified as some of the greatest pop stars of all time. There was no one bigger than One Direction at that point in time, they fully dominated music for the five short years they were together and continue to make a lasting impact on the industry. There was nothing like it before and there will never be anything like it again. Four features quite a ...

Sabrina Carpenter 's  Fruitcake is equal parts naughty and nice - two traits that she has always embodied so well in her music. Every single song on this EP is so much fun to listen to, I absolutely love it. It has been so long since there was a really great original holiday album like this, I can truly see so many of these songs becoming annual Christmas classics.  This EP is full of glittering and cheeky holiday anthems that fit really well into the rest of Sabrina's discography. It is especially akin to emails i can't send and Short n' Sweet , which are her two best albums. So much of her personality and charm is all over this music much in the same way as those two albums. Fruitcake features six songs, five of them are original holiday tracks that she wrote with her frequent collaborators; John Ryan, Steph Jones, Amy Allen , and Julien Bunetta. The closing song on the EP is called "white xmas", a beautiful rendition of the holiday classic which also inte...

"Don't Smile" closes out Sabrina Carpenter 's Short n' Sweet on a lush, understated note, which beautifully contrasts some of the more playful energy that made up so much of the rest of the album. It's a glittery, jazzy slow burn that is so full of emotion. This is such a refreshing sound for Sabrina to be experimenting with, especially as it allows her vocal range to shine so effortlessly.  I often think of it as if it were the song rolling at the ending credits of this album, fading out as the metaphorical party ends. On this song she takes the common phrase "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened" and reverses it to "Don't smile because it happened, baby, cry because it's over".  In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, she opened up about the inspiration behind the song; "That title is so... it's on every Pinterest board, on every sewn pillow, but the opposite; don't cry because it...