2024: Please, Please, Please - Sabrina Carpenter

Looking back at 30 years of music | Sabrina Carpenter

I’ve spent so much of this year listening to all the releases from the last 30 years that I’ve been writing about that it seems I’ve missed out on a lot the albums and releases from 2024 as they’ve been coming out.

I’ve seen a lot of writers and critics that I read and respect talking online about how many great albums have been released this year, but so many of them have passed me by.

One release that was impossible to miss, though, was Sabrina Carpenter’s huge hit single Espresso. This song has been everywhere this year. I’ve heard it countless times in shops, on the television, in clips on the internet, from passing car windows and just about anywhere else that you can think of hearing music in a public space.

When the music video went viral on Twitter, some fans were claiming that Carpenter had created a new genre that somewhere between funk, disco and pop with the song, which is just absolutely not true. Not only has the blend of funk, disco and pop never been that far away from the charts, it’s not even the first time Sabrina Carpenter has put these elements together in a track.

Her 2023 single Feather, from the emails i can’t send fwd album, is another throwback track which is propelled by a steady, grooving and funky bass line and brings in disco strings and has got an incredible melody that utilises both the breathy depths of Carpenter’s range and the angelic heights of her register.

And my favourite of all of her songs is the second single from this year’s album Short n Sweet, Please, Please, Please.

I think you can draw a direct line from George McRae’s 1974 classic Rock Your Baby - widely considered the first disco song - and Carpenter’s Please, Please, Please. Both have got an understated but steady rhythm and beat, both have got a restrained vocal which still allows plenty of room for the singer to stretch out and show off their quality, and both have got a real dreamy, dreamlike quality.

Despite its modern sound, Please, Please, Please has got such a 70’s sensibility. The vocal melody wouldn’t really sound out of place somewhere on the soundtrack to Grease and the sound strikes a perfect balance somewhere between modernity and vintage. The synths and guitars recall a million other tracks from the golden age of disco but also have a swagger and consistency that is all their own.

Once again on this song, Carpenter utilises the full breadth of her voice. My girlfriend described the lowest parts of the chorus as “scratching an itch in her brain”, which perfectly describes just how satisfying that slide down the scale is.

My favourite rendition of the song contains an update on that low line in the chorus, switching out the expletive line “I beg you don’t embarrass me motherfucker” with the much more interesting “I beg you don’t embarrass me like the others” for the BBC audience. In such a simple switch, there is so much depth added to the meaning of the line, and reflects the depth of the vocal there.

Sabrina Carpenter hasn’t invented disco pop, but she is doing it better than anyone else has done in a very long time.

---

Notable album releases

Beyonce - Cowboy Carter

Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft

Charlie XCX - Brat

The Cure - Songs of a Lost World

Hurray for the Riff Raff - The Past is Still Alive

The Last Dinner Party - Prelude to Ecstasy

The Lemon Twigs - A Dream is All We Know

Taylor Swift - The Tortured Poets Department

Palaye Royale - Death or Glory

Willie Nelson - The Border

---

I caught the live debut of Willie Nelson’s title song The Border this year at his 4th July Picnic in Camden, NJ. Seeing Willie Nelson live, and from so close to the front, was one of the high thrills of a lifetime and the song was a really moving addition to his set. In a show filled with such all time classics as Whiskey River, Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground, On the Road Again, Georgia On My Mind and Help Me Make It Through the Night, The Border stood up alongside them and stood out as a highlight.

Seeing Willie Nelson was so exciting that it even eclipsed seeing Bob Dylan on the same day, for me, which is not something that has ever happened to me before.

And whilst all the connections between Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan are obvious, I can’t help but find some between Bob Dylan and Sabrina Carpenter in the unlikeliest of places.

Their music doesn’t have much in common, but their music videos are not a million miles away from one another. Carpenter’s Feather contains a cartoonish level of blood and violence that wouldn’t have been out of place in Dylan’s videos for 2009’s Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ or Duquesne Whistle from Tempest. In fact, in both the video for Feather and Duquesne Whistle, the lead singers step over the prone body of a character who has been on the receiving end of a beat down.

The violence continues into Carpenter’s Please, Please, Please video and the 70’s crime-thriller filter feels like a slight update on Dylan’s love-tangled 2015 The Night We Called It a Day noir. It doesn’t stop there, though - with Carpenter in prison for parts of the video, you could also make a connection with Dylan’s fantastic Tight Connection to My Heart music video from the 1980s. Both great synth-pop tracks, both great music videos.

Not that they ever will, but any collaboration between the two would surely throw up an interesting, if bloody, music video.

---

That’s a wrap for this “Looking back at 30 years of music” series. I set out to explore the music from this time period over the last 30 weeks in anticipation of my 30th birthday, which is coming up on Tuesday.

I might take a week away from writing next week - although maybe not, we’ll see - but will be back before long with some more instalments about music that has been important to me over the years, but which hasn’t exclusively come out since 1994.

I’m planning to write about releases from Tony Joe White and Millie Jackson, Ray Charles and Jose Feliciano, Bobby Womack, Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley plus plenty of others. I’ll probably go back and add a few albums in that I missed over the course of this series from people like Tobias Jesso Jr, The Lemon Twigs, Bettye LaVette and Ángela Aguilar, as well. And finally, I also want to get into the Together Through Live series that I threatened a while back, looking at all the live releases since 1994, including ones from Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell.

Stick around, baby, we’re not through
Don’t look for me, I’ll see you
When the night comes falling from the sky