On the cover of Sabrina Carpenter’s new album, Emails I Can’t Send, the musician and actor sits on her bed in a simple black dress next to a laptop, turning toward the camera as though interrupted. If that seems a very literal interpretation of the title, it’s fully intentional—many of the lyrics for the 13 songs that make up the record actually began with emails that Carpenter would write during the pandemic as a kind of therapy, making the album by far her most intimate yet. “I wanted everything to feel a lot more simple and timeless,” says Carpenter of the direction for the record, citing her childhood inspirations—from Dolly Parton to Carole King to Carly Simon—as key influences.
While Emails I Can’t Send is, somewhat remarkably, her fifth album—the first four, which leaned more pop, were all released via Disney’s Hollywood Records, while Emails is her first outing since moving to Island Records early last year—there’s something about it that feels like a new beginning for the musician. As was the case for so many, the pandemic forced a stark reevaluation of what mattered to Carpenter—and when it came to music, that meant tapping into a frankness and candor (mostly the product of writing songs at home alone), as well as a greater sense of autonomy as she shaped the sound and aesthetic of the record.
“One thing that experience did do was that it stripped back a lot of layers of tolerating anything that’s less than real, because I didn’t really have the energy to tolerate anything that was less than genuine and authentic at that time,” she says. (Another factor in Carpenter’s willingness to let down her guard may have been the tabloid maelstrom that followed the release of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License,” the lyrics of which some interpreted as a response to her ex, fellow Disney actor Joshua Bassett, embarking on a new relationship with Carpenter.)
Where Emails I Can’t Send departs from Carpenter’s heroes from decades past, however, is in its sprinkling of very Gen Z references (from unread texts to lying to your therapist to anonymous online death threats), among more timeless, heart-on-your-sleeve elegies to lost love. It feels like the most fully realized vision of Carpenter the musician—and the most rounded portrait of Carpenter the human being—yet. “I would hope that if someone had never listened to my music before, and they listened to this album, they would leave it feeling like they know me better as a person,” she says.
Here, Carpenter tells Vogue about the unusual writing process for the album, balancing heartbreak with humor, and why she can’t wait to get back on the road and perform live.
Vogue: When did you start writing the record? Was there a clean break between the songwriting for Singular [Carpenter’s previous album] and Emails I Can’t Send?
Sabrina Carpenter: I was doing a run on Broadway [in Mean Girls] right before the pandemic, and once the shutdown happened, I sort of went into this mode of... I mean, everybody has their way of coping. Some people were like, I’m not going to do anything for however long, and I’m just going to take this time off for myself and recuperate. But for me, I was like, I’m going to start this process [of writing a new album]. I knew that it would take a long time, because I really wanted to take my time with this project in particular. I signed with a new label in the middle of the pandemic, and I think there’s so much that changes between the ages of 18 to 21, so I knew that this project would be very different. But the process kind of started there. It incorporated a lot of living life as well as it did actually working on the music—I was really writing through everything that I was experiencing.
You’ve said that in some of your previous records, there were aspects of yourself you covered up with confidence, and this record is a lot more confessional. Was there any specific turning point for you where you thought, hey, I’m going to be a bit more candid this time around?
I think I’ve always been someone that likes to change things up, and no project I’ve ever made has been the same as the one before it. But honestly, I feel like the reason I couldn’t write some of those more vulnerable, some of those more insecure, some of those more forward songs before is because I just hadn’t felt those emotions. I think when you’re younger, it’s very easy to see the world and think that you can take it on—you have all the confidence required to do that. And then once you start to get humbled by the world, it’s very easy to be like, oh, never mind, backtrack, backtrack. And that’s where these feelings started to creep in. I was worried for a second that it wasn’t the fully confident pop record that fans who have been following me for a long time might be coming to my music for. I didn’t know what to expect, to be honest, but if anything, I realized that there’s far more strength in vulnerability and insecurities, because they are the emotions that I think we’re all kind of scared to face—even if that doesn’t make them any less real.
How literal was the title? Did any of the lyrics actually originate as emails you couldn’t send?
Yeah, totally. I think the hardest thing for me has always been naming the album. I don’t know why, but I think it's just the fact that you have so many stories in one place, and you're expected to slap one word on it. That’s a lot of pressure. When I wrote the actual title track, I was [using] one of the emails that I had written to myself, and I just said out loud: “That’s the name of the album!” Then every song kind of came from that place. Every song came from those emails or messages or whatever my way of coping was at the time. I think it captures a really important time in my life.
How do you decide which aspects of your personal life to include and which to leave out, especially given the intense scrutiny about your lyrics online?
It’s funny, because I look back on songs that I wrote when I was 16 and 17. The first time I ever got sued, I wrote a song called “Sue Me.” Taking personal situations in my life and being able to turn them into art was always a way of healing myself, and also understanding those situations a bit better. And so nothing changed in that sense. I’ve always been writing from that very real place. But I’m also not naïve, and even the songs that are literally about nothing at all, I’m sure people would be able to take all kinds of things from them and run with it, because I think that’s just what people do, they love the dramatics and the theatrics of it all. But personally, I don’t ever write from a place of thinking about people hearing this, and thinking about what they might assume. Otherwise, I don’t think the songs would feel honest. I think that the whole thing behind this album was really to do with me writing those emails. I was never writing emails to myself and thinking about actually sending them, or thinking about what other people would think about them, because I really was just doing it for myself, and it was a way to cope. So I kind of tried to stick with that through the album and just write songs thinking, I can say whatever I want, because no one’s ever gonna hear this. And then, yeah, I’ll just have to throw my phone in the ocean when the album comes out. [Laughs.]
It feels like you really get a fuller picture of your personality on the record, including your sense of humor.
I do think that a lot of the time, as a person, I deflect with humor, so it was only natural that a lot of the things that I was writing about—even some of the most painful moments of my life—were just so stupid, honestly, that it made me laugh. I was able to take these situations that really hurt me and use humor to cope with them. Someone that listened to the album said, “It’s almost like your music is a romantic comedy.” It felt like a weird way to describe it at first, but I guess it makes a lot of sense. I think as a songwriter I do romanticize, but at the same time, those moments of innocence and humor are the moments that I find really special. Most of the time I think, Nobody will find this funny, I’m just doing it for myself. But I think that’s all part of making something that feels a little bit closer to me.
Now that the album has come out, how has it been, seeing your fans respond to it?
I feel like the only word that could describe it would be surreal, and just such a weight off of my shoulders. I think for this project, in particular, I had so much anxiety before releasing it. I just really didn’t know how it would be received—which is so funny, because the whole concept behind the album is these things that I never really want anyone to hear, and things that I never intended on saying to people. Having that time of my life sort held in these songs forever is as scary as it is really special. But I think the cool thing that happens when you release music, and it’s no longer yours, is that you start to see the way that people connect it to their lives, and you realize that something that you thought was such a specific memory or feeling is actually so universal, and that makes you feel a lot less lonely. It’s been so, so lovely hearing people say that to me.
Have you started thinking about how you want to bring the album to life in a live setting?
Performing live has always been the root of my love for music and a huge part of my life, but I haven’t toured for years, which is really crazy to think about. I think with this album being so special to me, it’s going to be possibly the most fun show I’ve ever been able to put on. I got to do one performance the other day for the first time, it was the day after the album came out and they knew every single word. I was so taken aback. I was just like, how? That music can connect with people like that, it’s so magical, and I hope that the tour will be kind of the same experience. I’m very excited.
Sabrina Carpenter’s Emails I Can’t Send is out now from Island Records.