Who Wrote Sabrina Carpenter’s Songs of the Summer? That Would Be Amy Allen

This summer, Sabrina Carpenter became one of the biggest pop stars to grace the radio due to her wildly popular songs “Espresso” and “Please Please Please.” There was a lyrical mastermind behind those two songs by the name of Amy Allen, who got her first big hit with Halsey five years ago. Since then, she’s brought an interesting idiosyncrasy to pop music that the genre hasn’t seen in a while.

Allen is credited on every song on Carpenter’s new album, Short N’ Sweet. She had a hand in the biggest songs of the summer, and essentially wrote the soundtrack to the Gen Z gender divide. Pop has long been about surface-level imagery, especially for female pop stars. Think back to summer hits of the early 2000s, Katy Perry and Kesha, among others. Those lyrics plodded along, thunking heavily from our car speakers as we drove on the highway with the windows down.

“Espresso,” however, leaves us singing along to a sigh, as Spencer Kornhaber wrote in The Atlantic. Isn’t that sweet / I guess so, sings Carpenter, giving listeners something new in their pop music—sarcasm, exasperation, and a general sense of being done with men. Essentially, Amy Allen as songwriter and Sabrina Carpenter as performer have tapped into what it means to be “young, female, straight, and single in 2024,” as Kornhaber writes.

[RELATED: 3 of the Most Buzzy Songs on Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Short n’ Sweet’ That Are Sure to Have Fans Talking]

Amy Allen and Sabrina Carpenter Add a Unique Voice to Pop Music

“Five years ago, I would have never thought it was OK,” Amy Allen said in a profile with the New York Times, referring to her clever turns of phrase in “Espresso” and “Please Please Please.” Phrases like That’s that me espresso, which stumped a lot of linguists when the song first dropped.

“Now I feel scared of generic things that sound like No. 1s,” she continued, adding “Listeners are just getting smarter and smarter now. 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.”

For Allen, the idiosyncratic elements of her writing really started working when she met Sabrina Carpenter. Allen is “militant” about her work, as she told the NYT, and writes unique pop phrases and verses that “would be impossible to write in a session and pitch to an artist,” she added.

“When I think back on it, it’s weird, because Dolly [Parton] is so much personality and quirkiness and jokes — same with John Prine,” said Allen of her songwriting inspirations. “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.”

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