Sabrina Carpenter is steadily unpacking the nuance behind her latest studio effort, “Man’s Best Friend.” In conversation with Mel Ottenberg for Interview, Carpenter addressed the backlash she received when she first shared the official cover art for the record.
“You can be sure that anything I do and say has a little bit of a wink to it,” Carpenter said of the album’s title and its matching imagery — a shot of her on hands and knees, being dragged by her blonde hair. “If I’m being completely transparent, I don’t do anything anticipating what the reaction will be. I only do things that speak to me, that feel right, and make sense when you hear the music. When I came up with the imaging for it, it was so clear to me what it meant. So the reaction is fascinating to me. You just watch it unravel and go, ‘Wow.’”
Of the record, Carpenter continued, “there’s a lot of nuance to this and I’m not naive to that.” Honing in on the album’s central themes, she described the project to be about “loss and heartbreak and celebration and trying to navigate my life as a young woman — it’s not so much like I’m above it all, but I’m not beneath it, either.”
Ottenberg brings up the idea that the backlash Carpenter received was due to her appearing “submissive” on the cover art.
“Submission is both dominant and submissive,” she responds. “It really depends on what your intentions are and what you want, and what you crave, and what you need. The image, the way I see it, is a metaphor, but I’m sure that other people are like, ‘Dang, she’s a sub?’”
Elsewhere in the piece, Carpenter discusses recording the album in London, New York and Los Angeles, highlighting the set’s main collaborators — Jack Antonoff, John Ryan and Amy Allen.
“It was just the four of us and a lot of fireplaces,” she said. “There was a constant smell of smoke in the air and I was in a really delirious state, almost. But a lot of it ended up being exactly how I felt, which was sort of hugged and thrown around in my head. But the production is some of my favorite ever, and it’s obviously all because of Jack and John. They’re both masters of what they do. If you listen to the instrumentals on their own, it’s another album, so I’m really excited about that as well.”
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