The latest edition of Hrishikesh Hirway's great Song Exploder podcast breaks down one of Sabrina Carpenter's multiple big pop hits this year, "Please Please Please." In the episode, the pop star revealed that that expletive-filled line in the bridge that everyone on TikTok had a field day lip-syncing to was actually something she came up with on the spot.
Carpenter and producer Jack Antonoff reflected on putting the Short n' Sweet track together after meeting at a party two weeks after she had attended his Bleachers show at Radio City Music Hall. On their first day in the studio together with co-writer Amy Allen, they wrote "Lie to Girls," the beginning of "Slim Pickins" and the majority of "Please Please Please."
"I had the lyric, 'Please, please, please,' before I even knew what I wanted the song to be," Carpenter explained, adding that the initial idea came from Antonoff playing those chorus synth chords. "It felt like the chorus was just coming out so quickly."
Bolstered by the intro guitar riff — "Any song I grew up loving has this iconic musical riff that you get so excited the second you hear that riff. You're like, 'Oh, my favourite song's about to start!'" — and inspiration from Dolly Parton's sweet delivery of harsh truths, the pop star said the song happened at "lightning speed."
"We had 'Heartbreak is one thing, my ego's another,' because that's something that I said earlier that day," she said of the bridge, with Antonoff adding that he couldn't remember the moment that she came up with the couplet's culminating "motherfucker" line.
"That melody is such a little rainbow," Carpenter explained, vocalizing, "and 'motherfucker' came out like an ad-lib. It literally just came out as we were finding the melody, because initially we were ending that melody a lot higher — until we kind of just were like, 'Let's push it! Let's see how far we can — we can start up here and end super low!' And it was so necessary for that little hick in me," she laughed.
As part of the biggest avoidance of a pre-release single sophomore slump maybe ever on the heels of "Espresso," that little hick moment will go down in history as one of the top pop sound bytes of 2024. Listen to the full Song Exploder episode below.