By: Selena Quijandria
There’s multiple ways for you to know who Sabrina Carpenter is. Maybe you know her from her acting credits or her music career. Anyone who didn’t know her from either of these things might know her from what was the Internet’s favorite rumored love triangle: pop rock superstar Olivia Rodrigo (the girl who was hurt), actor/singer Joshua Bassett (the guy who left Olivia) and Carpenter (the one he left Olivia for).
Unfortunately for Carpenter, this left her being seen as “the other woman,” and she received an unimaginable amount of hate. People sent her death threats, harassing her relentlessly online. This is only one of the things she sings about in her new album, “emails i can’t send.” While I love the whole album itself, I wanted to take a closer look at the first song on the track, which shares the same name as the title.
The title of the album is exactly what it is. Every song on the album stems from emails she wrote that she never intended for anyone to ever see. She never sent these emails. Eventually, she turned them into songs, which goes to show how cathartic writing and music can be. Telling people that they hurt us is incredibly hard, especially when it comes to people who you loved and trusted. But this is a healing process, and the process doesn’t start off easy.
Many songs today are romantic. It’s just the way it is. There’s nothing wrong with romance. The majority of the album has to do with heartbreak over an ex-significant other. But a person can go through so many other things that result in equally powerful feelings, which is seen in this album. She’s dealt with intense bullying and harassment. She’s dealt with being let down by someone she looked up to, which she sings about in the title track.
In the title track, she sings about how she had looked up to her father. After finding out about how he hurt her mother, her view on relationships was ruined. She can’t help but think negatively of the guys she meets. After all, how is it easy to let someone into your heart after finding out something like that?
She questions why he did this and blames him for how she views relationships. She softly sings this, but you can clearly hear the pain in her voice as she pleads with her father to fix what he ruined. She explained that this song is about how someone close to her let her down and that when you start to think of why you are the way that you are, it’s “a sad realization to come to.” This level of vulnerability is seen all throughout the album. Music is a way for people to channel their pain, and this album is all about Carpenter doing that.
The title track is the only one that has to do with this topic, but it’s arguably one of the most emotional songs on the album. It’s only her and the piano, but that’s all that’s needed. She loves him but at the same time can’t stand to be around him. It’s a different type of pain that she has been able to put into words and share with the world.
We all have our own emails that we might be too afraid to send. We might not have ever written them down yet, but they’re inside us. Turning them into a hit album and sharing them doesn’t have to be the way to go about it, but following Carpenter’s example of writing down everything we’re feeling, the good and the bad, the pain and the beauty, could help us with whatever we’re going through.