How Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Please Please Please’ and Two Other Songs Were Written in One Day

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music If a genetic engineer — or a version of AI way better than the ones we’ve got now — could conjure a perfect song of the summer, there’s a good chance it would sound a lot like Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso”: frothy, effervescent, instantly identifiable and as catchy as poison oak.

It even opens with a tinny-sounding intro, as if it were coming out of a tiny speaker on the beach. But make no mistake: It’s a very sophisticated song from very sophisticated hitmakers.

In fact, if there’s one thing Sabrina Carpenter’s collaborators constantly mention when they’re talking about Carpenter, apart from her all-around awesomeness, it’s her work ethic. “It’s unlike anybody I’ve ever seen,” says Steph Jones, her longtime co-writer, who has worked on five of Carpenter’s six albums. “She’ll be texting me before a session, ‘Are you almost here?,’ and I’m like, ‘You’re 10 minutes early!’ She’ll have been working at a [film or TV] set since 4 a.m., and she’s early for the writing session.” Thus, it was not out of character that, during a break from her stint opening Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour,” Carpenter gathered Jones and collaborators Amy Allen and Julian Bunetta at a studio in France. “This is so her: She had 12 days off from ‘The Eras Tour,’ and she wanted to spend nine of them writing,” Jones marvels. “The studio is this really beautiful place, just outside Paris, with sleeping areas upstairs so we could work till super late — that’s where the line ‘I’m working late/’Cos I’m a singer’ came from.” Not surprisingly, the nonsense hook line, “That’s that me, espresso,” came about spontaneously.