Sabrina Carpenter‘s new album Man’s Best Friend is full of tongue-in-cheek lyrics and lighthearted bops, but at its core, the pop star says the project is actually about something more serious: heartbreak.
In an a upcoming interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music 1 arriving Thursday (Sept. 4), the pop star opens up about creating the fun music fans hear on Man’s Best Friend — which arrived at the end of August, months after Carpenter’s breakup from Barry Keoghan — out of an emotional period of time in her life. “I think I came out of a sad situation a lot less bitter than I intended or expected to,” she begins.
“With a little bit more of the, like, ‘You know what? There’s two people involved, and this is part of growing up,’” she continues. “I don’t want to be enemies with people that I loved … I feel like it is one of those situations where, even the album starting with, ‘Oh, boy’ was sort of an eye roll to yourself being like, ‘Here we go again.’”
On “Manchild,” the Billboard Hot 100-topping “eye roll” in question, Carpenter gently makes fun of a romantic partner for being “incompetent.” The track dropped earlier this summer and served as the lead track for Man’s Best Friend, with the Grammy winner recently following it up with single “Tears,” on which she jokes about her own lowered expectations by singing about thinking men who do the bare minimum are sexy.
But while she was able to show off her signature sense of humor on Man’s Best Friend, Carpenter reminds listeners on Apple Music 1 that it was born from a time in her life where she didn’t “really have a lot of time to mope and weep” about a breakup she was experiencing. “You kind of just have to get back out there, and not even in a dating way, not even in a romantic way, but just get back out there in terms of, if you’re staying inside and you’re thinking about how everything’s going wrong, everything’s going to go wrong,” she says on Lowe’s show.
“Just because you deal with something that’s difficult and maybe really hurts you, doesn’t mean that you’re damaged, doesn’t mean you can’t do it again, doesn’t mean you can’t open yourself up,” Carpenter adds. “And I think this one was a newer heartbreak experience for me.”
The interview comes about nine months after the singer split from the actor, who she dated for about a year. Before that, the two stars had made public appearances at events such as the Met Gala, and Keoghan even starred in his then-girlfriend’s “Please Please Please” music video.
During a different interview about Man’s Best Friend, Carpenter addressed whether she feels responsible for the hate Keoghan has received in light of their breakup. “I feel pretty transparent going into any of my relationships that I write songs,” she recently told Gayle King on CBS Mornings. “And I think they’re just as down for it. I think also most of the time, they’ve been pretty flattered when they get a song written about them, good or bad.”