Amy Allen just scored a Grammy nomination for Songwriter of the Year after co-writing every song on Sabrina Carpenter‘s Short n’ Sweet — and she owes her entire career to the vampire baby in one of the Twilight movies. As a nursing student at Boston College, she discovered a major flaw in her career plan during that baby’s gory birth scene. “I blacked out in the movie theater cause I, like, couldn’t see blood,” she says in the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, “which I didn’t know until I was already at school for nursing, which was the biggest oversight of all time.”
She ended up transferring to the nearby Berklee College of Music, where she studied songwriting. Her initial goal was to be a recording artist, but she decided to double down on her writing talent instead, working with artists from Selena Gomez to Harry Styles before connecting with Carpenter. But she’s also fulfilled her original dream, releasing a strong solo album, Amy Allen, in September. In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, she talks about her work with Carpenter and other artists, the art of pop songwriting, and much more. Some highlights follow; to hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.
She knew Carpenter was destined for superstardom the first time they met. “It’s easy to meet somebody and be like, Oh, I think they have it in them,” she says. “It’s really hard to find somebody and be like, Oh, undoubtedly, you are the thing. Some people just have it.”
Writing “Please Please Please” in Electric Lady Studios with Jack Antonoff and Carpenter is a stand-out memory. “I remember it was snowing that day. The fearlessness of modulating [keys] in that song and then the lyric content of ‘don’t embarrass me, motherfucker’ — it was just such a joy to help craft that one. It’s such a gift to be able to work with an artist that not only is daring enough to go in all those places, like musicality-wise with the modulation, and how different that song really is for pop radio. It’s pretty unique for this moment in time with how musical it is. And then also lyrically — I’d never heard a song really talk about that content in that way and be that witty, but also heartfelt. And then for her to be able to execute the high notes of that, and then the low notes on ‘motherfucker.’
Working with Justin Timberlake on his most recent album was a full-circle moment for Allen. “My idea of pop music really is formed by Justin and ‘NSync and the music of my childhood… Getting to be with him in real time and see how he works, somebody that I’ve learned so much of my own pop sensibilities from, like actually being like two feet away from me, bouncing ideas back and forth was just incredible.”
Allen believes the general public is more open than ever to “weird” pop songs. “If the weird scares you a little bit, it’s probably right,” she says. “If the musicality of it feels like it’s pushing a lot of doors open, [and] you feel a little bit nervous to do so — it’s probably the right direction… The general public is not only ready for something really out of the box, but they’re wanting it and they’re craving it now.”
Allen says her core sensibilities are a combination of canonic older music and early-aughts pop. “I had this interesting culmination in my brain of Dolly and Petty and John Prine and so many greats,” she says, “clashing and coming into this weird, like, congruent amalgamation of Britney and Backstreet Boys.”
Allen writes songs very differently for herself. “When I’m writing with an artist or for another artist, I just focus on crafting the chorus,” she says, “and really making a chorus feel like it stands alone and it could be on pop radio… When I’m writing for myself, it’s just a nice outlet to go back to how I started writing songs, which was just poetry and then putting that to music, not putting so much pressure on myself to create a really hooky or super-climactic chorus. I just want to write from the heart… It takes a lot of pressure off music in general, living in the pop realm of music and living in L.A., [which] can be quite a big machine you’re a part of.”
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