My Favorite Singer Made Me Cry, "All Because I Liked A Boy

In the summer of 2022, I was having an amazing time. I was working on my portfolio for art school, excited to be doing what I love. I was also having fun spending all my free time with a “friend” I had reconnected with some months prior. You know the type, that one friend that people always suspect you’re dating and then you say “omg no we are just friends!!”. I was in the clouds, though the conscious part of me wouldn’t admit the reason that that was the case.

This same summer, my favorite artist Sabrina Carpenter released her fourth studio album. She’s a 24 year old singer and actress, and former Disney channel star. Sabrina’s album was deeply personal, starting with a song written after her father’s affair, and then taking us through the ups and downs of her previous relationships, some of which are known by the public. The album was a mix of “pop hits” as she was prone to make, but with an added maturity since her Disney days. The album didn’t feel like general statement songs like her past work, it was her in every single song. The album was beautiful, but I didn’t care for it.

I had listened to it here and there, kind of putting up with it like daytime television 20 years ago, having it on just to have it on. But as the summer ended, so did my friendship with my aforementioned “friend”. The ending was sudden, but after it was a slow descent into sadness, a familiar feeling to me because I had fallen out with this person once before, just two years prior. That very human feeling, of a slow separation of one’s soul from another as they get more and more distant, feels catastrophic, no matter how many times one goes through it. But life goes on, and so do concert announcements. The “Emails I Can’t Send” album tour began in September, and so I decided I would go see Sabrina, since I hadn’t gotten to before the pandemic.

Upon listening to that album again for the sole purpose of learning all the songs before the concert, I realized that it was no longer an album, but a spirit that was determined to have its way with my body. It shook me, weighed me down, so intensely that I could be convinced that I was possessed by it. Months before, it had been just an album, but now it had taken on this new life, every word. Even more upbeat songs like “Read Your Mind” with the funky rhythm and charming violin felt subconsciously weighted because of lyrics like “wasting all our time” and “You’re not my friend, and baby, you never were”. I felt for the first time since being her fan, that she had opened up in a way that only a real person could, not a product of the industries she is a part of.

One night on the way home from work, the last song in the album started to play, “Decode”. I felt a tingling sensation, as the first lines were already attention grabbing for me.

“You’re good at the falling, not the staying there. You’re good at the giving too much, then getting scared. You’re good at impersonating someone who cares, and you had me for a minute there.”

As I walked home, I passed the ice cream shop just a block up from my house, one I had gone to and shared ice cream with that old friend at, and started to bawl. How could Sabrina feel exactly how I feel but in another body? How could we have the exact same experience, separate from each other, at different times, and yet feel it in the same way? Her breathy delivery, over dreamy and romantic sounding melodies while uttering words of a complex situation that refuses to be resolved creates the exact sense of both confusion and clarity that I was feeling.

She says in the second part of the song:

“There’s a weight off my shoulder now that I don’t chase you. Being myself, did that emasculate you?”

This line struck so deep, like a light from inside being realized all over the surface of my body. I had felt seen. Within this friendship, there was a back and forth, that “will they won’t they” that happens between people, because of that person’s inability to feel comfortable around my confidence. Just as I know Sabrina to be, I am a confident and outgoing person, usually not afraid to say and do anything in the company of others, and that tends to scare certain people, make them feel insecure. But no one should have to dim their light for another. I had learned that in my situation, but it had been my reality for so long with many people, I started to think, am I the only one who this happens to? I must be! I felt as though, maybe, there is a problem within myself that repels them, but Decode had shown me that even people in the highest of places deal with such thoughts and complexities. It brought us back to the one true level that matters, our humanity. We are not so much different, especially if we can relate on such a level. She sings

“I wonder why I let your confusion keep me up at night.”

She talks about how she’s “unpacked every single word you wrote” which is such a normal thing for people to do when it comes to the ones they care about that they are afraid of losing. You feel as though you’ve done something wrong, and you think that if you replay the conversations, texts, body language from the night in the park, that you will find something in it that will lead to the solution. Especially when a person, friend, or partner cannot seem to communicate as well as they should, we tend to try to fill in those empty spaces that they cannot. “Maybe when they said this, they wanted to say that”. We don’t want those empty spaces to become so significant that they start to drift away, like an island. You can only tell what is going on in the water, breaking an island into small parts, if you dive into it. But sometimes, that water is just too turbulent to examine. The chorus of Decode goes:

“Overanalyzed it, front, back, and beside it. Where else can we go? There’s nothing left here to decode.”

She wrote the lyrics to affirm herself, get it out on paper, and express her thought process during her relationship. But in my experience of the song, the song just sounds like she’s talking to me about her experiences, and telling me “there’s nothing left here to decode”, as if she knew I and other people in her audience would need to hear those words. We all need someone from the outside to let us know, “this may never have a resolution, but you have to learn to be okay with that, because everything will be okay. From start to finish, this album left me completely open and vulnerable, as if my whole exterior were pulled back, every wall was gently taken down, and I was given a reassuring hug. After that night I had nearly obsessively listened to the album, not for the sake of learning the words for the concert, but because I wanted to keep that feeling of being understood by this art.

In October, I made my way to Webster Hall with friends for the concert. I had never been to a real concert so I was excited, in my costume I’d made the day prior, which resembled hers from one of her song’s music videos. Before the opening act, they had a meticulously put together playlist that embodied the feeling of the album but in different artists’ works. “I remember it all too well” everyone screamed for the full 10 minute duration of the re-released Taylor Swift song. The feeling of being in a crowd made up mostly of people who had felt something just as deeply was comforting and chaotic. We almost all felt it, we all understood. When Sabrina came on, she sang the title song, and so did the crowd in perfect unison. As she made her way down the set list, inserting her anecdotes about the situations that the songs had arisen from. Mostly everyone was ecstatic. But then there was something I began to notice about some of the audience members around me. Not everyone was as excited, and not everyone seemed to be feeling the same feeling. In fact, some people were just nodding up and down, looking happy to be anywhere but home, but not singing the words.

This confused me afterwards. I had thought, “why be in the audience, paying for tickets, if you don’t even care enough about the album to know the words?”. It had genuinely made me upset, given that I knew people who weren’t able to get tickets to see her. In my head I thought, there isn’t a reason if you aren’t a die hard fan to pay to see the show that actual fans have had to only dream about until the tour was announced.

After thinking on it a while, I realized that what I had gotten upset about, with the people who didn’t seem to feel, is exactly my reaction when the album was released. When I realized this, I had a more deep appreciation for her art, and art in general. The way in which we perceive and digest art is an instinctive thing, and it is something that connects us all on a beautiful and basic level. Our humanness lets us feel this art, or not feel the art in the same way as the next person. “This was amazing” or “I hated that” are on different spectrums of the same mechanical way in which we all feel. Now I am in constant awe of seeing how we all react to the same art. It is so interesting because of the informative power it holds. I didn’t feel this album deeply until I had a circumstance which made me. So now as I perceive art in the company of others, I love hearing how they feel, because on some level I have a basic understanding of the circumstances that led them to such a response. I felt so understood in that moment of hearing words I resonated with, but now I feel a much deeper appreciation for the art that makes everyone feel anything, because it’s indicative of the human experience, and at what form each person’s experience is taking in that moment. Listening to the album now, I feel a sweet nostalgia for my past relationship. It gives me a calm and content feeling about the situation that made me sob at those same words. The informative nature of art toward change in its true form.

The tall and lean woman wrapped in the arms of her even taller partner, swaying back and forth, is feeling, as I am, just in a different way. Depending on the end of her relationship with her partner, she may be screaming the words of the album at the top of her lungs in 3 months, while the intensity for me has already subdued. It is a comforting thought, to know that on some level we each as individuals can connect and understand each other. It led me to understand that no matter what realm of feeling that any person is in, true and beautiful art will still make you feel, every time, all the time, no matter the circumstance.

*Originally uploaded to Medium.com*

* https://medium.com/@honziehhp/my-favorite-singer-made-me-cry-all-because-i-liked-a-boy-4b8a4eede8ff *