The country influence on Sabrina Carpenter’s Please Please Please is pretty obvious - she went as far as to release a second version of it that features none other than Dolly Parton - but producer Jack Antonoff says that, when the song was being created, he had some different classic artists in mind.
In a new sneak peek video of his Mix with the Masters breakdown of the song, Antonoff says: “So I wanted this song to feel like discovery. I wanted it to feel like someone getting their hands on something for the first time and being, you know, shocked and freaked out by it. But in this Jeff Lynne/Abba concept, you know, you start in a very organic ‘song is God’ place, which is always a great place to start, but when we were writing it it was really about, in many ways, the structure of a country song that tells a story.”
Antonoff goes on to say that Please Please Please grew out of him strumming chords on an acoustic guitar, and that it was “thinking about the Beatles” that inspired the “kind of tight-sounding but very loose-feeling drums.”
And then there’s the bass: “I’m thinking about Jeff Lynne, I’m thinking about low end not having to be standard… It’s a little off to the right and it’s really telling me where the pulse is.”
The groove certainly has a noticeably slouchy feel: “You can hear how loose it is - you can hear how not gridded it is,” says Antonoff.
“It feels like two people playing in the room - it doesn’t matter that they were both me,” he continues. “It feels like just a band in the room.”
Subscribers can check out the full course on the Mix with the Masters website.
