Bad Reviews

Album: Short n' Sweet (2025)
Charted: 87
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Songfacts®:

  • In this song, Sabrina Carpenter details her quick tempered, volatile boyfriend. Ignoring the flashing neon red flags and the chorus of well-meaning friends insisting she run for the hills, she stays put. Despite all the bad reviews he gets, love wins out.
  • The jaunty little pop ballad is the closing track on the deluxe edition of Short n' Sweet. Clocking in at 2:21, it's certainly short, reasonably sweet, but still not the briefest offering on the album; that honor belongs to "Dumb & Poetic," which makes its point in a brisk 2:13.
  • Carpenter wrote the song with Amy Allen, John Ryan and Ian Kirkpatrick. Ryan and Kirkpatrick also produced the track with Jack Antonoff. All of them contributed to multiple Short n' Sweet tracks.
  • As for the song's muse, who is this moody, tantrum-prone boyfriend? The answer is probably no one in particular. Rather than an ex with a particularly bad attitude, he's likely a mish mash of various real-life relationships; some lived, some witnessed, some entirely fabricated for the sake of a catchy hook. In the end, it doesn't matter who he is. What matters is that somewhere, someone is currently ignoring their best friend's texts about why they should break up, and this song is for them.

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