Best Thing I Got

When an album closes on a moment of quiet devotion, the gesture carries real weight. On Sabrina Carpenter's debut record Eyes Wide Open (2015), the final track does exactly that. "Best Thing I Got" arrives after eleven tracks of youthful folk-pop energy, offering a piano-driven landing that feels more intimate than anything preceding it. For a fifteen-year-old making her first full-length statement, ending on a song about the irreplaceable value of love was a choice that revealed what she actually believed beneath all the production and teenage bravado.

A Debut's Final Word

Carpenter was not yet sixteen when Eyes Wide Open was released on April 14, 2015, on Hollywood Records.^[1] She was already a recognizable face to millions of Disney Channel viewers through her role as Maya Hart on Girl Meets World, a show that premiered in June 2014 and ran until 2017.^[7] The album was positioned as an authentic artistic introduction, not merely a Disney product.

"Best Thing I Got" had appeared even earlier, on Carpenter's debut EP Can't Blame a Girl for Trying in March 2014, making it one of the first songs she ever released publicly.^[2] Its placement as the closing track of both the EP and the full album suggests the song held a particular significance, functioning as the emotional thesis of the project as a whole.

An Unlikely Origin Story

What makes the song's history genuinely surprising is where it came from. "Best Thing I Got" was written by the Danish-American songwriting team of John Gordon and Julie Frost, and it was not originally written for Carpenter.^[2] The duo had previously written "Satellite," which won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2010 for Germany's Lena Meyer-Landrut. In January 2012, they submitted "Best Thing I Got" to the Dansk Melodi Grand Prix, Denmark's national selection contest for Eurovision, where it was performed by an artist named Aya (Yanne Friis).^[3] The song was eliminated in the first round of that competition.

Three years later, what couldn't break through a Danish national competition became the emotional anchor of a debut album. The song was recorded at Gordon's own studio in Denmark, Gordon Studio DK, making it the only track on Eyes Wide Open recorded outside of Los Angeles.^[2] It is a quietly compelling footnote: a song rejected by Eurovision voters found a more lasting home in the catalog of a teenager from Pennsylvania.

Themes: Freedom, Imperfection, and Love's Primacy

The song's lyrical world centers on a narrator who is candid about her own complexity. She is not idealized or complete. She acknowledges wanting freedom. She does not pretend to be without flaw. And yet the central claim of the song is that the relationship she is singing about outweighs all of that.

This is a sharper emotional position than it first appears. Many pop songs about love frame the beloved as the remedy for some internal wound, as though love arrives to make a broken person whole. "Best Thing I Got" is somewhat different. It does not promise transformation. It simply insists, with the directness of someone who means it, that even amid wanting more and being imperfect, this love is the most valuable thing she possesses. Love and freedom coexist, held in honest tension rather than resolved.

The piano arrangement reinforces this quality. Without the layered production common on the album's more radio-friendly tracks, the song is stripped down to melody and intimacy. There is a jazz inflection in the chord vocabulary that reads as emotional maturity, a register that reaches slightly beyond teen pop's usual tools.^[6] That choice to end an album of bright, produced pop with something this understated was either a moment of real instinct or a very confident editorial decision.

The Album's Emotional Architecture

Eyes Wide Open was a record about awakening, about seeing the world more clearly, about the specific alertness of adolescence. Most of its tracks are energetic, folk-pop aimed at the same audience watching Carpenter on Disney Channel every week.

"Best Thing I Got" closes the album by turning that outward gaze inward. After eleven tracks exploring friendships, self-discovery, and youthful confidence, the record ends with a quiet insistence that, when she looks at everything she has, love matters most. It is the emotional equivalent of a long breath out after a busy room.

Critics who engaged with the album noted the tension between its more produced moments and its quieter ones. Brian Cantor at Headline Planet praised it as "decidedly loose in construct but rich in personality" and described Carpenter as "one of the most promising and emotionally authentic young artists in mainstream pop."^[4] More dismissive reviews compared her sound to a derivative early Taylor Swift and Colbie Caillat, reserving what little praise they offered for the album's more organic moments.^[5] "Best Thing I Got" fits squarely in the latter category.

The Shape of a Career in Hindsight

In the decade since Eyes Wide Open, Carpenter transformed into one of the most commercially successful pop artists of her generation. Her 2024 album Short n' Sweet produced global hits and earned Grammy nominations.^[7] Looking back at her debut from that vantage point, "Best Thing I Got" reads differently.

The song's themes of wanting freedom while still choosing love anticipate the emotional logic of her later work. Her more mature catalog is full of complicated relationships where desire and devotion exist in awkward proximity. The roots were visible at fifteen.

There is also something worth noting in the song's trajectory from Eurovision reject to debut closer. The songwriters Gordon and Frost were not newcomers. Frost had previously won a Golden Globe Award for songwriting work in film.^[2] The fact that a song by this caliber of writers couldn't clear the bar of a national selection contest, and then landed on a debut that debuted at number 43 on the Billboard 200,^[1] is the kind of story the music industry generates constantly and rarely pauses to appreciate.

A Closing Note

"Best Thing I Got" does not try to dazzle. It does not announce its ambition. It simply says, with piano and a clear voice, that after everything else is accounted for, love is the thing worth keeping.

For a first album from an artist still finding her vocabulary, that is a remarkably clear-eyed thing to say. The song did not make Carpenter famous. It did not chart as a single or anchor a tour. What it did was close a debut record on an honest note, which, as opening statements go, is more durable than most.

AllMusic described Eyes Wide Open as a debut where the best moments came when Carpenter allowed "a glimpse of her old soul."^[8] "Best Thing I Got" is that glimpse made into a song.