Nonsense

There is a specific variety of human foolishness that almost everyone has experienced but very few songs have the courage to celebrate outright: the kind that arrives when you are around someone you find impossibly attractive and your brain simply stops working. You say something idiotic. You laugh too loud at something that is not funny. You forget your own name. Most love songs prefer to dwell in heartbreak, longing, or triumph. Sabrina Carpenter decided to make the dumb, dizzy, short-circuiting part the whole point.

"Nonsense," the ninth track on her 2022 album emails i can't send, is a pop song about the precise moment when attraction overwhelms articulation. It is flirtatious, funny, and deliberately, cheerfully absurd. In the landscape of a record that was otherwise defined by real pain and hard-won personal reckoning, it stands apart as something rarer: a song that finds genuine joy in its own ridiculousness. And it turned out to be the song that changed everything for Carpenter's career.

A Happy Accident in the Studio

emails i can't send arrived in July 2022 as the first album of Carpenter's post-Disney artistic life, released on Island Records after she departed Hollywood Records following four studio albums. The record was personal in ways her earlier work had not been. It addressed the very public firestorm that had erupted the previous year when Olivia Rodrigo's "drivers license" went viral, widely interpreted as targeting Carpenter in the context of a shared romantic history with actor Joshua Bassett. The harassment Carpenter received was severe: death threats, doxxing, relentless public shaming for the act of being in a relationship. One of the album's most direct tracks, "because i liked a boy," confronted that experience head-on, and the record's emotional weight runs through most of its runtime.^[5]

Against that backdrop, "Nonsense" looks like a deliberate act of tonal counterbalance. While its companion tracks tend toward emotional reckoning and confessional candor, this one is purely, unapologetically fun. And it came together almost by accident.

Carpenter, producer Julian Bunetta (a Grammy-winning collaborator known for his work with One Direction), and Nashville songwriter Steph Jones were mid-session on a more emotionally intense track when they hit a creative wall. During the break, Bunetta started playing a slide guitar progression. The three of them collectively decided to abandon the more serious work for the moment and write something silly instead. The entire song was completed in a couple of hours.^[1] Carpenter has spoken about wanting at least one song on the album that reflected her actual sense of humor: goofy, self-deprecating, and a little unhinged when it comes to attraction. "There's a lot of humour infused in the song, which is very similar to how I feel when I'm kind of crushing on somebody for the first time," she told Hits Radio. "Maybe it's a little too close to home!"^[4]

The Eloquence of Inarticulation

The song's central comic premise is deceptively simple: the narrator, confronted with someone she is attracted to, loses all ability to form coherent sentences. The words that come out are embarrassing, incoherent, and completely at odds with how she wants to present herself. She is, as the title announces, talking nonsense.

What makes the premise work as more than a novelty is how Carpenter builds the song around double meanings and rhythmic wordplay that are themselves a kind of nonsense -- clever and silly at once, operating on more than one level simultaneously. A semantic analysis of the lyrics identifies layer upon layer of contextual meaning embedded in phrases that read as flirtatious gibberish on the surface but reveal careful craft underneath.^[12] The song performs its own thesis: it is nonsensical in the most intentional possible way.

The humor is also specifically gendered in an interesting fashion. The tradition of the tongue-tied lover in pop music tends to cast women as the cool, composed object of admiring attention. Here, Carpenter puts the ridiculous vulnerability front and center and owns it completely. She is the person saying something embarrassing and knowing it. That inversion carries a quiet self-assurance even inside the apparent self-deprecation: you have to be genuinely confident to make your own awkwardness this funny.

The track also functions as a palate cleanser within the album's emotional architecture. emails i can't send is largely a record about private pain made public, about the exhaustion of being misread, about grief and longing. "Nonsense" offers a different register entirely. It suggests that even in the middle of an emotionally difficult period, the experience of a new crush can bypass all of that and reduce a person to something purely, giddily human.^[9] In a record full of messages that were never sent, this one gets delivered at full volume.

There is also a subtle argument in the song about what it means to be attracted to someone. By the chorus, the narrator has essentially given up on making sense and leaned fully into the absurdity. The subtext is something close to: this is what you do to me, it's ridiculous, and I don't even care. That combination of self-awareness and helplessness is exactly what makes infatuation so disarming. The song captures it without trying to make it more dignified than it is.

From Deep Cut to Breakthrough

"Nonsense" was not initially promoted as a single. It lived on the standard edition of emails i can't send as track nine, a late-album treat for listeners who stayed with the record all the way through. What changed was TikTok.

A sped-up version of the song began circulating on the platform in late 2022, followed by dance choreography set to its verses. The playful, rhythmically propulsive character of the track translates perfectly to short-form video, and it spread quickly. By January 2023, it had debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 75, eventually climbing to number 56 on the main chart and, more significantly, reaching number ten on Mainstream Top 40. That last figure represented Carpenter's first top-ten hit on that chart format.^[2]

For Carpenter's career, the breakthrough carried a specific symbolic weight. She had spent much of 2021 and early 2022 navigating a media narrative that positioned her as a supporting character in someone else's story. "Nonsense" rewrote that framing in real time. A song this funny, this assured, and this immediately likeable shifted critical attention to who she actually was as an artist: a pop songwriter with genuine wit and a gift for making the listener feel like they are in on the joke.^[11]

The song's sound also helped anchor a fresh critical understanding of her range. Its buoyant production, built around Bunetta's slide guitar and a funk-inflected rhythm section, occupied a different sonic space from the more stripped-back material elsewhere on the album.^[3] Critics noted comparisons to Ariana Grande's pop-R&B aesthetic, and the track demonstrated that Carpenter could move fluently between intimate acoustic vulnerability and bright, polished irreverence. That range would define the artistic identity she spent the next two years building toward.

The Outro Phenomenon

If "Nonsense" had simply been a viral TikTok hit, it would already constitute a notable chapter in Carpenter's career. What elevated it into something genuinely unusual in contemporary pop was what happened when she performed it live.

Beginning with the Emails I Can't Send Tour in September 2022, Carpenter started changing the song's outro at every single show. Each city got a bespoke, improvised ending ranging from affectionate local humor to increasingly provocative wordplay. Fans filmed and posted these nightly to TikTok, creating a feedback loop that extended the song's cultural presence far beyond its chart run.^[6] Rolling Stone and Billboard both published dedicated rankings of the best versions.^[7]

Carpenter has said she wrote approximately 900 different outros over the course of the tour cycle.^[1] That figure becomes even more striking when you consider that each one was an exercise in the spirit of the original song, which is precisely about losing control of your mouth and saying ridiculous things. The outro tradition was not a departure from the song's meaning. It was the song's meaning, enacted live every night.

The tradition expanded dramatically when Carpenter opened for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour through 2023 and into 2024. Playing to stadium crowds who may have been unfamiliar with her work, Carpenter consistently used the outro as her most memorable moment -- winning over audiences who arrived as Swift fans and often left as Carpenter fans too. The outros became appointment viewing on TikTok even for people who had never heard the album.^[7]

The tradition was eventually retired during the Short n' Sweet Tour in 2024. Rather than simply stopping, Carpenter staged a playful send-off: a theatrical "technical difficulties" moment timed to when the outro would have been performed, complete with a satirical message appearing on the screen overhead. It was a dignified, funny ending to a two-year running joke, and it was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the song that started it all.^[8]

The Bigger Nonsense: Love as Irrational Act

The obvious interpretation of "Nonsense" is that it is about attraction making you inarticulate. But there is another way to hear it that gives the song a bit more philosophical weight.

What if the nonsense isn't just what the narrator is saying, but what the entire experience of falling for someone fundamentally is? Romantic infatuation is, from a rational standpoint, a profoundly irrational state. You know you are being a little ridiculous. You know the thoughts cycling through your head don't entirely add up. And you are doing it anyway, gladly, because the alternative -- keeping your composure, staying guarded, performing coolness -- is far less interesting.

On that reading, the song isn't just about being tongue-tied in front of someone cute. It's about the choice to show up in your full, goofy, unguarded self rather than the version of yourself that has everything under control. The wordplay isn't a failure of language; it's a refusal to be boring. And the outro tradition that grew around the song extended that logic outward into stadium pop: every night, in a new city, Carpenter chose to say something new and slightly unhinged, because sincerity and absurdity, as it turns out, are not mutually exclusive.

What Gets Sent

"Nonsense" works because it is genuinely funny, but it also works because it is honest about something that love songs rarely admit: being attracted to someone is often less like a cinematic grand gesture and more like a small, private short circuit. Carpenter did not write the song as an autobiographical confession about a specific person. She wrote it as a document of a feeling, and the feeling is universally, embarrassingly recognizable.

That it emerged as the breakout song from an album otherwise defined by real pain and emotional complexity says something about the particular intelligence Carpenter brought to emails i can't send. Among all the drafts that sat unsent, this one -- the light, dizzy, wordless feeling of someone scrambling your thoughts -- got sent. Not as a confessional, not as a response to public drama, but as a shared joke about the most human thing there is.

The audiences that turned it into a phenomenon understood exactly what they were receiving. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say is the thing that doesn't quite make sense.