The Middle of Starting Over

Neither Here Nor There

There is a particular kind of limbo that most people recognize, even when they cannot quite name it. You have already left something behind, but you have not yet arrived anywhere new. The old life is receding. The new one has not taken shape. You are somewhere in the transition, suspended between what was and what will be.

This is the territory Sabrina Carpenter claimed as her own on one of the earliest songs she ever released to the public. "The Middle of Starting Over" arrived in August 2014 as the second single from her debut EP "Can't Blame a Girl for Trying,"^[1] and it did something unusual for a debut from a fifteen-year-old Disney Channel cast member: it reached for something genuinely felt, rooted in the specific geography of her own life at that moment.

A Song Written From Two Directions

The origin story of "The Middle of Starting Over" involves an unlikely convergence of experience. Songwriters Jim McGorman and Robb Vallier wrote it during a period of significant personal transition in their own lives. McGorman had recently become a father, and both men were navigating the particular upheaval that arrives in middle age, when old identities shift and new ones require conscious construction.^[5] The song emerged from that lived reckoning, and when it was complete, McGorman and Vallier were genuinely uncertain whether a teenage artist would connect with material rooted so firmly in their own adult experience.

They almost withheld it from the batch of demos they submitted to Hollywood Records for a newly signed act. But the song reached Sabrina Carpenter, then fifteen years old, and something clicked immediately. According to McGorman, she did not change a single word. She performed it exactly as written.^[5]

What made this possible was a biographical parallel almost too neat to be coincidence. Carpenter had just uprooted her life in eastern Pennsylvania, leaving behind her school, her friends, and the familiar routines of growing up in Quakertown to move to Los Angeles for a role on Disney Channel's Girl Meets World.^[3] She was literally in the middle of starting over, geographically, socially, and professionally, at the exact moment the song arrived in her hands.

The track was later included on her debut full-length studio album Eyes Wide Open, released April 14, 2015 on Hollywood Records.^[2] Critics received the album warmly, praising its emotional authenticity and personality, with some drawing early comparisons to the folk-tinged country-pop of Taylor Swift's debut era.^[8]

Choosing to Begin

At its core, "The Middle of Starting Over" is a song about agency. What distinguishes it from most pop songs about change and loss is where the narrator positions herself in relation to that change: not as a victim of circumstance but as a person making an active choice.

The lyrical imagery leans toward renovation and transformation rather than grief or absence. The narrator speaks of painting over old wounds, of converting small overlooked things into something of genuine value, of dismantling internal walls rather than fortifying herself behind them. Each image reinforces the same underlying idea: starting over is not something that happened to you. It is something you are doing.

This framing shifts the emotional register of the song from melancholy to momentum. There is acknowledgment of tiredness, of accumulated troubles and past mistakes, but the narrator's posture is decisively forward-facing. She does not dwell in the difficulty of what came before. She is already in motion.

The phrase "in the middle" carries its own weight. The song does not celebrate a completed transformation or memorialize a finished relationship. It locates the narrator inside the process itself, uncertain of the outcome but committed to the direction. This is a more honest emotional position than either triumphant arrival or devastating departure, and it is a harder one to write convincingly.

The Sound of Motion

The production reinforces the thematic content with unusual consistency. The arrangement is rooted in acoustic folk-pop textures familiar from the early 2010s, built around guitars, piano, and a forward-driving rhythm that does not let the song settle into stillness.^[2]

The tempo communicates the song's meaning almost as effectively as the words do. Forward motion is embedded in the musical structure itself. Reviewers noted the acoustic, guitar-forward production as a distinguishing quality of Eyes Wide Open as a whole, placing it closer to earnest folk-pop than to the manufactured dance-pop more typical of Disney Channel releases at the time.^[8]

A Cross-Generational Resonance

"The Middle of Starting Over" has accumulated over 45 million views on YouTube since its official video premiered in September 2014.^[6] That longevity reflects something real about how the song functions in a listener's experience.

Part of the explanation lies in that cross-generational authorship. The song was written by adults drawing on adult experience and performed by a teenager drawing on teenage experience, and the emotional core holds equally in both directions. Starting over is not an age-specific phenomenon. Displacement, reinvention, the uncertain in-between of major transitions: these recur throughout a life, appearing at fifteen and forty and sixty in different forms but carrying the same essential weight.^[5]

The song also helped establish what would become Carpenter's signature tonal register: earnest, resilient, emotionally transparent without tipping into self-pity. That sensibility would evolve and sharpen across the decade that followed, running through the introspective songwriting of Emails I Can't Send (2022) all the way to the polished wit of Short n' Sweet, which earned her Grammy recognition.^[9] The core sensibility was already audible in 2014.

Other Ways of Hearing It

The song is deliberately unspecific about what exactly is being started over from. This openness is a feature, not an absence. It invites the listener to supply their own context: a dissolved relationship, a move to a new city, a career shift, a personal loss, a deliberate reinvention. The renovation and rebuilding imagery works equally well across all of these.

Some listeners have heard it primarily as a post-breakup anthem, reading the imagery of old wounds and walls through a romantic lens. Others connect more to the experience of leaving home or beginning a new professional chapter. Carpenter's own situation in 2014 offers the most complete reading: the song encompasses all of these simultaneously, because she was living all of them at once.

A Debut That Pointed Forward

In retrospect, "The Middle of Starting Over" is a revealing beginning. It introduced Sabrina Carpenter to the world with a song that was emotionally honest, thematically coherent, and rooted in something genuine rather than assembled from genre formulas. For a debut by a teenager on a Hollywood Records deal tied to a Disney Channel series, this was not the obvious commercial choice.^[2]

The song has aged without irony. Its message does not require the listener to be young, or just out of school, or embarking on something specific. It requires only that the listener has stood in that particular limbo: somewhere between the life just left and the life not yet arrived. Which is to say, it requires only that the listener is human.