Sabrina Carpenter and London-based producer Jonas Blue sat down with Billboard to chat about their brand new collaborative single “Alien” as part of the “How It Went Down” video series, revealing how the song was written and what they love most about it.
Carpenter explains that she first got in touch with Blue over a year ago via Twitter, since she was a huge fan of his. Then, when she later went to Europe during her tour with The Vamps, she spent an extra week in London and met up with Blue in the studio. “We all [Carpenter, Blue and their other co-writer Janee “Jin Jin” Bennett] decided that we wanted to write a song that could relate to each of us,” the 18-year-old actress and singer tells Billboard.
The song, Carpenter shares, is about the feeling alienated and trapped within your own thoughts in a relationship, and not being able to describe those emotions out loud. “All of the lyrics are very much kind of like an inner dialogue on what you wish you could say to someone and how you wish you could just understand what was going on inside their mind,” she says, “and almost understand what was going on inside your own.”