Amy Allen, Sabrina Carpenter.
Getty Images (2)Songwriter Amy Allen already has one Grammy win under her belt, but the nomination never gets old, and neither does celebrating the honor.
Allen, who amassed four nods last month when the nominations for 2025 were announced, I learned of her latest honors in the most appropriate place possible: work.
“I was in London in the middle of a session,” the Los Angeles-based artist exclusively said Us Weekly earlier this month. “Obviously I was nervous because there are so many phenomenal writers who are friends of mine, and you just never know where it’s going to go. But I was in the middle of a session and my manager texted me with an all-caps “YES!” And I was like, “What do you mean?” And then I signed up and then the text messages from friends started coming in and it was very exciting.
Allen couldn’t take too much time to celebrate — she was at work, after all — but she and her fellow musicians split up for a “little congratulatory” toast with Aperol spritzs, “which was very sweet and fun,” she said.
The musician, who previously won the Grammy for Album of the Year last year for his work on Harry Styles‘ Harry’s house — is nominated for four awards at the 2025 ceremony: Song of the Year (Sabrina Carpenterof “Please Please Please”), Album of the Year (Carpenter’s Short and sweet), Best Song Written for Visual Media (NSync’s “Better Place” by Trolls Band together) and Songwriter of the Year, Non-Classical.
The Countdown to the 2025 Grammy Awards started after the official announcement of the nominations. Mark Ronson, Kylie Minogue, Victoria Monae, Brandi Clarke and Kirk Franklin revealed the nominees on Friday, November 8. The 67th Annual Grammy Awards will be held at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Sunday, February 2, 2025. ceremony (…)
Allen is particularly honored to be nominated in the Songwriter of the Year category, which is only in its third year (she previously scored a nomination in 2023).
“It’s a chance to be recognized for your work, not just for one particular song. And for me it’s really exciting, especially this year because I have country songs that got me to the nomination,” she told us. “And then I have a wide variety of different genres of songs with the Sabrina project because she’s such a phenomenal artist and writer. It crosses genres. It’s a really exciting time for me to be able to cross genres and showcase the type of songwriting that I love to do, which is really diverse and well-rounded.”
The songs listed in Allen’s Songwriter of the Year nomination are indeed quite diverse: in addition to three Carpenter tracks (“Please Please Please,” “Taste” and “Espresso”), the list includes songs by Justin Timberlake, Olivia Rodrigo and Leon Bridges as well as two hits by a country artist You Wetzel.
Amy Allen.
Lorne Thomson/RedfernsIn between writing all these songs for other artists, Allen found time to record his own self-titled debut album, which was released in September. While she loves the variety of musicians she collaborates with when writing for other people, she takes a completely different approach when working on songs she intends to keep for herself.
“I usually start the songs myself at home. It comes from a place of like, I’ve written with and for other people so much that for my soul I need to just sit in silence for a while with my own thoughts and just write from the heart and get back to what I love about music “, she explained. “So that’s where all the songs from my first album came from, it’s just me taking a break from always helping someone else tell their story and giving a lot of my emotions to pop radio. I really enjoy living outside of that collaborative world all the time and going a little bit more internal, and it’s very cathartic for me. … It’s not swinging for the fences in any way like, ‘Let’s make this the biggest song possible.'”
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However, Allen can certainly write the greatest song possible, as evidenced by her body of work Short and sweet. She co-wrote all the songs on the critically acclaimed hit album, which debuted at No. 1 in the Billboard 200 and gave Carpenter her first Hot 100 No. 1 in Please, Please, Please.
The duo first collaborated on Carpenter’s 2022 album, Emails I can’t sendand Alan “instantly loved” their relationship. “The chemistry just started building from day one,” she said us. “I feel like people can spend their life as a songwriter looking for collaborators, and I just feel really grateful to have some great ones so far in my career that I really appreciate and constantly learn from.”
Alan said his favorite Short and sweet track changes depending on her mood, but she confirmed that “Juno” was indeed inspired by the teenage pregnancy movie of the same name — and the playfully crude idea was “totally Sabrina.”
At the 66th annual Grammy Awards in February, it was hard not to notice a pattern as artists took the stage to accept their accolades: Most of them were women. Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist – the so-called “Big Four” awards – went to (…)
“I’m so grateful to have her as a collaborator for moments like this, because I think as a pop songwriter, five years ago, if someone had come in with this concept, it would have been like, ‘I’m not sure that people will get it,” Allen explained. “But because she’s so authentic and her artistry is so intact and she knows who she is, the second she started talking about her idea for it, I was like, ‘Oh, we’re doing this, it’s going to be great and you’re going to be witty and it will be sincere. She is such a fearless leader with such ideas.”
Allen does believe in the old adage that it’s an honor just to be nominated – “having your name out there in any capacity already feels like a win because music is so subjective” – but if she wins again in February, her mum ensures that has a great place to put his second Grammy.
“I actually had (mine) in my little home studio, and then my mom came over a few months ago and she moved it from my home studio to my living room,” she recalls. “So it’s a little more visible now, which is a classic mom move. … (My mom is like), ‘Let them know, let the world know!'”
The 67th Grammy Awards air on CBS on Sunday, February 2 at 8:00 PM ET.
