Album Review: Toy With Me by Meghan Trainor
The Nantucket pop singer’s seventh album says “I don’t care” so many times it forgets to say anything else, and borrows Sabrina Carpenter’s playbook without any of the punchlines.
Ten years after “All About That Bass” went to number one in almost every country with a radio, Meghan Trainor picked up the Hitmaker Award at Billboard’s Women in Music ceremony and announced a 33-date headline tour with Icona Pop, her first proper run in eight years. She canceled the entire thing three weeks before the album dropped, posting on social media that juggling a new baby, tour prep, and the album was “more than I can take on right now.” That admission is more interesting than most of what ended up on Toy With Me, a record whose only gear is insisting that nothing bothers her. She canceled a tour over it, and the cancellation was more honest than anything on the record.
She told Billboard that Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and Doechii inspired her to take risks and that Toy With Me would be her “most honest and fearless” album with “no more rules.” The risk-taking mostly involves copying the cheeky sexual innuendo and petty-revenge tone that Carpenter has been running since Short n’ Sweet. “Pink Cadillac” is a double-entendre car song built on beep-beep-beep and vroom-vroom vocal effects, “Toy With Me” asks to be wound up and turned on like a doll, and “Chef’s Kiss” is a curse-your-ex list that escalates from “a rock in your shoe” to “poison in your booze” to “give up on your dreams.” These are fun as premises. As songs, they run out of ideas after the first chorus and spend the remaining two minutes repeating themselves in louder fonts. Carpenter gets away with the shtick partly by writing actual jokes, punchlines with setups that reward a second listen. Trainor writes bumper stickers.
You could swap choruses across most of the album and nobody would flinch. On “Rich Man,” she announces she’s a CEO, a passenger princess, that she eats diamonds for dinner, that the bags under her eyes are Chanel and Dior. “Delulu” insists she’s a dreamer, a keeper, a goddess who wants to kiss herself. “Men’s Tears” credits her success to spite and a cup of men’s tears every morning. “Shimmer” brags that she doesn’t sweat, she shimmers, make them mad, let them get bitter. “Hush” tells someone to stop talking. The message, I don’t care what you think, I’m unbothered, I’m that girl, gets restated so many times across forty-two minutes that it stops meaning anything. It’s a ringtone of self-regard.
The act drops on “Princess.” Over an Ellis and Grant Boutin production, she sings about being shut inside a castle, training for battle, trapped in her body so she can act like people want her to. Her chorus asks you to applaud her dress for hiding that she’s broken, her makeup for holding her tears: “You wouldn’t believe all the hurt I can handle for so many years/Right here, oh, being a princess.”
With “Little One,” produced by Adam and Gabe Yaron, goes somewhere similar, a song to her child about wanting them to see the world but not wanting to watch them get hurt, and she asks if she’ll see her own reflection in her kid “before all the pain and the scars.” A child’s voice closes the track saying “I love you, Mama,” which is corny, but on a record this walled-off, any crack reads as an event.
Whole stretches of Toy With Me aren’t words at all. “Ladylike” is a three-and-a-half minute song whose lyrics are mostly bap-bap-bap-bap-bap-barap repeated dozens of times between a few lines about wanting a smooth operator. “Pink Cadillac” runs on beep-beep-beep, vroom-vroom, boom-boom-boom, tweet-tweet-tweet, bop-bop-bop. The title track stutters t-t-toy with me through its chorus. Grant Bouti and Mark Schick produced the bulk of these tracks, and you could cut a third of the album’s runtime and lose nothing except vocal sound effects.
Only once does the I-don’t-care act come with emolument. On “Still Don’t Care,” Trainor sings “Said I was too thick, then I got way too thin,” naming actual comments that sent her to therapy, the stretch marks and the too-loud and the “Can’t believe you’re still here, girl, where have you been?” The pre-chorus, “Let me take a moment, think it over, does it touch me at all?”, has a pause built into it, a beat where she considers the question before answering nope. Everywhere else on the record, “I don’t care” is a slogan. Here it sounds like it cost something to say. “Cry Baby” tries for the same effect with “I bet you’d be a crybaby if they talked all that shit about you,” but it never goes past the dare. Trainor’s mama tells her they’re jealous, they can’t do what she does, and she admits that shit hurts all day, and then the hook kicks back in and it’s over.
Subpar (★★☆☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Still Don’t Care,” “Princess”