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This interview was published on December 12, 2025.
At the2025 Grammy Awards, Amy Allen won Songwriter of the Year, Non-Classical .
Some musicians take the Grammys as an opportunity tobrush shoulders with their heroes.
Im like,What table can I hide under right now?
But she prides herself on trying to show all sides of the artist shes working with.
Listeners love to hear an artist be self-aware and to laugh at themselves, but also be honest.
We bounced around a lot.
So we were in all these different atmospheres, which helped the album have so many chapters.
hey hey hey was in New York, at Electric Lady, where Jack has a room.
I think we did Slim Pickins, Lie to Girls, and yo yo yo in the same day.
We were just laughing about shared experiences that so many women have with dating.
It was like your dream day, where everything just fell into place.
I dont remember getting stuck on a section at all.
The motherfucker line, I remember us laughing about it and not thinking much of it at the time.
We were not following any rules of what a pop song should be.
Theres not many key changes on pop radio right now, thats for sure.
.Step 3: Have a laugh but dont make it a joke
Sabrinas so witty and self-aware.
We both approach songwriting from a place of wanting to say something honest.
So its never coming from a joking place thats just the crazy cherry on top.
Were wanting to write beautiful music, it just so happens that shes hilarious.
Selfish, Justin Timberlake
Hes such a veteran.
He is so grounded in who he is as a writer and artist.
If Justin is in the session, its gonna go where its gonna go.
So many of my instincts are because I grew up on *NSYNC and Justin.
And it didnt need to be this hit-you-over-the-head-with-the-production song, it needed to just be the sentiment.
I am a student of the country method of writing a song because its honest and story-based.
And I love how, instrumentally, its still so organic.
But I hadnt spent a lot of time in Nashville or working with country artists before.
I was like, Im probably going to have fewer touchpoints with him.
We are so similar.
And its a very real thing.
I think anybody thats ever been in a relationship can relate.
We had so much fun writing it.
It was a late night.
It was my birthday.
Lots of tequila consumption.
I probably wrote it within 30 minutes of sitting down.
Im thinking of my mom and my grandmothers and my aunts and my sisters.
On one hand, that is the best trait anybody could ever have.
I dont even know why it came up.
Theron came in, and hes such a musical genius.
He said, Stop what are you guys playing?
And Rosie was like, Oh, its this Korean drinking game.
That just wouldnt have crossed my brain, to give a shot to interpolate that into a song.
If the whole song had been percussive like that, the chorus wouldnt have stood out.
We needed to contrast it with some big, lofty pop part leading into it.
You just hear the song in its raw form, how the game would be played.
Rosie doing her own project freed her up to have space to say whatever she wanted.
Correction: A previous version of this story mistakenly noted that Allen wrote her solo album entirely by herself.
She also worked with a co-writer.
