“I’m ghettofabulous, you know,” Charlotte Sometimes jokes as she explains how her first single — which incorporates Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill A Man” — came to be. “My producer, Sam Hollander, came up to me and asked if I knew the Cypress Hill song and I’m like ‘Yeah, but what does that have to do with me? I’m just a little white girl from Jersey!’” On Hollander’s suggestion, Charlotte — who draws her name from a children’s book character — took the 1991 hit and reworked it to reflect a current relationship. “Actually, the guy [I was dating] had said ‘How can you just kill me like this?’ so I was like ‘I can be totally gangsta with your heart!’”

The success of “How I Could Just Kill a Man,” (the video for which recently jumped into heavy rotation on both VH1 and MTV) has helped the spunky twenty-year-old former dancer find success with her debut Waves and the Both of Us. “It’s really a young people’s record,” Charlotte describes, adding she wrote it while coping with a breakup and the struggle of living on her own for the first time after graduating high school. “I totally wear my heart on my sleeve; I’m one of those people who can’t keep my own secrets, so it was really easy for me to be revealing,” she says.

The album’s brutal honesty is paired with summer-ready melodies that are perfect for Charlotte’s upcoming stint on the Warped Tour. “It’s going to be like summer camp,” Charlotte predicts. “Except with a bunch of smelly dudes.”