Less than 24 hours ago, Sabrina Carpenter made her Coachella debut. Now she’s feeling a bit hungover. “Not a literal hangover,” she says, “but just, like, an energy hangover.” Working late ’cause you’re a singer—as she purrs on “Espresso,” a top contender for song of the summer—can be tough on the vocal cords. “I sound like a man more than I usually do,” she says. Despite the dry desert air, though, the 25-year-old singer seems anything but world-weary. “I thought I was really old when I was 21,” she says. “I feel now that I’m truly just getting started.”
Clothing and brooch by Schiaparelli.Photograph by Emma Summerton; Styled by Natasha Royt.
A handful of years ago, Carpenter was the classic Disney performer, starring in shows like Girl Meets World and releasing albums through the studio’s label, Hollywood Records. Then two things happened: She moved to the decidedly more adult Island Records and her fellow Disney star Olivia Rodrigo released her barn-burning single “Drivers License,” which referenced an ex-boyfriend (allegedly Rodrigo’s High School Musical costar Joshua Bassett), who had left Rodrigo for “that blonde girl” (allegedly Carpenter). Carpenter later responded with a hit of her own, “because i liked a boy”: “I’m a homewrecker, I’m a slut / I got death threats fillin’ up semi-trucks / Tell me who I am, guess I don’t have a choice / All because I liked a boy.”
That album, 2022’s emails i can’t send, reintroduced Carpenter as both an introspective, sex-positive singer-songwriter and a “short pop bop queen,” to quote Quinta Brunson. (Carpenter stands shy of five feet.) Since then, she has found time for a romance with Saltburn star Barry Keoghan, headlined an international tour, and opened shows on Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Eras extravaganza. “It is magnificent to grow up idolizing someone, and then meet them, and they are all the things that you hoped that they would be,” Carpenter says of Swift. “On a personal level, she’s really been there for me, and I’m so grateful. That’s something she’s taught me really well—she has remained very human throughout all of it.”
