Introduction to Sabrina Carpenter’s Musical Journey

Unbelievably, there were summers before Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso arrived. Although the breezy noon dance tune was only published in April, already it contains one delightfully idiotic neologism (“That’s that my espresso”). It lasted seven weeks at No. 1 in the UK and racked up 1 billion plays on Spotify. Like Get Lucky, it has also infiltrated the world’s coffee shops, bars, and taxis so thoroughly that it’s a legitimate competitor to be the summer song.

Carpenter cautions the object of her adoration that her charms are so great he is prone to develop insomnia, the exquisite sweet has a humorous terrifying tone. She says, low, deviant chuckle, “It was a manifestation tactic because no one liked me romantically at that point – no one was obsessed with me.” She started developing the tune on a trip to France last July. “I had no one I was even chatting to. I have always been slightly deceived in that respect.

Ten years after she launched her first song, Carpenter, 25, has used the success of Espresso – the first single from her sixth album, published today – to become one of 2024’s top pop singers. Unlike more conventional markers of success like sellout stadium tours, chart hits or household-name recognition, pop performers nowadays usually have to settle with niche fame. Carpenter has nonetheless accomplished all three.

She claims the decor looks like “they just threw up every pattern in the world”; it has just been confirmed that Please Please, her withering yacht-rock-meets-country follow-up to Espresso, will debut at No 1 on the UK charts, a rarefied new zone for her. The morning we meet in early June is in the basement of a luxury hotel in Soho, central London. Not that she finds considerable disturbance. “Full transparency: I’m wondering as I have never really been on charts till relatively lately. She adds, “It’s not the reason I write music and it’s not the reason I’ll ever write music.” “It reminds me of the sprinkles atop the sundae.”

Sabrina’s Transformation: From Disney to Pop Stardom

Carpenter is among a wave of year-defining pop performers, like her Island Records labelmate Chappell Roan and the experimental pop doyenne Charli xcx, who look less polished and distant than the pop stars that appeared in the previous decade, tailored-made for mass appeal. She was a Disney child, so she lacked the slightly glazed, media-trained face that many other former child stars possessed. She appears at our interview looking like a human Barbie – deeply bronzed, neatly coiffed, Burberry two-piece freshly ironed – and talks slowly and systematically. She is also quick-witted, prone to throw in a joke at the end of a serious speech or let out a powerful, wicked laugh.

Carpenter’s career has been falling for a few years. She twisted a little scandal—of which more later—into a handful of hit viral songs that landed in a support spot on Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, where she enchanted audiences with polished yet screwed-based performances. But Espresso seemed to many listeners to come out of nowhere; Carpenter defines the phrase “overnight success 10 years in the making.”

Handling Fame and Public Scrutiny

Growing up in a small village in Pennsylvania, she began acting as a child actor at the age of eleven and earned popularity in four-year Girl Meets World, a Disney Channel spin-off of the 90s comedy Boy Meets World. She also obtained a contract with Disney’s Hollywood Records. She adds, from an early age, she had a “no plan-B attitude.” Shows in shopping malls, TV movies, a support tour for the also-run British boy band the Vamps, she worked hard as any ambitious adolescent star would have to do. One eyebrow-raising photo on Carpenter’s Wikipedia page shows her signing for US troops at fourteen. Carpenter “didn’t really know what those goals were and what they entailed,” but the sort of successes she is now experiencing were on her bucket list back then.

You begin to see that all of it is more than just, blood, sweat tears love and skill, and desire. She replies, there are extremely dark, strange portions to all of this and attractive sides as well. “I truly adore doing it; sort of a need for it; and when that’s the thing powering you, success doesn’t matter. You just will keep on anyhow. Many times I have been dubbed a flop, and now we are here, so…

Carpenter acknowledges she chose to utilize the early years of her music career to “make things and not have to be so critical,” knowing that the probability of “people wanting to listen to an album by a 13-year-old girl was not super-high.” An excursion into Carpenter’s back catalog reveals ukulele folk (Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying), drama-kid soul (Shadows), and possibly Latin-flavoured EDM pop (Looking at Me). While part of it is humiliating, Carpenter’s Disney supervisors allowed her to explore widely, which has inspired her composition moving forward. One couplet on Espresso has a caustic, hilarious streak: “I can’t relate to desperation / my give-a-fucks are on vacation.” Skinny Dipping, a song from 2022, is packed of shockingly wordy run-on sentences and dull depictions of suburban living.

Carpenter adds, “People maybe wrote me off, from my past as a Disney kid,” when she approached adulthood, but her popularity progressively rose, preparing for the stardom she is currently enjoying with its concomitant scrutiny and criticism. She continues, “It’s not like you start doing well and everyone loves it and you’re set for life; you reach a certain place you’ve always wanted to be at and then there’s a whole new group of people that want to try to bring you down.” For allegedly failing to pay their commissions, two former managers sued her in 2017: I was just eighteen years old. That was quite like oop! Not sure even what to do with that!

She prevailed in that instance and generated a song called Sue Me from it, but the public has been more difficult to deal with. “When I was a kid, I simply wanted to sing on stage and, in that, I hoped to make people happy,” she adds. “And then you realize, especially with the internet: if I’m having a bad day, or didn’t get enough sleep, or haven’t had any coffee, and I say something and the tone comes out a bit harsh, there are a million people ready to call you a terrible person. You have to tiptoe about the boundary between being authentic and shielding oneself, which is a little mindfuck.

Personal Life and Media Attention

Carpenter is speaking from experience: following her identification as the “other woman” in Olivia Rodrigo’s blockbuster track Drivers License, she became persona non grata among certain music fans in 2021 Thanks to the popularity of Rodrigo’s song, what should have been niche, sophomoric internet drama—a love triangle of Rodrigo, her former, Joshua Bassett, and his new girlfriend, Carpenter—was pushed to mainstream media. Former Disney superstar all three of them.

Navigating the Aftermath of a Public Breakup

Regarding issues, Carpenter’s solitary fault was dating someone’s ex-partner, although she still endured harassment and abuse. (Her minders have told me not to interrogate her about this era.) She poured the sorrow of the termination of her relationship with Bassett as well as the heightened scrutiny she endured into the Emails I Can’t Send for 2022. Her fifth album was technically a career reset with songs varying in their pain from variedly beautiful, and passionate, to wretched. She also departed Hollywood Records to work on Island.

A Fresh Start with Island Records

She says, “I definitely felt held back where I was,” adding that she “had to fight a little bit” to get out – but she says she is appreciative to her past label boss for “allowing me to leave.”

Carpenter used the love-triangle controversy to restyle herself as a raunchy, old-fashioned sexpot whose poems were as sharp as her one-time rival’s; Rodrigo traded Disney for a new image as a heart-on-sleeve balladeer or angry pop-poker. Carpenter opted to debut the album with Skinny Dipping, one of the most self-consciously strange pieces she has done, knowing Emails would provide her a new start. “The common populace felt this music was dreadful! But she claims she didn’t want you folks to hear the same thing I had been doing. “That song genuinely benefitted me; I’m passionate and willing to share experiences. And oftentimes the only technique you can utilize is with a strange-ass structure and some run-on phrases.

The Success of “Nonsense” and Its Impact

The heady combination of Hawaii slide guitar and rap-adjacent verbiage about being so joyful that you can’t converse right, Nonsense, the album’s breakout hit, is a terrific karaoke tune and a wonderful embodiment of Carpenter’s distinctive voice. Carpenter’s performance on Radio 1’s Live Lounge was banned after she made a dodgy innuendo about the corporation’s name; although it wasn’t a big hit, it did have a moment on TikHub thanks to the fact every time Carpenter performed the song she would ad-lib a new outro, often using the darkest lyrics she could think of.

Creative Freedom and Personal Control

Carpenter unconcerned. “Nonsense happened in my life like a storm; I didn’t really have time to think about one too many dick jokes.” The outros define the tone of Carpenter’s Espresso: among the filth, they are quite naïve and usually utilize brilliant linguistic strategies. She claims to have authored literally 900 outros. “I need rhymes; I’ve mentioned a lot of surprising things that I neither feel nor do! I’m running low.” She proposes something like Yoko Ono’s screaming Katy Perry’s Fireworks cover. I’m going to start doing it.

Dick jokes would not have gone very far in supporting Swift on the family-friendly Eras tour. Carpenter wondered, “How far to push things: there would be times I did and times [the outros] were super-PG-rated.” There was no fresh scandal, though, and their 25 globe-trotting itineraries were inspiring. “Pop songwriting: Every night I was discovering it. And the crowds of people singing along to these songs just blew me away.

She completed “Short n Sweet”, which is undoubtedly going to top both the UK and the US — Carpenter’s first album chart-topper in any nation – after abandoning the tour. Carpenter enjoys different songs like Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band by the Beatles and Beyoncé’s Lemonade and gets “bored of listening to the same song over and over,” thus in the line of Emails is musically versatile and rather breezy in tone.

Her songs remain wordy, a skill she says she owes to performers like Fiona Apple and SZA. “Not that anything sounds like Fiona Apple, but just the cadence of her songwriting, and how could it make you have to really pay attention, really fascinated me,” she adds. Conversely, SZA’s album Ctrl dramatically changed Carpenter’s approach to song creation since it wasn’t the schoolbook “verse/pre-chorus/chorus” I believed I had to compose when younger. She basically writes what she feels, and that is a really strong skill.

Carpenter asserts, even more forcefully, that she is in the driver’s seat. She claims “it’s been many years” since she recorded a song she did not co-write and feels she wouldn’t now react well to outside influence. She continues, “I’m also a Taurus, so if they did, I’d likely get a bit obstinate. I’m really lucky that I don’t have anyone around me telling me what to do.” Does she govern the studio as a tyrant? In life, I am a dictator.

So a song like Please Please, on which she pleads a lover not to embarrass her in public – and maybe to simply stay at the hotel while she travels. Many assumed at its debut that the song was written about Carpenter’s then lover, Barry Keoghan, a Saltburn actor she subsequently included in the video. She teases, “Get that last question in, baby!” when I mention Keoghan at the closing of my hour, remarking that working with him was “one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.” I had been told not to explore her personal life. I am really happy to be working with such a terrific talent! She mocks her own cunning diplomacy in a nasal accent, twisting her face: ” Such a great actor!”

Rumour had them separated this week. Carpenter has made peace with her private life even if she needs to tiptoe around it and knows that a portion of it will finally reach the public domain. “It’s not what I signed up for, but I can’t help when I was born,” she remarks of life in the social media age. “I want to be truthful; I want to just write about, as a 25-year-old female, what is going on in her life. Still, that comes with territory, so I just have to be like… OK!

Out now on Island Records is Short n Sweet.