All the nonsense you need to know about Sabrina Carpenter

The latest chapter of Sabrina Carpenter’s quest to become the most prolific 4’11” person on the planet is a new album. The singer, famous for working late, released Short n’ Sweet, a 12-song pop confection brimming with playfulness and humor. To celebrate, Carpenter released a video for “Taste,” a sugary rock tune about the poor, unfortunate soul unlucky enough to date one of her exes.
“You can have him if you like, I’ve been there, done that once or twice,” Carpenter purrs, before coyly referencing her own boyfriend-stealing drama (more on this down below). “And singing about it, don’t mean I care. Yeah, I know I’ve been known to share.”
With the help of scream queen Jenna Ortega, Carpenter’s video is a reference to the 1992 horror comedy Death Becomes Her, starring Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn. Like Streep’s and Hawn’s Mad and Hel, Carpenter’s and Ortega’s characters hate each other, can’t stop killing each other, and are also — unlike their predecessors — more than slightly horny for each other. Like so many of her hits (there are very few souls on the planet who are not familiar with her smash “Espresso”), “Taste” has Carpenter’s signature combination of Betty Boop-ish sex appeal undercut by an extremely self-aware edge.
It’s nonsense, and nonsense is actually what 25-year-old Carpenter does best.
Whether it be sex with exes, dirty rhyme schemes, or being hot, a clown, or the other woman, Carpenter’s surprisingly long career has been seriously devoted to never taking things too seriously.
With the success of “Espresso,” which was released in April and became the biggest song of summer, it might seem like Carpenter simply materialized out of thin air. But she didn’t just come out of nowhere.
Carpenter has been releasing music since her debut album Eyes Wide Open in 2015, five albums in total. She started out honing her craft as part of the Disney machine, breaking out on Girl Meets World in 2014. But it’s her presence in one of the biggest songs in 2021, one she didn’t actually sing, that made the then-21-year-old famous.
Turn the clock back a little over three years: 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo had just burst on the scene with “Drivers License,” an angsty ballad about a boy who broke her heart. In it, Rodrigo hints that the breakup involved another woman. “And you’re probably with that blonde girl,” she sings, adding: “She’s so much older than me. She’s everything I’m insecure about.”
Since this is an article about Sabrina Carpenter, and Carpenter is blonde and four-ish years older than Rodrigo, you’ve probably guessed that Carpenter is who Rodrigo might be singing about.
Rodrigo acted on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, a show on Disney+, and was rumored to be dating co-star Joshua Bassett. The two wrote songs together, some of which were featured on the program. The characters they played — Nini and Ricky — were a romantic pair. Disney couldn’t have asked for a better script.
But in August 2020, Rodrigo hinted she was going through a breakup. Around the same time, Bassett was spotted with Carpenter, a fellow Disney star. Adding fuel to the fire, Bassett and Carpenter donned a couples costume for Halloween, going as Sharkboy and Lavagirl.
Despite all these public appearances and social media clues, Rodrigo, Carpenter, and Bassett have never explicitly addressed the love triangle they may or may not have been a part of. But they haven’t explicitly denied the rumors either. Like Rodrigo, Carpenter seems to have turned it into music.
Carpenter seemed to address the drama in her 2021 song “Skin.” “Maybe you didn’t mean it. Maybe blonde was the only rhyme,” Carpenter sings, telling the subject of her song — who may or may not be Rodrigo — that she’s sorry but not that sorry, and she won’t let the digs get under her, under her, under her skin.
It’s a relatively plaintive track that wasn’t as big as “Drivers License” — not many songs are as big as Rodrigo’s monster hit. It wasn’t until her next album, 2022’s emails i can’t send, that Carpenter gave her final word and started to lean into her new persona. On the sneakily edged “Because I Liked a Boy,” Carpenter is even less apologetic. She declares that she is going to be herself — the other woman, the cool girl, the hot girl, the mean girl, and everything in between — because that person can’t be any worse than what’s already been said about her (“Now I’m a homewrecker, I’m a slut I got death threats filling up semi-trucks”).
“Dating boys with exes. No, I wouldn’t recommend it.” Carpenter cheekily sings. It’s a poppier, more ironic take on her new bad-girl image.
At first blush, the Rodrigo-Carpenter dynamic doesn’t seem to be that different from the way culture has always pitted pop princesses against each other. Whether it’s Britney and Christina, Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, Brandy and Monica, or Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, there’s always been an inclination that every female pop star needs a rival.
Thanks to the alleged love triangle, Rodrigo and Carpenter have that built in. They have very thinly veiled songs about each other — a territory some of those past “rivals” have never really ventured in.
But what makes the Rodrigo-Carpenter dynamic unique is that they’ve both figured out how to make the “rivalry” work in their favor, embracing their respective images even while leaving the specific rivalry behind. They’re each more famous than their supposed feud. They’re each more famous than the boy, too.
Both singers make art that illustrates that liking boys is a humiliating experience. Rodrigo’s music is all about getting dumped by losers; Carpenter’s is about how all these losers are obsessed with her. Being dumped by a guy who dresses up as Sharkboy is equally as pathetic as dressing up as Lavagirl with that same guy.
At the end of the day, they both come to the same realization: When it comes to men, there is no winning — unless it’s using them to make some really good pop music.
Prior to this summer, the biggest hit of Carpenter’s pop career was an easy, breezy pop confection called “Nonsense.” It’s not about Rodrigo or Bassett, but about how liking a boy makes Carpenter feel (hint: silly). The song has a splendid little bit in which Carpenter sings, “It feels so good, I had to jump the octave,” and she does in fact, sing up a note. Carpenter is not afraid of a gimmick, a little wordplay, or even some wink-y pandering to the audience.
Her commitment to the bit was a huge part of what made “Nonsense” so popular. In live performances, Carpenter started ad-libbing the outro of the song. The original goes:
When she toured in Europe in 2023 she gave her German audience a bespoke naughty verse:
Fans who came and saw her perform at Coachella this year saw Carpenter reference her boyfriend Barry Keoghan’s infamous Saltburn scene:
During a stop in Sydney:
Last year, she even created a special holiday edition, “A Nonsense Christmas” in which she somehow naughties holiday cheer and gift-giving:
Iambic pentameter this is not, but Carpenter’s schtick of cheeky, PG-13 rhymes showed off a pop star who isn’t afraid to laugh, especially at her own expense. While these outros could easily fall into raunch or being explicit, Carpenter uses wit as her restraint. Clown humor gives her something to play her image and our expectations against.
Carpenter’s interplay between humor and hotness is also evident in her video for “Feather,” a cotton candy-like kiss-off. The video has Carpenter pulling up to a church in a bubblegum pink hearse. It turns out her blush-hued deathmobile is full of the bodies of creepy men ogling her, and Carpenter is praying for their souls as she traipses through the chapel in a black veil and tulle lingerie.
The video was filmed at Brooklyn’s Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church and eventually made its way to the higher-ups at the Brooklyn Archdiocese, who were extremely upset at the video’s imagery. They admonished not just Carpenter but the staffers who approved the video shoot.
Carpenter was unfazed by the holy rebuke. “We got approval in advance,” she told Variety. “And Jesus was a carpenter.”
According to Johnny Cash and the Gospel of Mark, Sabrina is correct.
While you could chalk a song like this summer’s smash hit “Espresso” up to luck, it’d be a disservice to Carpenter and how hard she’s worked. In reality, “Espresso” is a perfect capsule of what makes her so special.
This is a former Disney kid who’s been playing the game for a decade. For the last few years, she’s carefully crafted a savvy, in-on-the-joke image. She’s also been putting in the work on the festival circuit and taking opportunities like the MTV VMAs pre-show (Rodrigo performed at the main show), crafting her naughty jingles and taking them on the road. This summer, she opened for Taylor Swift (who, according to certain fans, may be employing Carpenter as part of a proxy war against Rodrigo, who may or may not have written her song “Vampire” about Swift) and performed at Coachella, where she debuted “Espresso.”
The song being a massive hit is no doubt lucky, but Carpenter put herself in the best position to make that good fortune happen.
It also helps that “Espresso” effectively crystallizes the persona that Carpenter has been creating for herself: a proudly flippant ditz who is so much savvier than she seems.
Take that song’s hook, which isn’t just an ear-worm but a brain-worm: Grammatically, the phrase “that’s that me espresso” is a train wreck with no survivors. After listening to the song hundreds of times, I still cannot figure out if the “me espresso” in question is a metaphor in which Carpenter is comparing her essence to that of espresso. Or perhaps it’s possessive and “me espresso” refers to something of hers. Maybe she is simply identifying an entirely new type of coffee beverage.
Later in the song, flanked right up against the chorus, Carpenter admits she’s up past her bedtime too. She sings that she’s “working late” because she’s a “singer,” emphasizing that final syllable in a comically exaggerated way. She stresses the “er” in singer, forcing the word to rhyme with fin-ger. I now no longer want to pronounce singer any other way.
But what if this is the correct way? What if everything we thought we knew about singers is wrong? Are singers putting in the same hours as diner waitresses and convenience store clerks? How long, exactly, did it take to create “Espresso?”
Carpenter’s equally playful on the new, folksy “Slim Pickins.” She inverts the “stand by your man” country trope by singing a love song to her last resort. She knows Mr. Right is out there, but he didn’t text back. And now she’s stuck with someone who did. “If I can’t have the one I love, I guess it’s you that I’ll be kissin’ — just to get my fixings,” she coos.
And she continues this tradition of flanking cheeky wordplay and sparkly synths in “Juno.” On the surface, the song sounds the way your first teenage crush feels. It’s airy and bouncy, sweet like cotton candy.
“You make me wanna make you fall in love,” Carpenter purrs right before the chorus. Then she goes for the surprise — referencing a 2007 teenage pregnancy movie. “If you love me right, then who knows? I might let you make me Juno.”
God, that’s so dumb. And so brilliant. That’s that me espresso.
Update, August 23, 4:40 ET: This post was originally published on May 14 and has been updated with information about Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet.