Sabrina Carpenter

One Liner: Insanely popular pop with zero traction in my brain
Wikipedia Genre: pop, R&B
Home: L.A. (via Quakertown, PA)

Poster Position: The Headliner.
Day: Saturday
Both Weekends.

American Express Stage at 8:40 (she can't even give an hour and a half?!?! The TOP headliner?!?! And it even got five minutes shorter after I originally said that...)

Thoughts:  I fully understand that she is a massive pop star and, like Dual IPA last year, she probably deserves top billing, but you might as well just have Donald Trump reading the Art of the Deal on stage during this hour for as much as this interests me.

Here is what I said about her one album when I reviewed it in February.

"Sabrina Carpenter - Short n' Sweet.  This may sound false, but I am 99% sure that I just heard that "Espresso" song for the first time ever.  Nothing about it sounded familiar in the slightest to me.  As I understand it, that was a huge hit that got parodied on SNL and everything.  1.8 freaking BILLION streams [by the way, up to 2.3 B now in July 2025].  Which is deeply weird, because growing up, I would have definitely heard the most popular song of the year.  Now, hearing it for the first time, it's sort of like seeing Shrek for the first time, after years of people telling me that it was hysterical, and ending up a little less excited about it because it couldn't live up to the hype.  This just sounds like Ariana Grande or Dua Lipa or whatever the newest disco-biting pop thing is.  I don't get the excitement?

She's very pretty, but the song itself just seems entirely generic to me.  I guess I'm not the target audience because I think coffee is gross.  We'll see, maybe my brain will ear worm it and I'll be singing this tonight, but right now I feel like "Taste" is a better track.  Makes me feel like an asshole to dismiss a huge star like this, but I just don't hear anything here that matters.  Some aspects of the poptimism movement make sense to me, but I still can't get my head around trying to act like all sugarpop matters. [finds out Carpenter is the headliner for ACL, sighs deeply, starts to write about how amazing her voice is...]"

Which is true!  She has a pretty voice!  And a really pretty face!  I get why she could be popular.  But the music is just a zero for me.  I really wish this was Olivia Rodrigo.  Anyway, not happening.  Sabrina first came to fame starring on the Disney Channel series Girl Meets World.  I don't know if that is one of the Disney shows that I used to hear blaring from iPads around the house, but I'd guess it likely was.  She signed to Disney Records and started releasing tunes in 2014.  Her first single was "Can't Blame a Girl for Trying."  75.5 million streams.

Haha!  Such a wholesome little Disney pop song with toy piano and strummy strums.  Co-written by Meghan Trainor, so she had some big backing here.  The overacting and vamping with power dimples in that video is amazing.  11 years ago, so she was, uh, 15 years old?  Jeez.  That track made it onto the 2015 album Eyes Wide Open, with an unfortunate cover (being that she is 15) or her lying on her back looking at the camera.  Her next album was 2016's EVOLution (spelled so that the first four letters are backwards to make it spell love).  The hit on that is a vacuously generic pop track called "Thumbs."  353.1 million streams.  I have never heard this before.

Like a bad Rihanna ripoff.  With skiddledeedat dum dum!  I couldn't finish that video.  Just stop making those goofy ass sounds.  Next, we get 2018's Singular Act I and 2019's Singular Act II.  Biggest of either of those (some songs are less than 10 million streams, which is weird to me) is "Looking at Me" with 395.1 million.

Trying that Latin-influenced EDM-lite thing here.  Terrible song from every angle.  2022's e-mails i can't send had her first massive hit, with "Nonsense" grabbing 1.35 BILLION streams.

Okay, I'll go along with that one.  Much better beat in the background and a kind of fun set of lyrics about that feeling when you're falling in love (or lust, maybe).  Wikipedia claims this became a hit because she would add improvised sexually suggestive outros for the song while on tour, which went viral on TikTok.

And then, the world-defeating mega-power of Short n' Sweet, her 2024 album with "Espresso" and "Taste" and "Please Please Please," all three of which have more than a billion streams.  Huge album - as you can see from my review up there, not my cup of tea.  But, it won two Grammy awards, so what do I know?

Early acting included voice work on Sofia the First and a guest role on Law & Order.  She's continued acting, appearing in a bunch of movies I did not see like The Hate U Give, Clouds, The Short History of the Long Road, and an Adventures in Babysitting reboot from 2016.  She also acted on Broadway in the Mean Girls musical.  She was born in Quakertown, PA with three older sisters and was homeschooled.  her father built a home studio and she began studying voice at age six before uploading videos singing covers.  In 2010, she applied to the online singing contest called The Next Miley Cyrus Project, and finished third.  More recently, she got to open for Taylor Swift on some of the Eras Tour stops in 2023 and 2024.  Which sounds sort of insane now that she is so popular.

She has a new album coming out at the end of August.  She's already created controversy because of the release of the cover of the album, which shows Carpenter on her hands and knees with an out-of-frame man grabbing her hair while she "paws" at his leg.  Critics immediately called it degrading to women and problematic.  I don't really care at the end of the day?

If this is your jam, then I hope you have the best time over there watching this go down.  I will be just about anywhere else on earth.