This article originally appeared in the Spring 2025 Pink Issue of Showstopper Magazine.
Sabrina Carpenter isn’t afraid to show emotion. A teen star turned pop sensation, Sabrina (or “Brina” as many of her fans like to call her) has built her brand on feeling things loudly and to comedic effect. This is her pop persona, but it is also her perspective on life. “I’m so blunt and forward,” she told Time in her Time100 Next interview. “I feel like, what is the reason that we’re all hiding from each other when these are just real things?” Sabrina’s feelings are as real as anyone else’s. They just take place on a much bigger stage.
Divine Timing
This attitude is a moment in time. Her global fandom embraces her oversharing, jokes, and sassy references today, but she knows that this openness is something she and the world around her are working toward. “Even right now, I feel like a lot of my personality has been infused in my music that wouldn’t have made sense to people, really, two or three years ago,” she explained to Vogue. “The jokes land a bit better. It really is just divine timing, and I feel that with everything.”
Having fun and exuding the level of confidence Sabrina is known for doesn’t mean she is rudely tell-all or flippant about her work. Her co-writer, Steph Jones, told Variety that Sabrina is always early to recording sessions. In the same interview, Sabrina revealed that whenever she feels the need to comment on internet speculation about her life and choices, she usually turns to songwriting instead. Sabrina’s not hiding anything, but she doesn’t owe the world everything either.
Espresso-ing Herself
Sabrina isn’t without insecurity. She gets nervous. She doubts herself. She wonders what her next moves will look like. She admitted to Time that her dreams, like performing on Saturday Night Live and for the VMAs, started to come true later than she expected, and she told Interview magazine that she feels the limits of pop music like other stars. “Sometimes I get insecure about pop music and the fact that it can’t always resonate with people,” she said, reflecting on the ways some of her songs find their own fans. Sabrina embraces silly as a lifestyle, but being a pop star is her job, too. She knows when to set realistic expectations.
Sharing fearlessly and leading with confidence—even if, as comedian Taylor Tomlinson puts it, “Every song she has is the most confident song I’ve ever heard in my life”—is a skill. Sabrina projects confidence, and she feels it, but she also knows success doesn’t require a huge ego. “I’m trying to keep present and center myself,” she told Paper magazine. It can be so easy to lose touch of where you are.” Sabrina’s confidence isn’t selfish or at anyone else’s expense—unless you’re the man getting thrown out of a speed boat in her “Espresso” music video.
Fame and Friends
No one builds this kind of success on their own. Sabrina knows what she wants. She’s been chasing her dream of singing and songwriting long before anyone knew her name or face. From a young age, she looked up to icons like Taylor Swift, Sabrina’s now best friend who she opened for on 25 stops of The Eras Tour, and Christina Aguilera. As a kid, Sabrina was bullied for her passion for singing. Now, like her idols, she curated a team of people she likes to work with, including songwriters Steph Jones and Amy Allen and producers Julian Bunetta and Jack Antonoff. She gives this magical team credit for fueling her silly and nonsensical lyrics.
Sabrina’s ability to collaborate helped to build genre flexibility. From the disco feel of “Espresso” to the Dolly Parton twang that emerges in parts of “Please, Please, Please,” Sabrina has infused folk, hip hop, and electronic elements into her music. There’s honesty in genre-hopping and in how she tells her story. The soundtrack to Sabrina’s life doesn’t always sound the same, so she changes the music to meet her needs. Her fans relate to the ups and downs.
“Espresso”: Confident Choice
“Espresso” landed Sabrina over one billion streams on Spotify, her first song to hit the milestone, after a bold Coachella live debut. Vogue called summer 2024 “The Summer of Sabrina.” Everyone from fans to other celebs sang the disco bop compulsively, “I’m working late ’cause I’m a singer” filtering into conversations and car rides at random. The song is a nonchalant take on being an object of obsession, and Sabrina knwe when she wrote it that it was good. She told Paper she lvoed the song from the start and pushed for its release.
The single wasn’t for everyone, though. Sabrina shared with Variety, “I was completely alone in wanting to release ‘Espresso.'” She explained that her team loved it but suggested that higher-ups in her label didn’t see her song’s fierce potential. “…But they trusted me in the end, and I was happy that I believed in myself at that moment.” Confidence in her craft gave the world a song, the perfect earworm for summer adventures (and a confidnece boost for car singalongs).
Switch It Up
Child stars grow up, too. Sabrina dislikes the idea that her early career defines her future. People change and move on. Sabrina’s lyrics even evolve from show to show. For her Emails I Can’t Send Tour and Eras Tour performances, she changed her punny “Nonsense” outro to surprise the crowd and nod to the city she was in. “I’ve written literally 900 outros,” she told The Guardian.
Sabrina’s sixth album Short ‘n Sweet released August 23, 2024, but she considers it more of a sophomore project. Short ‘n Sweet is her second albumm with Island Records and her second post-pandemic project. Before 2020, Sabrina had more credits under her belt than most 21-year-olds—albums, Disney star status, and even a role in the Broadway run of Mean Girls, but the pandemic marked a hard stop on that path. “For the people who love those early records and listen to them, I love you for that,” she says. “But I personally feel a sense of separation from them, largely due to the shift in who I am as a person and as an artist, pre-pandemic and post-pandemic.”
Leaving an Impression
Sabrina’s belief in herself is never-ending. This is obvious in her songs and her performances. Her fans idolize herself for it. They want to look up to someone who doesn’t care about what others think she is doing wrong as much as she does about what she loves and can do. “I’m just annoying. I’m literally just annoying,” she said to Rolling Stone. “I never had the plan B, and it wasn’t even a thought in my mind that it wouldn’t work out. I just always knew it was about not if it would happen but when it would happen.” Believing in “when” instead of “what if” is a powerful mindset.
As unrealistic as becoming a pop star is in the first place, Sabrina knows better than to look at the music industry as something that can be navigated with self-assurance and a love of music alone. She explored the more uncomfortable nuances of her career with The Guardian. “You start to realize that there’s more to all of it than just, like, blood, sweat, and tears and love and talent and passion,” she said. “There’s beautiful sides to this and there’s really dark, weird sides to all of it. I just love doing it—there’s sort of a need for it—and when that’s the thing that’s driving you, success doesn’t really matter. You’re just gonna keep going regardless. I’ve been called a flop many times and here we are, so…”
