Sabrina talked to and posed for Paper Magazine. Photos from the photoshoot have been added to the gallery and the full article can be read below.

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“Sorry! I’m in a hilly-type area. Can you hear me?” Sabrina Carpenter’s sweet voice pours out from the other end of the call. She’s just returned from a well-documented Euro holiday (vivid photos of the star making pasta from scratch, donning a Baywatch red swimsuit by a crystal blue sea and roaming the streets of Paris with the caption “my give a fucks are euhhh how do u say”). Now she’s back home in Los Angeles, taking our chat while riding shotgun in the car. “I don’t really know what time it is anymore”, she says, noting her recent jet-setting. I joke that at least she knows she’s on Earth. She jests back, “I actually don’t know if I’m on Earth. It may be a different planet”. Anyone witnessing Carpenter’s meteoric rise over the past year could imagine it’s hard for her to stay close to the ground. “I’m trying to keep present and center myself”, she says. “It can be so easy to lose touch of where you are”.

This past June, Carpenter secured her first No. 1 hit with the teasing, tongue-in-cheek love song, “Please Please Please”. Her previous single, the summery disco jaunt “Espresso”, peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard chart not long after, making the 25-year-old singer the first solo artist in chart history to have two simultaneous top-three hits. This feat was made even more staggering by the fact that it happened six studio albums into Carpenter’s career. “I believe in divine timing, I always have”, she says of her steady, then rapid ascent. “There are moments in everyone’s life where the stars align. But it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t spent the last years working so hard. Not for these things that are happening now, but just working so hard to feel true to my own voice and excited about the things I’m making. I had to fight off a lot of voices and opinions and people controlling me when I was younger, whether that be in music or acting, because I was a child coming into this”.

Though she grew up acting and doing small parts on TV, Carpenter’s first real brush with celebrity was on the Disney Channel, starring in 2013’s Girl Meets World series. She began releasing music in 2014 but didn’t sign a major label deal until 2021 with Island Records. In 2022, Carpenter released emails i can’t send, her debut on the label that marked a turning point for the singer. A 2023 bonus track from the album, “Feather”, became a standout, quickly climbing the US pop charts and drumming up attention for its visuals, which were recorded in a Catholic Church. In response to the backlash she faced from those who called the video sacrilegious, Carpenter simply said she’d had permission to film, adding: “Jesus was a carpenter”. That same year, she opened for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. “I’m so, so lucky that it’s happening at a time where I feel most aligned with myself”, she says. “I feel more myself than I ever have, and that’s something I’m really grateful for”.

Although Carpenter may not have known exactly when all her hard work would pay off, she never questioned that it would happen. “I don’t know how to describe it”, she says. “When you’re a child and you just have a feeling of, I know I’m going to do this someday. I know I’m going to do this for the rest of my life. I know this is the path I need to follow, whatever that means for me, and whatever success that means for me is what I’m destined for. I have dreams and goals, and I will say I’m a little bit of a freak manifester sometimes, which is a blessing and a curse depending on how you look at it. I always knew deep down that this was something I would do with my life, and I didn’t ever really doubt that, even when shit was hitting the ceiling fan”, she laughs, quoting her own “Please Please Please” lyrics. “No pun intended. I don’t think I ever doubted it”.

In the spring of 2024, Carpenter gave “Espresso” a live premiere at Coachella. The crowd was entranced as the pint-sized blonde bombshell sang the words, “Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know/ That’s that me espresso”, permanently embedding it into our collective consciousness. As PAPER watched her perform the single for the first time on stage, it seemed obvious Carpenter had a hit — something she’d felt hints of while recording in studio. “When I was writing [‘Espresso’], I knew I loved it”, she says. ” I don’t ever want to make myself sound like a psychic. All I knew was that I was faced with a decision of what song I wanted to put out into the world first when it came to this album, I was like, I think this is the time for this song. This makes the most sense for me right now and where I’m at in life”.

The brazen wording and sassy delivery of “Espresso” matched the energy Carpenter had found success with from her previous album:the cheeky dance track “Feather” and sultry, R&B number “Nonsense”. “All things considered, I was really grateful that ‘Nonsense’ and ‘Feather’ formed little lives of their own, because [they represented] this side of my personality, but also pop music that was really exciting and fun and funny and playful and charming”, she says. “I love listening to music that makes me feel that way. I thought it was only appropriate to be able to bring in my new project with a song like that”.

Carpenter’s desire to share moments that are “playful and charming” has been on full display in recent setlists, where she adds a punny, hilarious outro — different every show — to her track “Nonsense”, highlighting her penchant for sharp, witty and sometimes sexy turns of phrases. At this year’s Gov Ball in New York, she mixed innuendo with a Pride shoutout, saying, “Do I text him back? It’s such a tough call/ That won’t fit inside me, bro, I’m dumb small/ People who hate Pride can suck my Gov Balls”. Then at her BBC Radio 1 performance, Carpenter got slyly suggestive again, telling the audience, “BBC said I should keep it PG/ BBC I wish I had it in me/ There’s a double meaning if you dig deep”.

“The ‘Nonsense’ outros were a happy accident”, she says. “I didn’t sit around a table of marketing people who said, ‘You know what you should do every night?’ It was literally my sister and I that were like ‘I have all these extra lines from the song. Let’s shout out the city!’ Then it took on a life of its own”.

On the second weekend of Coachella, Carpenter’s outro referenced her current boyfriend, Academy Award-nominated Barry Keoghan’s recent film Saltburn, specifically a scene where he drinks someone’s filthy bathwater: “Made his knees so weak he had to spread mine/ He’s drinking my bath water like it’s red wine. Coachella see you back here when I headline”. The more Carpenter said something that was “even slightly unserious”, she says “it made the show more fun”.

Carpenter followed this model when writing “Please Please Please”, which she says is her “personality in a nutshell”. In the track, she sweetly tells her lover, “Heartbreak is one thing my ego’s another/ I beg you don’t embarrass me motherfucker”, with a hint of twang, before begging, “Please, please, please”. “I think dating men in general, you’re setting yourself up for a little bit of that”, she says. “That was how it came about, because I was like, ‘You know, I think this is funny, but it’s real.’ I definitely remember leaving and questioning it, and it wasn’t until I wrote the bridge that I realized that was the song I’d dreamt about writing my whole life”.

Carpenter’s sixth album Short n’ Sweet drops on August 23, followed by a sold-out global arena tour of the same name. The LP offers a more honest and irreverent version of the singer, with the style and delivery of someone who grew up during pop music’s heyday of the early 2000s.

In “Taste”, Carpenter speaks plainly about messy relationship dynamics, mixing lyrics like “I’ve been known to share” and “you’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissing you”. When asked if she’s ever reluctant to write so boldly about taboo topics, especially in relation to past coverage she’s had in the press, Carpenter explains what she calls the “scary truth”. She says, “I will write any song. It doesn’t mean I’ll put it out, but I’ll write it. I think the series of unfortunate events I’ve encountered in relationships are no secret to people who know me or think they know me”.

“Bed Chem”, another album highlight, shows off Carpenter’s sensual side over sexy, groovy production. “There was a lot of steam in the studio. It was real hot and heavy”, Carpenter says, deepening her voice seductively, before breaking into laughter. “No, I’m kidding. My friend Paloma [Sandoval] and I coined the term [‘bed chem’]. I went to the studio that day and was like, ‘I have this title and idea, and we have to make it sexy and a little bit unserious at the same time because it is such a ridiculous concept”. The track’s throwback sound pulls from the songs Carpenter grew up listening to. “I love Christina [Aguilera]”, she says. “That was one of my very first idols and icons. I was 11 years old and you couldn’t get her name out of my mouth. She’s very special to me. Those songs raised me”. There are definitely traces of pop icons of the past throughout Short n’ Sweet, but it shifts from country to pop to R&B to disco. Carpenter is excellent at genre-hopping.

“I’ll put it this way: when I was younger, I was told by a lot of grown men that I needed to pick a genre, stay in that genre, be that genre and do one thing”, she says. “And there wasn’t even a genre that excited me at the time. It was their idea of what I should be. I was like 12 or 13. I know that sounds insane, but that was put into my head. So I think secretly my entire life, the goal was to be able to create something that felt multi-genre but also so distinctly myself. Sonically, all the songs are different, but the lyrical perspective is all Sabrina. It’s all me and it’s all stories in my life. That’s the throughline”.

Carpenter hopes that dodging genres will give her listeners everything they need. “If your favorite song is ‘Espresso,’ then you’ll have another song that you love. And if your favorite song is ‘Please’ Please Please,’ you’ll have another song that you love. And if you hate both of those songs, then listen to a different album”, she jokes. “I’m grateful for the people for tuning in, whether it be 10 years ago, five years ago, yesterday or tomorrow, in two years. There’s definitely some people that are still not tuned in. I plan on tuning them in”.

With a high-profile relationship, rumors that make headlines and songs that seem to publicly pull the curtain back on every aspect of her life, it’s easy to believe we know everything about Carpenter and her music. “There’s more to me than my [hit songs]”, she says. “There’s a person under there that some days feels really confident and some days literally just can’t get out of bed”, she says. “I think that’s really important for people to understand, regardless of who they listen to, that they’re a person”.

As the call ends, Carpenter anticipates the nearing release date of Short n’ Sweet. “I get so scared to share anything”, she admits, her voice revealing a rare hint of tension for the first time in our conversation. Underneath the timeless Hollywood pin-up beauty and confident breakup ballads, there’s a vulnerable and earnest young woman, thrilled and nervous to share her true self and most important creative project to date with the world.

Source: Paper