The cover interview
The singer on touring with Taylor Swift and staying in her own lane
Forgive me for starting this story off on such a deeply woo-woo note, but there’s really no other way to say it: when Sabrina Carpenter and I part ways after a two-hour breakfast at Sant Ambroeus in the West Village, New York, her taking off into a black car in a big furry leopard-print bucket hat, my first thought is that she operates with the knowing self-awareness of someone who’s been here before. It’s not enough to call the 25-year-old ‘mature’ or an ‘old soul’ – although both of those things are true, platform boots and micro-miniskirts be damned.
It’s more that she walks through the world already embodying some of the lessons that take many of us decades or even a lifetime to learn: how to trust her gut, never take herself too seriously (while still working really hard) and the magic of staying present in the moment. Then there’s this insight, which she dropped between bites of toast, ‘I feel like I have a very, very strong relationship with the universe and not even in an astrology-type or spiritual way. I think I’ve always just been very good at knowing the things that I want to do and that I can make them happen.’ You walk away from a conversation with Sabrina thinking, ‘Damn, she’s really got this figured out.’
And it’s a good thing she does, because with the kind of year she’s had – including the fever dream of opening for one-ofher-longtime-idols-turned-friends Taylor Swift on a tour that’s become a once-in-a-generation culturally defining moment – it would be all too easy to lose touch with her sense of reality.
Of course, Sabrina does have more than a decade of experience navigating a career in the spotlight, having landed her first role at age 11 on NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and then, in almost rapid succession, starring in Disney’s Girl Meets World and Netflix’s Work It, putting out five albums with her addictively feminine, extremely layered pop sound and all too relatable relationship-centric lyrics, touring the world and building an Instagram following that’s more than 33-million-fans strong. And the thing is, she seems to be having fun with it all. Exhibit A: the way she custom-writes and belts out delightfully raunchy new outros to her hit song Nonsense throughout The Eras Tour (and during her Emails I Can’t Send Tour, too), tweaked specifically to whatever city she happens to be performing in1 .
Meanwhile, not unlike the megastar she’s been opening for, parts of her personal life play out for public consumption via a self-feeding loop of lyrics and gossip a
