It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Sabrina Carpenter is a really good hang. “Most people who are friends with a pop star would be like, ‘People don’t know that she’s so funny,” says her best friend, Paloma Sandoval. “But actually, it’s this incredibly unique situation where everyone knows that. As far as things that people wouldn’t expect, I would say she’s the smartest person [I’ve] ever met. You’ll never have a conversation with her that’s dumb.”
Considering we spent several hours with Carpenter for the July/August Rolling Stone cover story, we have to agree. Across two different continents, extreme temperatures (a sauna and a cold plunge were involved), and several beverages, Carpenter was deeply insightful and charming. Though our cover story stretched past 6,000 words, we left a lot on the cutting room floor. Here are 17 things that didn’t make it.
The “Manchild” video was inspired by movie trailers.
The video for Carpenter’s latest smash hit, directed by Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia, depicts Carpenter in a chaotic adventure, hitchhiking, hopping on a beefy dude’s motorcycle, bathing with piglets, and so on. “I truly was just watching a shit ton of movie trailers,” she says. “Because I love a good trailer and the way that it’s cut together. You could be crying in three seconds just because of an expression someone makes, or see someone laughing, and then someone crying, and then someone kissing, and then someone dancing. It’s all of those little vignettes that really feel like they tell a whole story in a really short period of time.”
Weed doesn’t agree with her.
Carpenter spoke in her cover story about being selective when she drinks alcohol, especially when she’s on tour. “There’s been a key song in every album that I’ve made since I was legal that has come from a lot of alcohol,” she said. “On the last album, it was ‘Bed Chem.’ We had to be a little tipsy to write that song. I think that’ll be a trend. I never go crazy, but sometimes it’s fun for me.”
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But she’s never been a weed smoker. “It’s just not for me,” she said. “I don’t know how to describe it. It’s not positive. It’s not negative. It literally makes me nothing. I’ve acknowledged that that’s enough for me to go, ‘Why would I ever do it?’ I don’t like the smell of it on clothing. I think that’s also why I steer clear of it. I like things that smell good.” As far as vices go, she loves chocolate: “my vice till the day I die.”
Jack Antonoff loves Electric Light Orchestra.
While Carpenter is a massive ABBA fan — covering the Swedish pop legends on the Short n’ Sweet tour, naming her cats after two of its members, and having Björn Ulvaeus give her a personal tour of the museum in Stockholm — her producer brings another Seventies sound to the mix. “When we’re together, ABBA is a big reference point for her, and ELO is a big reference point for me,” Jack Antonoff told us. “I think those comp each other beautifully. If her reference point was ABBA and mine was Captain Beefheart, that wouldn’t work.”
“On a lot of these recordings, you hear people playing these synthesizers like their heads on fire, and they’re discovering it for the first time,” he adds. “There’s a childlike wonder to that. And what the result is was a super untamed relationship to organic and synthetic, and that concept was something that we fucking loved. Just absolutely loved. Dexys Midnight Runners is another big example for me of that. All these things are happening and they make sense, but it’s such a kaleidoscope.”
Ulvaeus gave Carpenter some advice.
When we interviewed Ulvaeus for the cover story, he had some words of wisdom for ABBA’s biggest fan. “I do have one [piece] of advice,” he said. “Don’t let anyone breathe down your neck. Concentrate on the song and the recording. That’s where it starts. That is the very heart of the whole business. It all starts with a song. Remember that. Don’t tour so much that you cannot concentrate on creating that.”
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Both Ulvaeus and Dolly Parton really believe in her.
Carpenter’s two heroes both said they see a bright future for her, whether it’s starring in films, television, or even in gaming. “I just see her as a smart businesswoman,” Parton said, while Ulvaeus said, “I know her heart is in creating music, and whatever she else does, she will always return to that.”
Parton wants to collaborate again.
Following their “Please Please Please” duet, off the Short n’ Sweet deluxe version, Parton told RS she wants to work with Carpenter again. “I hope she does ask me to sing on something else,” she said. “Maybe someday she’ll sing one of my songs. That would thrill me to death …We just had a connection that was bound to be, and I really think it was for a bigger reason. I can’t wait to see what we do next together, if anything. But I’ll always treasure what we did, whether it’s anything else or not.”
Her sister, Sarah, has never missed a show.
Carpenter describes her sister as “my creative partner slash photographer slash best friend. We do everything together.” Sarah’s role in the Carpenterverse runs deep. She has never missed a single Sabrina concert, and sang backing vocals early on. “Of all of our sisters, I think the two of us were the closest,” Sarah told us. During Carpenter’s Girl Meets World days, Sarah followed Carpenter and their mom to L.A., and even appeared on the show, playing one of the students. “I was like, ‘I want to be with my sister,’” she recalled. “So that’s what I did. And then we just were together, and honestly, I have not left her side since.”
Sarah has future plans for her Polaroids.
Sarah takes Polaroids of Carpenter, using a camera owned by a great uncle, who was from Brooklyn. “You can go to the actual spot where he took this photo from across the Brooklyn Bridge, and it’s right in the neighborhood that I was living in when I first moved to New York,” Carpenter said. Sarah, who posts the photos on a separate Instagram account, has been taking Polaroids of Carpenter for over a decade. “She’s got thousands,” Carpenter says. “They’ve gotten significantly better over the last five years, which has been so special for us, because it really informs all the imagery for everything I do.”
Sarah says she hopes to one day release a book of her sister’s Polaroids. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” she said. “It’s a big dream of mine. That’s definitely on my bucket list. I have ideas and titles in mind. It’s just about timing and what makes sense.”
Carpenter and Sandoval often lie about how they met.
Sandoval, who appeared in Carpenter’s video for “Nonsense” and goes on tour with her, said the duo often makes up stories about how they met. Sometimes they say they met on Bumble or Hinge, or that they’re sisters or cousins, or that she’s her assistant. “We get the question so often, and lying is fun,” Sandoval says. “I’m going to give you the true story, which sounds fake, but we met at a vegan restaurant.” They were introduced through a mutual friend in New York in late 2020. “I didn’t know anything about her except that she was a singer, and she didn’t know anything about me,” Sandoval says. “She goes, ‘Are you guys like vegan or something?’ And we kind of just were like, ‘Well, we thought maybe you were vegan.’ And she goes, ‘Oh, I’m not. Do you guys actually want to not eat here?’”
From there, Sandoval met Sarah, and the three of them started hanging out. “We can’t get rid of each other, we’re attached at the hip,” Sandoval says. “I have no business being best friends with these people and traveling the world with them, but we just clicked so crazy hard.”
Carpenter and Sandoval came up with the concept of “Bed Chem” together.
The Short n’ Sweet highlight was born during the first trip Sandoval took with Carpenter. “It was another incident of me forcing myself upon them,” she jokes. “It was the first time that Sab and I shared a bed. We talked for an hour, and our sentences just trailed off into the abyss, and we both fell asleep. Nine hours passed by. We’ve just had such an amazing sleep, and both of our eyes just flutter open at the same time. We we woke up and just immediately picked back up those words that we had dropped when we fell asleep.”
Sandoval doesn’t remember who said it first, but their peaceful sleep resulted in a cheeky phrase. “One of us said ‘bed’ and the other one said ‘chem,’” she says. “The words appeared above us like a cloud, and we were like, ‘Oh my God, we have bed chem!’ I remember running around the house being like, ‘Yeah, we just found out we had bed chem last night.’ The song ended up being promiscuous, but we just meant we both slept like logs.”
Carpenter cold plunges backstage before her shows.
The Short n’ Sweet tour begins with a video of Carpenter in a bubble bath, only for her to appear onstage in a towel. This isn’t too far from real life: Before every show, she’s plunging in a backstage bathroom in her portable ice bath, minutes before she goes onstage. “Do you want to picture something really silly?” she said. “It’s me in full glam and stage curls, and I don’t put my head in. So it’s just from the neck up, I’m like on-stage Sabrina, and then from neck down, I’m nude.”
Sometimes, Carpenter will plunge outdoors or in spas in whatever city she’s playing She won’t bring her crew (“They have the funniest reaction to getting in. They still shriek or scream and start panicking”), but she does take Sarah and Sandoval. “I would say I’m addicted to the cold plunge because of her,” Sandoval says. “We all have our go-to ice bath song that we listen to, and we know what time it ends. You need to put on your ice-bath song if you’re going to be about that life.”
The first verse of “Manchild” took a minute.
Carpenter wrote the new single with Antonoff and Amy Allen, whom she collaborated with on Short n’ Sweet. “The three of us have become more and more like the Three Musketeers in such a beautiful way,” she said. “We all understand each other so well.”
Carpenter described writing “Manchild” as mostly effortless, except for the first verse, which she described as “a little bit of a bitch. We had all the lyrics and we had no melody, which is weird for us. I think it was because the hook was so strong, and everything else felt so exciting and big, that we didn’t want to start the song on a dumbass note.” But after tinkering with the song for a few days, Carpenter and Allen struck gold. “She’s strumming the chords and I literally read the lyrics off my phone in that melody,” she said. “It was like, ‘that’s it.’ Those moments feel really special, because it feels like a little puzzle piece.”
Her algorithm is just like ours.
Like many of us, Carpenter’s For You Page contains Trader Joe’s products and recipes for her alcoholic beverage of choice. “I get people making their homemade spritzes for the summer, like hugo spritz, limoncello spritz, rhubarb spritz,” she says. “It’s very wholesome.”
There was no master plan behind Short n’ Sweet.
Carpenter is often asked about the evolution between her breakup album Emails I Can’t Send and Short n’ Sweet, but she says it’s not that complicated. There was no master plan to showcase her humor more; it all happened quite naturally. “I truly was just sad when I made Emails I Can’t Send, and then I was happier when I made Short n’ Sweet,” she said. “It wasn’t this grand sit-down meeting where I plotted how I was going to [do] it. It really did just happen organically through a few key songs.”
“The other thing people underestimate is how important the visuals are,” she added. “It brought it all to life. Whether it’s the tour looks, the music video outfits, the kiss mark on my shoulder, and things like that. You could feel like you’re there with me. That was really important to me, but it wasn’t something that I was even aware of until it was done. I was just like, ‘What a magical little world where everything’s making sense and it feels light, funny, and versatile. It feels like me.’ It’s such a beautiful feeling. That’s why I hold this album so close to my heart, and I always will.”
She was more than happy to be the Garfunkel.
Carpenter had a blast duetting with Paul Simon on SNL earlier this year, performing Simon & Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” on the 50th-anniversary special. The line “Cigarettes and magazines” was changed to “Airport lounges and magazines,” which Carpenter said was Simon’s idea. “I think he’s at a point in his life where he’s like, ‘We shouldn’t be promoting smoking,’” she said. “Respect. I would’ve never tampered with the lyrics.”
When asked if she felt strange about the fact that the other half of Simon & Garfunkel was blocks away, presumably sitting in his Upper West Side apartment watching their duet of “Homeward Bound” on television, she shrugged. “I’m not in all that drama,” she said. “But I was like, ‘If someone’s got to step in for this one, I’ll step in.’ No one’s going to put more effort or thought or time into something like that than I would. I know how important that is to someone like him, and the show in general. Paul is literally one of the greatest of all time.”
She would consider banning phones at concerts.
Carpenter said she’s open to the possibility of banning phones at future concerts, requiring fans to lock them in pouches, like Bob Dylan, Adele, Madonna, and others. “This will honestly piss off my fans, but absolutely,” she said. “Because I went to see Silk Sonic in Vegas, and they locked my phone. I’ve never had a better experience at a concert. I genuinely felt like I was back in the Seventies — wasn’t alive. Genuinely felt like I was there. Everyone’s singing, dancing, looking at each other, and laughing. It really, really just felt so beautiful.”
“I’ve grown up in the age of people having iPhones at shows,” she added. “It unfortunately feels super normal to me. I can’t blame people for wanting to have memories. But depending on how long I want to be touring, and what age I am, girl, take those phones away. You cannot zoom in on my face. Right now, my skin is soft and supple. It’s fine. Do not zoom in on me when I’m 80 years old up there.”
She hasn’t totally closed the book on Short n’ Sweet.
In the cover story, Carpenter spoke at length about her decision to release Man’s Best Friend so quickly after Short n’ Sweet (the new album arrives on Aug. 29, exactly 359 days after its predecessor). “If I really wanted to, I could have stretched out Short n’ Sweet much, much longer,” she told RS. “But I’m at that point in my life where I’m like, ‘Wait a second, there’s no rules.’ If I’m inspired to write and make something new, I would rather do that.”
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But that’s not to say that she wouldn’t revisit Short n’ Sweet, especially as she’s still touring behind the album. Carpenter said that if she ever feels like it, she’d release more videos from the album, like “Bed Chem” and “Juno.” “If I feel like I want to wake up one day and make a ‘Busy Woman’ music video in two years, no one’s telling me I can’t,” she said. “I’m in this weird zone right now where I just see the rules meaning less and less.”
She also spoke about formally releasing “Needless to Say,” a vinyl-only bonus track from the album that tackles the endless online scrutiny she faces. “I would put it out when the time is right,” she said. “That was a song that I loved for the longest time but couldn’t really fully put it out. I guess by the time it got to releasing the deluxe, I moved on to a different little sonic chapter. It didn’t feel like it fit anymore. But I’m happy that it still exists in the world on vinyl.”
