Pop

Sabrina Carpenter got an up-close-and-personal look at just how hard Taylor Swift rocks the stage when she opened for the Tortured Poets Department star on the Latin American, Australian and Singaporean legs of Swift’s Eras Tour in late 2023 and early 2024. And in a new interview with Variety, Carpenter says what she came away with was an indisputable fact: “Taylor is a rock star!”

The comment came while the singer/actress was perusing the racks at a Los Angeles record store and noticed that Swift’s latest chart-topping album was filed in the rock section. “She’s just such a gangster with all of it. No matter what people are saying, everything that I’ve ever seen her tackle, she’s done so with grace,” Carpenter added about the opening slot she has called a “dream come true.”

That dream has become a reality, with Carpenter, 25, telling the magazine that Swift is now, “one of my best, best friends, and we grab dinner or text and catch up like you would with your best friend.”

The story also touches on her relationship with Saltburn actor Barry Keoghan. While Carpenter was cagey about details, she did reveal that the actor was totally into the Basic Instinct-inspired video treatment for her Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit “Please Please Please,” which features lyrics about a troublesome thespian boyfriend. “He loved the song. He’s obsessed with the lyrics, and I’m so grateful for that,” she says of the track on which she famously warns: “Heartbreak is one thing/ My ego’s another/ I beg you don’t embarrass me mother f–ker.”

She adds, “I don’t want to sound biased, but I think he’s one of the best actors of this generation. So getting to see him on the screen with my song as the soundtrack made the video better and all the more special.”

The video is, of course, part of the wind-up to Carpenter’s anticipated upcoming sixth studio album, Short n’ Sweet (August 23), which she refers to as the “hot older sister” of 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send. “It’s my second ‘big girl’ album; it’s a companion but it’s not the same. When it comes to having full creative control and being a full-fledged adult, I would consider this a sophomore album,” she says of the earlier collection that featured the singles “Vicious,” “Nonsense” and “Fast Times.”

And, despite “Espresso” climbing all the way up to No. 3 on the Hot 100 and its weirdly alluring hook (“That’s that me, espresso”) becoming a ubiquitous meme this summer, Carpenter reveals that she was “completely alone” in wanted to release it as the first single. “Not so much from my immediate team. But when it came to ‘the powers above,’” she says in air quotes about unnamed naysayers who didn’t get it, “there was a lot of questioning behind whether it made sense. But they trusted me in the end, and I was happy that I believed in myself at that moment.”