Empire Polo Club, Indio, California
The pop star turned the desert into an ambitious theatrical revue with elaborate sets and celebrity cameos
Way back in the good old days of spring 2024, the pop singer Sabrina Carpenter ended her first Coachella set with a bold promise: “He’s drinking my bath water like it’s red wine / Coachella, see you back here when I headline,” she trilled as part of the ever-rotating, always naughty outro lines for her song Nonsense. Carpenter is a famously cheeky performer – her music, chock-full of double entendres and witty punchlines, is as much musical comedy as pop – but it seems, for once, that she was dead serious. Just two years later, she returned to the desert as the calling card for this year’s opening night, tongue still firmly in cheek. “I can’t believe I’m headlining Coachella!” she exclaimed to cheers that, true to form, she immediately melted to laughs – “Actually, I can … but it’s nicer to say that, right?”
Carpenter has reason to boast; the days when she chased virality with bawdy Nonsense outros now seem long gone. Her Coachella debut also marked the release of a daffy ditty called Espresso that soon turned everyone into “that’s that me” caffeine addicts, and catapulted the diminutive pop star (“oh I make quite an impression / five feet, to be exact,” she purrs in the delectable hit Taste) into pop’s big leagues. Near-constant touring and two albums – the no-skips Short n’ Sweet and the comparatively B-side Man’s Best Friend – cemented her status as one of pop’s consummate entertainers, churning out finely crafted, relentlessly horny hits at a pace not seen since perhaps Rihanna in the early 2010s. Nonsense, that 2022 song that first got my attention, didn’t even make the 20-plus song set list at Carpenter’s wildly ambitious headlining set, an audacious flex of ability and budget that declared her intentions for A-list permanence.
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