Sabrina Carpenter would be the first to admit that “Emails I Can’t Send,” her fifth and most recent album, was like going back to square one. “I saw it as my first big-girl album, for sure,” the 24-year-old says over the phone from Rio de Janeiro, where she’s about to open for Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour.”
That growth is the hallmark of “Emails,” which she repackaged as a deluxe version (with the title “Emails I Can’t Send Fwd”) this past March. The star of the 2014-17 Disney Channel comedy “Girl Meets World” had a new lease on life going into her most critically acclaimed work to date, signing with Island Records after a split from her longtime label, the Disney-owned Hollywood Records. She now has the freedom to express herself creatively.
“Island kind of let me run off and make the album I always dreamt of making that I couldn’t make before,” she says.
Why not?
“For political reasons I can’t get into,” she says. “But also I didn’t have the perspective to make that album when I was younger. I don’t think I could have dug that deep, maybe the capacity wasn’t there.”
“Emails” became Carpenter’s highest-charting album and reintroduced the Quakertown, Pa., native as a savvy pop storyteller, setting tales of heartbreak in a conversational tone against R&B-spangled backdrops. For the album, Carpenter tightened her creative circle from her last album, 2019’s “Singular: Act II,” which had 22 songwriters across nine songs. On “Emails,” she largely co-wrote with Julia Michaels, JP Saxe and Leroy Clampitt, making shimmering songs like the single “Fast Times” and “Tornado Warning,” where she sings of ignoring a lover’s red flags and lying to her therapist about it.
Though her subject matter can be weighty, Carpenter often runs her perspective through a comedic filter that brings levity to her music. Fans on social media clocked every performance of her hit “Nonsense” while she was on her 80-date international headlining tour, where she would custom-fit the song’s lyrics to the respective cities. She’s still doing it on the “Eras Tour.” (Sample: “This crowd is giving me all the endorphins / I wish someone could rearrange my organs / Philly is the city I was born in.”)
“These are kind of the jokes I make on a daily basis,” she says. “Humor is such a healing part of my life. And I use it in everything — that’s how a lot of my songs happen.”
Her humor has landed her in what some might call controversy, too, when the Brooklyn Catholic church where she lensed her blood-soaked music video for “Feather” claimed it had to re-bless the establishment after the clip’s release. Most recently, a priest was removed from administrative duties for letting her film there. (“We got approval in advance,” she says of the shoot, adding, “and Jesus was a carpenter.”) But it’s part of what helped her graduate from the squeaky-clean star of “Girl Meets World” into a sometimes-racy singer whom audiences are still discovering.
And there’s more to come. She dropped a holiday EP in November. And after a brief break before rejoining Swift’s trek in February, Carpenter plans to release more new music, fully aware that she’s in her reinvention era.
“I never would have expected that going on a tour would have amplified the songs the way that it did,” she says. “And I just feel lucky that people have found them in different places and now see them in different lights. I’m just as astounded as anyone else.”
