Sabrina Carpenter is an artist who has become a household name in recent months. With her single, “Espresso” being played on every radio station over the summer and her Nonsense outros, where she comes up with the most obscene lyrics she can think of, being all over TikTok, it’s impossible to not know who she is. However, Sabrina Carpenter is not an overnight success. She has been in the industry her entire life releasing sixth studio albums since 2015 after getting a record deal. Preceding her singing career, Carpenter first got popular from her role as Maya Fox in the Disney Channel show, Girl Meets World as well as being in many popular movies. 

Although she has been in the industry for two decades, Sabrina Carpenter’s singing career really skyrocketed with her opening for Taylor Swift’s era tour last spring. Her performances put her catchiest songs from her previous album “Emails I Can’t Send” like “Feather” and “Nonsense” on the map displaying to younger fans that she was worthy of her new found title “Pop Princess.” When her sixth studio album “Short and Sweet” came out, it immediately topped the charts in eighteen different countries as well as all twelve of the songs topping the US’s top 100 charts.

Because of her immense growth in popularity over the last year, I knew that the tour for Short and Sweet was going to be quite the event. I quickly learned that this was a correct assumption when all of the tour dates sold out, including the concert in Minneapolis that I was attending.

Upon arrival, I noticed how much the vibe of the concert contrasted with the last concert of Carpenter’s that I went to. When I saw her in fall of 2022 for her “Emails I Can’t Send Tour” the concert tickets were twenty dollars and the venue was a small music hall in south Philadelphia. Now, she was playing for over 20,000 people in a sports arena where the Minnesota Timberwolves play. It was incredible to see how quickly an artist could become a household name. 

In terms of the vibes of the concert itself, the set displayed a very similar aesthetic to what Carpenter has been using to promote her music recently. This aesthetic is fifties inspired outfits as well as commercial-like promotions which have a very similar sound to vintage commercials. It was clear that she was continuing this aesthetic within the tour because at the start of the show, the screen transitioned to a vintage style cartoon displaying her walking through the city, followed by an introduction to her tour by a talk show host’s voice.

At the beginning of the concert, the talk show host (a voice from behind the curtain) introduces the concert as “Sabrina After Dark” and introduces the seventies style talk show theme that will  continue throughout the show. Throughout the concert setlist, songs are broken up into groups spaced out by skits and commercials. For example, Carpenter interweaved commercials with jokes from her songs like a ceiling fan with the phrase “I know you crave fresh air but the ceiling fan is so nice” which is a line from her single “Please Please Please.”

 Similarly the set itself is designed to look like a penthouse which Carpenter uses to her advantage. Each song is performed in a different spot on stage, adding variety to her set. For example, she sings track number six “Bed Chem” while on a round bed off to the side of this stage.

Although it is out of view to some of the audience, the dancers are holding cameras which film Carpenter up close providing the intimate and seductive vibes that she is aiming for with the song. For another one of her songs, Carpenter performs it on the “second floor” of the penthouse set in the bathroom. She sings into the heart shaped mirror on the wall which has a hidden camera allowing the audience to see her.

By changing up the locations of where she is singing as well as creatively separating songs with commercials to enhance the talk show-like feel, Carpenter successfully kept her fans engaged and excited to hear the next song. Sabrina Carpenter plays the entirety of her newest album “Short and Sweet” as well as weaving in between hits from her past. Something that I found interesting during the concert was when Sabrina sang her popular song “Nonsense,” she didn’t sing a new raunchy version of her outro, but instead was lowered under the stage out of view followed by a technical difficulties sign.

There was then a skit of Carpenter’s voice yelling at the narrator from backstage that she was frustrated that there were technical difficulties during the “one part of the show that everyone came for” poking fun at the enormous popularity that her Nonsense outros gave her. By Carpenter omitting from doing the outro, she displayed to the audience that she is entering a new era in her musical career, moving away from an album that came out over two years ago. 

Sabrina Carpenter’s Short and Sweet tour was a breath of fresh air compared to the insanely loud, long and flashy concerts that we have seen in recent years. Instead of being almost four hours long like Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour, Carpenter kept her concert at around one and a half hours staying true to the tour’s name. Each performance within the set had incredible vocals while also incorporating the humor that makes Sabrina Carpenter beloved as an artist. She certainly proved to the audience why the tour was sold out and successfully asserted herself as a force within the music industry.