Sabrina Carpenter brought her latest world tour in for a landing Sunday night at Crypto.com Arena, where the pop star will play half a dozen sold-out dates through Nov. 23 to wrap up her year-long road show behind 2024’s “Short n’ Sweet.”
I was at Crypto when Carpenter played the arena last November, just after “Short n’ Sweet” was nominated for six Grammys. (It went on to win prizes for pop vocal album and pop solo performance.) But since then she’s released a speedy follow-up LP, “Man’s Best Friend,” which itself earned another six Grammy nods this month, including album, record and song of the year.
So it seemed worth checking in on the tour again as Carpenter, 26, gets close to stepping offstage. At least for a moment, that is: Come April, she’ll be back in the spotlight to headline Coachella along with Karol G and Justin Bieber. Here are the seven best moments from Sunday’s concert:
1. Turns out that earlier visit to the Lakers’ home wasn’t quite as cheery as it seemed then. “This time last year, when I played this show, I was going through it,” Carpenter told the crowd Sunday night. “I was not in a good headspace, and thankfully because of that I was able to write a whole new album for you guys this year.”
“Man’s Best Friend” follows Carpenter’s breakup with the Irish actor Barry Keoghan, whom she seems to refer to in her song “Go Go Juice” when she threatens to drunk-dial an ex named Larry. “So thank you for Crypto last year,” she added, “’cause you really inspired ‘Man’s Best Friend’ and what was to come after that.”
2. Carpenter didn’t sing “Go Go Juice” on Sunday, though she did throw a few tunes from “Man’s Best Friend” into a set list still dominated by material from “Short n’ Sweet.” (“Short n’ Sweet” is the better of the two albums, so this was fine.)
For the lightly country-fied “Manchild,” the singer and her dancers did a cute little line dance, and Carpenter’s live band powered “Tears” with some appealingly skanky disco-funk energy. The evening’s surprise song — the product of a regular bit in which Carpenter selects a tune via spin the bottle — was the new album’s “Nobody’s Son,” which emulates Ace of Base’s Nordic reggae more precisely than anyone else has in the past 30 years.
3. In one of the show’s other recurring bits, Carpenter pretended to arrest one of her opening acts, Amber Mark, with a pair of fuzzy pink handcuffs before singing the very horny “Juno.” That song features Carpenter simulating a different sexual position every night; here, well, you can look it up on TikTok.
4. Shout out to Carpenter’s guitar player, Caleb Nelson, whose ripping solo in “Juno” made the tune sound just like the theme from “Beverly Hills, 90210.”
5. “I’m gonna give you a little bit of history that you didn’t ask for,” Carpenter said about halfway through the concert, which ended up being a selective rundown of gigs she’s played in L.A. since she was a teenager on the Disney Channel.
“I played the Roxy when I was 16, and then I think played the Wiltern,” she said. “Then I played the Fonda and then the Wiltern again. And then I went to the … the Greek! Went to the Greek, of course — that was the best night ever.”
6. It says something about Carpenter’s commitment to the concept of her show, which takes place in the various rooms of a late-’60s/early-’70s-style bachelorette pad, that after dozens of tour dates she’s still performing one of her most emotionally cutting songs, “Sharpest Tool,” while sitting on a toilet.
7. Carpenter closed, as she always does, with “Espresso,” and if you’d assumed that by now this breezy electro-pop bop would inevitably have lost some of its fizz, think again. “I’m working late ’cause I’m a singer,” she sang as she strutted down a runway jutting onto the arena floor. It’s a task she’s still up to.
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