{"id":393714,"date":"2026-04-11T19:53:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T19:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/393714\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T19:53:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T19:53:09","slug":"sabrina-carpenters-coachella-prediction-comes-true","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/393714\/","title":{"rendered":"Sabrina Carpenter’s Coachella prediction comes true"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2024, the last time Sabrina Carpenter<\/a> graced Coachella\u2019s<\/a> main stage, she held down a late afternoon slot at the festival. At the time, the pop vocalist had been opening for some of Taylor Swift\u2019s \u201cEras\u201d<\/a> tour dates \u2014 which led to rumors that Carpenter might bring out Swift during her Coachella set. Carpenter instead savored the moment for herself, flitting with her dancers through a set fashioned to look like a midcentury motel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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A few songs into that set, Carpenter took the mic and introduced a new tune that had dropped that same day. It was called \u201cEspresso.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Few in the crowd could have predicted that the fizzy song, while a banger, would become such a stratospheric hit. \u201cEspresso\u201d hovered for over a year on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and turbocharged Carpenter\u2019s career. She\u2019s since hosted \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d and starred in an anniversary special of \u201cThe Muppet Show.\u201d Carpenter, however, seemed to have prophetic designs. Before departing the festival stage that year, she grinned at the audience and declared: \u201cSee you back here when I headline!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"Sabrina<\/p>\n

Sabrina Carpenter performs at the Coachella Stage during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club on Friday, April 10, 2026, in Indio, CA.<\/p>\n

Kayla Bartkowski\/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Two years later practically to the day, Carpenter indeed returned as a festival headliner \u2014 just as she\u2019d predicted. In a high-concept Friday night show featuring an extravagant set and assists from Hollywood heavy hitters including Will Ferrell and Susan Sarandon, Carpenter completed the idiosyncratic star turn she\u2019d long envisioned for herself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ahead of her headlining stint, Carpenter said in an interview that <\/a>her Coachella gig would be \u201cthe most ambitious show I\u2019ve ever done,\u201d adding that she started plotting it out seven months ago. Even for a festival stage that\u2019s seen no shortage of wildly inventive set designs over the years, Carpenter\u2019s five-act opus stood out in its grandeur.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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She began the show with an ominous black and white short film depicting her driving out to the desert, stopped by a cop (played by Sam Elliott) warning her about the dangers of California. Carpenter then emerged in real life from a classic car, one of several lined up near the far end of the stage. She walked along a narrow catwalk studded with stars, not unlike the Hollywood Walk of Fame, transforming from black and white to Technicolor when the light shone on her. She bounded onto an immersive set meant to resemble the mountains surrounding Los Angeles, dotted with houses and twinkling against the sky.<\/p>\n

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\"Sabrina<\/p>\n

Sabrina Carpenter performs at the Coachella Stage during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club on Friday, April 10, 2026, in Indio, CA.<\/p>\n

Kayla Bartkowski\/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images<\/p>\n

But shortly after launching into \u201cTaste,\u201d the mountains cracked open to reveal a series of rooms, where actors were going through the grueling rigor of auditions. At another point, Carpenter danced atop massive letters reading out \u201cSabrinawood,\u201d modeled after the most recognizable landmark in Los Angeles, and jumped into a recording booth to pull off a stirring version of \u201cPlease Please Please.\u201d Designed by Stufish Entertainment Architects, the elaborate modular set acted as another layer within the narrative of Carpenter performance: The story of a young woman who still believes it\u2019s possible to make one\u2019s way in show business, even if the path is unorthodox.<\/p>\n

Carpenter cuts a unique figure in the contemporary pop landscape. An expressive vocalist who\u2019s been releasing records since 2014, Carpenter seems nonplussed that her brand of expletive-laden, no-nonsense pop isn\u2019t for everyone. In fact, she relishes that her fans are mostly women. During the performance, Carpenter complimented her female fans\u2019 festival getups, clocking how much time and effort it took them to put together. As for the boys? \u201cYou must have tried as well,\u201d she said, shrugging.<\/p>\n

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\"Sabrina<\/p>\n

Sabrina Carpenter performs at the Coachella Stage during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club on Friday, April 10, 2026, in Indio, CA.<\/p>\n

Kayla Bartkowski\/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Carpenter bears a deliberately cheeky persona that\u2019s dashed with some of Dolly Parton\u2019s whip-smart playfulness, Miss Piggy\u2019s glamour and her own unrelenting libidinousness. In live sets, she has a tendency to mimic different sexual positions when she performs \u201cJuno,\u201d a song that\u2019s joyously randy. (Though she didn\u2019t include the bit this time around, instead banging a gong and having the voice of Samuel L. Jackson lead the crowd in a brief, profane meditation.) Even the punchy \u201cHouse Tour,\u201d the song she opened with that\u2019s ostensibly about welcoming guests to her new home, is a feast of double entendres and wink-wink friskiness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some of Carpenter\u2019s strongest moments in the Coachella set revolved around one of her favorite songwriting pastimes: knocking men, especially ex-lovers, down a peg. During \u201cManchild,\u201d a rollicking single from her recent album \u201cMan\u2019s Best Friend,\u201d Carpenter\u2019s dancers were dressed up like poodles and dalmatians. As Carpenter belted about being fed up with immature men\u2019s excuses, they pawed and preened for her attention. A twist on the adage of men acting as dogs, the routine oozed the sort of knowing campiness that Carpenter excels at.<\/p>\n

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\"Sabrina<\/p>\n

Sabrina Carpenter performs at the Coachella Stage during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club on Friday, April 10, 2026, in Indio, CA.<\/p>\n

Kayla Bartkowski\/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Yet the set also showcased Carpenter\u2019s more conceptual leanings. She chose not to have famous musical friends join her onstage, as headliners often do at Coachella, but rather had Susan Sarandon deliver a lengthy monologue \u2014 acting as an older version of Carpenter \u2014 and Will Ferrell act as a stagehand who plugs in the lights again after a malfunction. The bits didn\u2019t always work; the people around me lost interest during the Sarandon monologue, and some sat down. Yet by doing so, Carpenter was both nodding to bygone eras of Hollywood and laying claim to her own trajectory within it, whatever form that should take.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2024, the last time Sabrina Carpenter graced Coachella\u2019s main stage, she held down a late afternoon slot…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278,174339,169079],"class_list":{"0":"post-393714","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-sfgarchive","13":"tag-sfgculture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}