“I can’t believe I’m headlining Coachella!” Sabrina Carpenter proclaimed partway through her performance doing exactly that on Friday night (Apr. 10) of the festival’s first weekend. “I mean… I can a little bit. But it sounds nicer to say that.”
Probably more than a little bit: Carpenter actually predicted this almost exactly two years earlier, when she closed out her debut performance at the festival with the “Nonsense” outro proclamation: “Coachella, see you back here when I headline.” At the time, with Carpenter a rising hitmaker but still hardly a superstar, the prediction might’ve felt outlandish — or at the very least slightly ahead of schedule — but thanks in large part to a song she released the same weekend, she was about to be fast-tracked to pop’s A-list, where she has only become more established in the days since.
In fact, if there was one major takeaway from Carpenter’s headlining set this Friday, it’s just what a robust catalog of hits she’s built in such a short period of time. The only songs older than “Espresso” that she performed were a couple Emails I Can’t Send-era favorites: the likely “Drivers License” rejoinder “Because I Liked a Boy” and the radio-blessed deluxe cut “Feather.” Still, it didn’t feel like a thin setlist for a headliner — her two most recent albums have just that many hits between them, and even most of the Man’s Best Friend deep cuts she played sounded single-ier than ever on Saturday, with beefed-up, extra-discofied arrangements, not to mention plenty of time to grow on fans since their mid-2025 release.
Carpenter has simply put in the work over those two years to not only produce the songs worthy of fleshing out a pop star resumé, but to continue to expand the world around them, with music videos and live performances and even in-song callbacks that deepen their impacts. And Friday night’s headlining show was one of her best examples of that yet, finding new ways to play with her established hits both sonically and visually, and adding to her own iconography in the process. Most notably, Friday marked the introduction of the no-doubt eternal “SABRINAWOOD,” her take on the famous Hollywood sign that appeared displayed on stage for most of the performance.
Classic Hollywood and its eternal glamour seemed to be a fixation of Carpenter’s for the majority of her performance, with the grooves and general sweep of disco serving as its other twin pillar. But Carpetner’s adoption of these long-past cultural touchstones never felt overly retro; even “SABRINAWOOD” not just suggested her general takeover of Southern California this week but snuck in an another boner joke to a memorable performance of her already dangerously frisky “When Did You Get Hot?” And moreover, by this point she projects as such a larger-than-life pop figure that 2020s top 40 stardom sometimes doesn’t really feel big enough for her anyway. Tellingly, no musical guest stars interfered with Carpenter’s one-woman show, though a handful of big-name actors — most notably Susan Sarandon and Will Ferrell — did offer quick (or sometimes not so quick) diversions for her many set and costume changes.
Also telling: No “Nonsense” at all in this set, with the breakout hit marking the only major song of her past three years to not make an appearance. Perhaps when you call a shot like Sabrina did with her prior Coachella “Nonsense,” the proper thing to do is to not push your luck a second time. (It sounds nicer to say that, anyway.)
Here were the seven most memorable (non-“SABRINAWOOD”) moments from Carpenter’s winning headline performance:
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“Manchild” Goes to the Dogs
It showed the high level of confidence Carpenter was playing with on Friday night that she burned one of her two Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hits just a few songs into her set. “Manchild” appeared first in a sort of Disney’ed up instrumental interlude, and then in full as Sabrina frolicked with a number of backup dancers dressed as poodles and Dalmatians. It’s a new visual theme for Carpenter, but one that works pretty well with the song — all about men not being much smarter or more useful than domestic pets anyway — and which leads you to wonder what she could do with a full Lady and the Tramp redo.
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A Rare “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night”
Carpenter said she’d never sung Man’s Best Friend deep cut “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night” before including it in her Friday Coachella set — not sure why it’d never made the grade previously, but the performance and arrangement sounded fantastic, peaking with a particularly ripping live guitar solo. “If any one has ever been in a relationship that started and ended, then started, then ended again….” Carpenter continued, “I’m singing his song directly to you.”
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“My Man” on Treadmills
Another MBF headlight, “My Man on Willpower” was memorably presented by Carpenter on Friday night with the help of moving walkways, which allowed her to do a little fun Jamiroquai-style maneuvering, but more importantly allowed her to visually capture the song’s themes of one-step-forward, two-steps-back relationships with men. (And at the end, the thing pitched Carpenter off the stage altogether, which also felt appropriate.)
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…Was That Actually Barry Manilow?
In the midst of a “Feather” that had already upped the disco quotient to Studio 54 levels, Carpenter took a dance break to be serenaded by a “Copabacabana”-quoting interlude that replaced that 1979 classic’s “At the Copa/ Copacabana” chorus with “Sabrina/ She’s at Coachella!” No word yet on if the interlude was performed by original singer Barry Manilow himself — singing has sadly been more of a struggle for Manilow lately — though it didn’t sound not like him, and we wouldn’t put it past her to go directly to the source there.
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Will Ferrell Saves the Day
The handful of actor cameos in Carpenter’s set were a bit of a mixed bag — the intro with Sam Elliott was an effective scene-setter, but the Susan Sarandon monologue went way too long and was plagued with audio issues that made her words largely incomprehensible to begin with. The most fun walk-on came from Will Ferrell, inexplicably showing up as the handyman to fix Carpenter’s electrical issues after an end-of-song short-circuit (“typical Coachella”). The funniest part was undoubtedly was Ferrell trying and failing to light a cigarette in the wind, before giving up and declaring, “Smoking is bad for you anyway.”
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An “Espresso” Anniversary
“Well two years ago, I wanted to put out a little song before Coachella,” Carpenter reminded the audience, as a familiar combination of bubbling bass and synth blankets started to emerge from her backing band. “And now, I think you might know the f–king words.” Just might indeed: “Espresso” has all but cemented itself in the all-time pop canon over the past 24 months, and it sounded just as great — and was just as fun to sing along to — as a victory lap on Friday night as it did as the most exciting new pop song in the world two years earlier.
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A “Tears” Waterfall
We’ve spent a year with tears running down Carpenter’s thighs — resulting from her, um, emotional overflow when her guy performs basic socialized human tasks — but on Friday, those tears turned into a full geyser. At the (ahem) climax of the Man’s Best Friend single, Carpenter was perched on a chair atop a full waterfall, giving the appearance of said tears coming rather fast and furious. It was certainly an unforgettable visual that she left us with as she drove away through the Coachella crowd to the strains of Kool & The Gang’s “Hollywood Swingin’,” likely off to be disappointed by another romantic partner and end up headlining the moon in 2028 as a result.
