One Coachella set was not performed in the desert this year…
… but rather under the gleaming marquees of Hollywood!
Sabrina Carpenter’s Coachella performance dares to showcase the most abundant world-building and visual storytelling a festival slot has ever seen.
With enormous sets, twenty-two dance numbers, and six outfit changes, the benevolent world of “Sabrinawood” is a love letter to live music and the joy of show business. The phantasmagoria of Hollywood glimmers around pop’s sweetest (and shortest) chantuese, as she dances us through the love and loss of a Californian fantasy.
The cardinal journey of a young dilettante reaching for stardom enchanted both Coachella’s Weekend One and Two audiences. Sabrina’s world exhibited a level of theatricality never before attempted in the renowned festival’s 27-year history… but does drama pay off?
Do you want the house tour?
After a noir-inspired intro sequence, the pop princess herself enters not in a flash of light or puff of smoke, but rather via car door, emerging humbly from a coterie of cars at the drive-in. All 5-feet of her then is illuminated, one by one, by the walk-of-fame stars that dot the catwalk, teetering like Tinkerbell to a lantern. An orchestral rendition of “House Tour” soundtracks her wide-eyed inception before transitioning into the cheeky synth-pop tune we all know and love.
Subtly, Sabrina’s choice to inaugurate her Coachella set with “House Tour” reflects an ambitious starlet’s induction into Hollywood’s fresh novelty.
Lights, camera, action!
And thus, “Sabrinawood” comes alive. Right off the bat, Coachella crowds are fed with fan favourites “Taste” and “Busy Woman.” “Manchild,” the lead single from Sabrina’s latest record Man’s Best Friend, featured male backup dancers costumed as bumbling canines. The spotty scene echoes the male species’ uselessness, a theme that runs through Sabrina’s discography. Mutts bow and fetch at Sabrina’s command in between the song’s iconic line-dance choreography.
Desert winds grow humid with “When Did You Get Hot?,” blessing Weekend One attendees with the song’s debut live performance. It’s then that Sabrina, a billowing silhouette of Cher-like glamour in custom Dior, begins to rise. A monolithic, lifesized “SABRINAWOOD” emerges from beneath the stage, carrying the woman of the hour atop it. The monument’s sheer scale, constructed for not even ten minutes of centrestage-time across both weekends, is a bold statement of Sabrina’s dedication to artistic world-building.
The nacarat diorama subsides as starkly as it’s birth, as sets rotate and showbiz bedlam ensues. Sabrina burst with genuine ecstasy upon Weekend One audiences, “I can’t believe I’m headlining Coachella!!!” Within moments, mountainous terrain has transformed into a vintage recording booth, ushering in the radio hit Please Please Please. The booth also hosts We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night, which makes its live performance debut at Coachella Weekend One. After an acoustic introduction, Sabrina parts the gold curtains and sings, weaving despondently between streetlamps. The performance’s virality has sparked a newfound affinity for the song’s poignantly helpless bridge: “You say we’re drifting apart / I said yeah, I fucking know! / big deal, we’ve been here before / and we’ll be here tomorrow!”
A little zest of life, a new sense of purpose, but why?
Coachella audiences were then wooshed to a dive-bar freezeframe for the jaunty “Nobody’s Son.” Sequentially, Sabrina paces her rainbow-lit catwalk for the ballad that began it all, “because i liked a boy.” Cult favourite “My Man On Willpower” commands the set with electric charge, sending technicolour streaks across the stage and dancers across treadmills. The track chronicles Sabrina’s lover framing their withdrawal of affection as self-improvement. This leaves Sabrina conflicted and feeling undesirable: “My man’s in touch with his emotions / my man won’t touch me with a twenty-foot pole.”
Sabrina belts and cinematically strides, her hair and sleeves deluged with relentless winds and flying papers. Yet despite ceaseless struggle, her position onstage remains stagnant, symbolizing her futile efforts. Her pursuits for his retracted affection, or at very least some explanation, are Sisyphean. Belting a powerful “where he’s gone, God only knows,” Sabrina’s strides halt, and the conveyor belt shoots her backward, accepting her relationship’s unsalvageable fate.
“They just see the light, and I like that. I like them to see the light.”
After the emotional cacophony of “My Man on Willpower,” Coachella Weekend One audiences fell dead silent. The succeeding interlude featured a nearly 7-minute monologue from Susan Sarandon of Rocky Horror fame, gripping hearts across the desert and the internet. Sarandon portrays an older version of Sabrina, resuming real-time Sabrina’s opening spot at the drive-in cinema and reminiscing on her career.
By communicating through an aged depiction of herself, ordinary human Sabrina Carpenter says what pop sensation Sabrina Carpenter cannot. To headline the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is a groundbreaking cornerstone for anyone’s career, let alone life, and Sabrina is already nostalgic. “What a moron I was, running around like nobody’s going to judge you, just bippity boppity boo, […] I do look happy, though.” One day, the vibrant world she’s crafted deeply enveloped herself within will be distant, and “way back in the day.”
A ventriloquist through Sarandon, Sabrina sheds light on the line drawn between celebrity and human being once her heels dismount the stage. Sabrina’s niece cannot fathom the global popstar as anything beyond a family member, “And this way, I’m just Aunt Sabrina. And that’s real. Maybe not as exciting, but it’s real.” Conclusively, she thanked her younger self for her unbending hope and for dreaming. “You quiet that little voice, and you say fuck it, I can do anything. […] Why do people stop saying that to themselves when they become twelve years old?”
For Weekend Two, Sarandon’s Thelma & Louise co-star Geena Davis filled the shoes of elder Sabrina. The Oscar-winner delivered a shortened version of her soliloquy to allow time for another historical surprise still in store.
Sugar talking isn’t working tonight
At the clap of rhythm sticks, the Coachella mainstage was revived as a Hollywood rehearsal room replete with leotard-clad dancers. In a sweater and dance tights, Sabrina and her entourage perform “Go Go Juice.” The Sabrina jiving here is freshly heartbroken with nothing to lose. She sings about harnessing the wondrous powers of drunk dialing: “I’m just drinking to call someone / ain’t nobody safe when I’m a little bit drunk.” The brassy ditty approaches this pitiful excuse for reconnection with sunny desperation. “Da da ba da da / bye it’s me, howsmmmcall / do you me still love?”
As the dregs surfaced, lights dimmed, and dancers regained their composure for the interrogative longing of Such A Funny Way. This more poised performance marked the single’s live debut at Weekend One.
Longing lingers in the rehearsal room after hours – Sabrina takes the stage with seasoned terpsichorean Mauro van de Kerkhof for a Dirty Dancing-inspired performance of “Sugar Talking,” which attempts to confront a lover sanding down their mistreating with charisma before yielding to affection, “it’s your seventh last chance, honey / get your sorry ass to mine”. Mauro and Sabrina’s sensual dance-break set the internet ablaze, with Sabrina crawling to retrieve her microphone before surrendering autonomy and having Mauro hold it for her, singing into his grip with unbroken eye contact, cultivating razor-sharp tension.
Sabrina wanders down the catwalk into Californian city streets, asking the audience to create an endless sparkling sea with their phone flashlights. Retiring a park bench for the moody Don’t Smile, Sabrina outpours admiration to both weekends’ audiences, “and to all the girls that dressed up, you look so beautiful, and you’ve put so much thought and effort into these outfits and makeup and hair.”
Sabrina, she’s at Coachella!
Breakout hit Feather comes drenched in frippery, with dancers flaunting large plumed burlesque fans. Sabrina reemerges in a delicately tasseled lingerie set, alternating black and white alongside her troupe of chorus girls for either weekend’s performance. A Copacobana interpolation warbles over a bassy disco, foreshadowing with flamboyance, “Sabrina, she’s at Coachella! The last song, well, you’ll need umbrellas!”
If you weren’t raising eyebrows over the sheer budget poured into this set, you’re about to. The swirling electric guitar of Bed Chem triggers a sudden architectural growth spurt (Sabrina remains 5-feet), as Sabrina’s staircase erupts into a six-story, burlesque megachurch, each floor peppered with gartered dancers caressing chairs.
In an abrupt “power outage,” Hollywood’s veteran dads made a light-hearted cameo: Will Ferrell and Terry Crews. The pair, playing electricians, comically haul a power cord down the catwalk whilst even more magic readies itself backstage.
Have you ever tried this one?
Sabrina reemerged for the playfully bold Juno as a laced peacock in custom Dior – classy black for Weekend One and angelic white for Weekend Two. Historically, Sabrina strikes what fans have coined as a “Juno Pose” before the chorus hits, visualizing the lyric “have you ever tried this one?”
However, this time, a striptease was replaced with a surprise for the history books.
Exactly 20 years ago, on the very same mainstage in Coachella Valley, another corsetted blonde stood in Sabrina’s go-go boots, reclaiming female sexuality through glitzy, fun pop music – and her name was Madonna.
Summoned by the soaring string synth of “Vogue,” rising from the set stood the “Queen of Pop” herself, donning the very same purple bodice as if she’d simply stepped out of a time machine. Sabrina and her predecessor, like mother and daughter, strutted down the catwalk hand-in-hand, duetting “Vogue” and teasing an unreleased collab, ostensibly titled “Bring Your Love.” The pair of pop royalty were equally endowed, with Sabrina gazing in admiration as Madonna waxed lyrical, “You can imagine what a thrill it is for me to be back in the same boots, in the same corset […] very meaningful for me.”
Madonna’s surprise cameo triumphantly concluded with the two duetting “Like A Prayer,” complete with a convent of habited dancers.
Working late, ’cause I’m a singer!
As Madonna bids farewell to an awestruck Sabrina, a panorama of all-encompassing Hollywood magic comes alive, somehow even brighter than before. Bulbed marquees, Playboy bunnies, and ab-laden rockers compose a tapestry of Californian utopia. Sabrina weaves through her hand-crafted spectacle with poise, and an iconic guitar riff rings overhead.
Before Coachella, fans raised concerns about which of Sabrina’s hits from her overwhelmingly popular catalog would make the setlist, and which would be sacrificed. However, there’s one track whose inclusion never faced a single shred of doubt.
“Espresso,” the unquestionable Song of the Summer, celebrated its birthday on the very same stage where it was served hot. “Two years ago, I wanted to put out a little song before Coachella… and now I think you might know the fuckin’ words.”
Fittingly, the twinkling piano of “Goodbye” ushers a sparkly procession down the catwalk, with runaway-bride Sabrina at the helm. The track is a triumphant reprieve from the clutches of heartbreak. Recontextualised, it blows a kiss to the ticketed tourists of Sabrinawood below.
A little initiative can go a very long, long way
Come the final hour, at the stroke of the synthy strings of “Tears,” the Sabrinawood chorus erupts with joy, cheering and hugging one another. Sabrina and company have returned to the drive-in for a full-circle moment, only now with a glitzy dancefloor to celebrate their sensational set. The unmistakable we-did-it moment they’re all sharing is electric, and the felicity of everyone’s hard work is contagious.
In case you weren’t quite aghast from the production budget allotted to a non-touring festival set, Sabrina has one last surprise up her go-go boots. As the disco-pop piano preceding the dance break in “Tears” begins to ascend, so does Sabrina. The car seat Sabrina luxuriates across sends her heavenward, the extended trunk a benevolent water fountain. Towering above the erupting waterworks is a joyous Sabrina Carpenter, watching over her creation, her precious world. Suspended above months of hard work, she laughs with disbelief and an unimaginable sense of reward.
The microcosm of self-becoming presented by journeying through Hollywoodian fantasy vaguely reflects Sabrina’s own crawl to the top. A girl from Pennsylvanian suburbia has ceaselessly bouldered her dreams for years before finding herself mounted atop an ejected car seat-turned-waterpark.
More than just a performance
In a growing swamp of AI slop, indulgent theatricality reminds us how human creativity and effort are sacred. The elaborate sets, costumes, special effects, choreography, 7-minute monologues, and utter drenching are hardly criteria to headline Coachella. Yet, this ephemerality showcases Sabrina’s dedication to storytelling and sculpting bountiful realms through art. Live music has changed hearts and minds throughout human history, and Sabrina’s contribution is an honourable and genuine one. If there’s one notion Coachellagoers and digital attendees alike should draw from their Sabrinawood tour, in the words of Sarandon’s elder Sabrina, “they had the conviction, […], and they did it. And that means you could do it, too.”
