The 25-year-old, 5-foot-tall former Disney star (who appeared in the hit teen TV series “Girl Meets World”) has become one of the hottest new artists on the planet, with two recent singles, “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” hitting No. 1 on charts around the world. Her profile first exploded in 2021, when Rodrigo released the single “Driver’s License,” which topped the charts.
The song’s lyrics, “And I bet you’re with that blonde girl / That always made me doubt,” were widely interpreted as a reference to Carpenter’s rumored affair with Rodrigo’s ex-boyfriend, actor Joshua Bassett. The internet’s pop-loving public went into a frenzy, and for a time Carpenter’s image was negatively cast as a woman who stole someone else’s man. (Interestingly, since Carpenter’s stardom has risen, very little has been said about her relationship with actor Barry Keoghan, with whom she has a baby son in Ireland.) This was an old trope in the music industry, where successful women have long been at odds with each other.
But what happened next was proof that while the industry may still be built on the same sexist foundations, artists now refuse to play by those rules. Refusing to accept the criticism quietly, Carpenter released her fifth album, Emails I Can’t Send, in 2022, which features her rebuttal to Rodrigo, “Because I Liked A Boy.” Notably, the album also features Carpenter’s commercial breakthrough, “Nonsense,” a concise, snappy pop song that builds to an ad-libbed verse full of innuendo. Performing the song at Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Luton in May, Carpenter (apparently with forewarning from the BBC) chose the lyrics, “BBC told me it should be rated PG/BBC, I wish I had it in me/Dig deep and there’s a double meaning.” Sorry, Tim Davie.
Shaving off her Disney-esque, innocent image, Carpenter catapulted her to social media fame after performing the song live, particularly during support slots on Swift’s Erasu tour, and, along with Roan, became pin-up girls for a generation of sexually empowered girls who refused to be told what to do.
Favorite song to listen to: Espresso
