I didn’t really get into music until high school, but when I did, a few albums single-handedly carried me through the rough patch that was my senior year and into my early college years. One of those albums was Sabrina Carpenter’s emails i can’t send.
Before Carpenter released the album, she had a very different aesthetic with few notable collaborations. Much of the album’s writing came from her relationship with Joshua Bassett and the inconsequential beef that followed with Olivia Rodrigo.
With the release of her independent single “Skin,” Carpenter set a new tone for herself and prepared her listeners for a new era, teasing a lead single for a potential album when she announced “skinny dipping” on Aug. 30, 2021.
The Real Beginning
After the soft rollout of “skinny dipping,” Carpenter started 2022 by releasing the album’s next single and music video, “Fast Times,” on Feb. 17. The music video signaled major changes were underway for her brand and aesthetic.
Following an appearance at the Met Gala and more teased lyrics, Carpenter revealed on June 30, 2022, that her next song, “Vicious,” would drop that same night, and the album emails i can’t send would be released on July 15.
It was the summer of my junior year of high school… and I’ll never forget the day that the album came out. And Oct. 13 became known as “emails i can’t send day” among her fans.
The song that immediately stood out to fans, and that some might remember as the album’s defining track, is “because I liked a boy.” This song dramatically heightened the love-triangle drama between Olivia Rodrigo, Joshua Bassett, and Carpenter. Even in her album release post, Carpenter expressed her gratitude for her process: “this feels really surreal, i kind of had to unlearn myself and learn myself again in order to make this album. it’s the one i’m most proud of thus far in my life. it’s the one i hope you listen to and feel like we were hanging and confiding in each other for an hour…”
The Emails I Can’t Send Tour
While Carpenter had toured in the past, the album was so successful that the emails i can’t send tour became her most successful to date. In mid-December, she announced a second leg of the tour that also sold out quickly, and in early 2023, she added a European/UK leg.
The looks, the songs… Carpenter’s new branding paid off. So much so that one song off the album, “Nonsense,” quickly became a cultural phenomenon, with many jokes attached to it. The running gag? Changing the outro in every city played to pay a silly homage to it. On Nov. 9, she dropped a teaser for the new single, and fans went wild.
Carpenter as a baddie and impressing the boy version of herself with a “dipsh*t” hat on? Yeah, I’m sold. I don’t doubt she created this video due to the song’s popularity. In fact, she even made a Christmas spin-off of the song to go along with the new holiday EP she dropped in November 2023.
I will always be sad I couldn’t go to that tour, but I am lucky enough to have seen Carpenter live, and I will never forget the experience.
Emails I can’t send: fwd
Carpenter proved the era wasn’t over in March 2023 when she announced that she would release a deluxe version of the album on the 17th with four new songs. Two of the new titles stood out immediately: “Feather” and “opposite,” one of my favorite Carpenter songs of all time.
Why did “Feather” become so popular? Well, it may have to do with Carpenter opening for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour. The song’s choreography went viral and catapulted Carpenter from Disney star to a full-blown pop sensation. She released a music video for “Feather,” which sparked controversy in the Catholic Church (IYKYK).
If there’s anything else I can say about her right now, it’s that her outfits were incredible, and many of them are still referenced today.
The songs on the album have meant a lot to me over the years, and I am so lucky to call myself a Carpenter fan. I’ve known her since her Girl Meets World days, and I never dreamed she would become so successful.
This album’s cultural impact shot her to global superstardom after her run on the Eras Tour, and people still resonate with it so deeply today. Yes, I listen to “decode” and think about all the times that I overthought things a situationship said to me. And don’t even get me started on “Tornado Warnings”; hearing that song live wrecked me.
We are lucky to live in a world where Sabrina Carpenter writes music, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.