Here Comes a Regular

That time Sabrina Carpenter rolled through my hometown.

If you know me, you probably saw it coming. I’ve decided to broaden the scope of this newsletter to include other states west of the 100th meridian. Namely California, where I grew up.

But maybe also Colorado, where I went to high school, and Oregon, where I went to college, and Utah, which I suddenly can’t get enough of, and Arizona, which I now drive through about ten times a year. Who knows, I might even make it to Montana, birthplace of the late great David Lynch.

To reflect this, I’ve renamed the newsletter Points West. It will still have a focus on northern New Mexico, but with permission to range.

The state of California appears to be my Hotel California. I can’t seem to leave, in my mind or in actual space and time. I was all ready to go back to New Mexico after a two-month stay this past fall when I got a text from my editor at Vogue asking if I’d like to interview Sabrina Carpenter. As fate would have it, the story entailed seeing Carpenter perform in my hometown.

“I’m sorry this venue is the venue it is,” she said when I got to her dressing room a few weeks later. Carpenter didn’t know that Pechanga Arena, née the San Diego Sports Arena, was familiar ground, the arena of my youth. Until I googled “Pechanga Arena” I didn’t know the old arena was still standing.

That sounds more wistful than I mean it to. I’m pretty sure the last time I’d been there it was to see the Ice Capades in the ’80s. I was probably eight. My cousin used to sell longboards at the swap meet held in the arena’s parking lot. Visiting his longboard stand is my other vivid memory.

But the place has a certain aura. As I mention in my profile of Carpenter, it’s a large concrete oval, vaguely Brutalist, built in 1966 and known to generations of locals by its former name. To many it will forever be where Jimi Hendrix recorded that twelve-minute version of “Red House.” If your dad was into boxing, you may have learned that it’s where Ken Norton broke Muhammad Ali’s jaw.

Its heyday was the ’70s, and it stands as a kind of monument to the arena rock of that era—Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Queen, Kiss. Gen-X journalists know it as the venue where, in 1972, a 15-year-old Cameron Crowe loitered around the backstage door in hopes of interviewing Black Sabbath, the real-life big break portrayed in “Almost Famous.” (The scenes in the movie were filmed there, too.)

I’m not old enough to have gone to the iconic shows that took place at the Sports Arena, but the mere mention of it conjures those scenes and vibes and hemlines, less Kate Hudson-as-Penny Lane than the woman wearing a bikini top in the 1972 new footage who waited all night for good seats to the Rolling Stones show because the last time she’d seen the Stones, at Altamont, the whole thing got cut short.

All of which made seeing it packed full of Sabrina Carpenter fans, a.k.a. Carpenters, extra entertaining. To Carpenter it must have felt like an ancient colosseum. There was a framed Neil Diamond poster hanging in her dressing room, and the ventilation wasn’t great. “My allergies have been triggered,” she told me. “I took three Claritin just sitting in this room.”

I find that pop musicians sometimes have this mysterious combination of qualities: They’re at once totally modern and utterly timeless. The first part is easier to put your finger on. In Carpenter’s case, her new songs couldn’t be more contemporary; she’s writing in a language that seems perfectly calibrated for this moment. The second is a more ineffable thing, where you can kind of imagine the person existing just as they are in other historical eras. Carpenter has it in spades.

She’s also funny as hell. I really enjoyed talking with her about her magnum opus, and seeing the Short n’ Sweet Tour in my hometown was a trip and a half. Her show incited Beatlemania-volume screaming. The woman sitting to my left, Mariah Santos, seemed to know every lyric of every single song, the old ones and the new ones. She was in town from Tacoma, Washington, to inspect Navy ships—“the best way I can describe what I do for a living is Rosie the Riveter”—and had been a fan since Carpenter’s Disney days. Santos told me she loves Carpenter because she doesn’t mask who she is: “She’s a normie at heart.”

Carpenter’s Vogue cover, photographed by Steven Meisel and styled by IB Kamara, is coming soon to a checkout aisle near you. I’d suggest you keep an eye out but I think it’ll be hard to miss.

---