Sabrina Carpenter Covers Chappell Roan’s ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ for BBC Radio
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Sabrina Carpenter performed her two songs of the summer candidates, “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” along with a cover of fast-rising labelmate Chappell Roan’s latest single “Good Luck, Babe!” for BBC Radio One’s Live Lounge on Tuesday.
Carpenter’s version of the song, which starts at around the 20-minute mark below, starts off low-key and near-acoustic, but gathers steam on the second verse as the band and backing singers join in. Carpenter stays in a lower register on the first chorus but impressively matches Roan’s sky-scraping soprano on the second one, and the band even slows the tempo to a halt at the conclusion, like the original.
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Asked before the performance why she chose to cover the song, Carpenter replies, “I just haven’t stopped listening to this song since it came out. I’m a huge fan of Chappell’s and we wanted to put our own little twist on it.”
The two delivered the most talked-about sets at New York’s Governors Ball festival earlier this month, with the buzz around Roan’s set — which saw her taking the stage dressed as the Statue of Liberty and revealing that she turned down an offer from the White House to appear at its Pride event — helping to drive her album into the Top 10 on the Billboard 200, an unusual feat for a new release that’s more than six months old.
Equally remarkably, Carpenter has two of the top candidates for song of the summer with the fizzy “Espresso” — which Variety recently described as a “genetically engineered song of the summer” — and the very different “Please Please Please,” which was produced by Taylor Swift/ Lana Del Rey/ Lorde/ 1975 colaborator Jack Antonoff.
The pair were also written about together in a New York Times feature last month that says they “saw a gap in pop, and filled it” with hits like “Espresso” and “Good Luck, Babe!”
Listen to Carpenter’s take on “Good Luck, Babe!” here.
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