Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend Ignites Lyric Sleuthing About Shawn Mendes and Barry Keoghan

Sabrina Carpenter’s seventh studio album Man’s Best Friend, released Aug. 29, has fans decoding razor-edged lyrics that appear to nod at Shawn Mendes, Barry Keoghan, and other familiar names from her past.

Hello, I am Maya Rivers, and tonight I am scribbling in the margins where pop turns into poetry, where a melody becomes a mirror and every rhyme points like a compass to the heart we are dying to identify. Let the words beat like a city at midnight, because this album is a neon riddle with the answers hiding in plain sight.

The headline track for the sleuths is “Go Go Juice,” in which Carpenter toasts to temptation with a chorus that feels cheeky and surgical at once. “I’m just drinking to call someone, ain’t nobody safe when I’m a little bit drunk,” she sings, then twists the knife with a roll call of rhyme games: “Could be John or Larry, gosh, who’s to say? Or the one that rhymes with ‘villain’ if I’m feelin’ that way.” Fans on X zeroed in on the wordplay. The consensus theory suggests “John” as code that rhymes with Shawn, “gosh” as a wink to Josh, “Larry” echoing Barry, and “villain” shadowing Dylan. Translation for the uninitiated: Shawn Mendes, Joshua Bassett, Barry Keoghan, and Dylan O’Brien, all names tied to Carpenter at different points on the public timeline.

Here is the tea, poured carefully and served with receipts. Mendes publicly denied a romance in March 2023, a moment well documented in interviews and headlines. Barry Keoghan and Carpenter were linked from 2023 to 2024, a pairing photographed and parsed with a magnifying glass. Dylan O’Brien was the name whispered in September 2022, the rumor that echoed like a chorus. Joshua Bassett, of course, sat in that triangle of tabloid geometry with Olivia Rodrigo and Carpenter that fans still diagram like detectives. E! Online rounded up the lyrical breadcrumbs, while Carpenter herself added a sly counterpoint on CBS Mornings with Gayle King, insisting she would never confirm her muses. “I just wouldn’t say,” she smiled in the Aug. 29 broadcast. “It is more fun to picture the person in their head than the person I picture in my head.” Two beats, two sources, one artist guarding the door to her diary.

If “Go Go Juice” is a coy confession, elsewhere the gloves come off. On “Never Getting Laid,” Carpenter sharpens benevolence into a parting gift that stings: “Wish you a lifetime full of happiness, and a forever of never getting laid.” It is a kiss-off wrapped in ribbon, pretty and lethal. Then the album’s closer “Goodbye” ends any lingering debate in four languages and one exhale of finality: “I’ll say, Arrivederci, au revoir. Forgive my French, but, f–k you, ta-ta.” The curtain drops, the auditorium gasps, and the ex in question disappears behind stage smoke.

Pop thrives on context, and Carpenter’s comes with a steady crescendo. Born May 11, 1999 in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, she credits quiet beginnings for loud ideas. Speaking to CBS Sunday Morning in 2024, she said the stillness let creativity take root. She was shimmying at age two, singing at six, and soon asking her parents to homeschool her so she could audition in earnest. As she told Vogue in March 2025, determination arrived early and did not knock.

Before Disney fame and streaming dominance, there was a fedora and a dream. Carpenter placed third in Miley Cyrus’ 2009 contest The Next Miley Cyrus Project, meeting her childhood idol with a starstruck smile and an outfit she now laughs about. In a chat with MTV UK, she admitted the hat was a choice she would love to time-travel and revise. Family ties also hum through her origin story. Her mother once danced, her father played in a band, and her aunt Nancy Cartwright has spent decades voicing a certain spiky-haired troublemaker. As Cartwright shared in a 2024 TikTok, Bart Simpson runs in the family lore like a prank with perfect comic timing.

Back to Man’s Best Friend, where the thrill is in the guessing and the art is in the restraint. Carpenter’s refusal to name names is not a dodge, it is a design. She offers us a kaleidoscope and trusts the audience to turn it. The rhymes are breadcrumbs, the bridges are confessions that never quite show the face. All of it sits comfortably beside public timestamps that give fans permission to connect dots, then redraw them, then debate the shapes again tomorrow.

So what lingers after the last chorus? A sense that this album is less a tell-all and more a spell, an invitation to project, to process, to sing along as if the lyric were written for you and only you. E! Online charts the hunt, CBS Mornings closes the case for mystery, and the songs themselves keep smiling coyly from the witness stand. Keep your eyes on the setlist, the tour banter, the next music video, the next interview. Will a new rhyme sharpen the silhouette of an old fling, or will Carpenter tilt the mirror and show us someone entirely new?

The beat fades, the clues remain, and the inbox of speculation refreshes itself. Consider this chapter underlined, dog-eared, and humming with possibility.

Sources: Celebrity Storm and E! Online, CBS Mornings, CBS Sunday Morning, MTV UK, Vogue, TikTok
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