Watch Sabrina Carpenter's Powerful Cover of Bruno Mars' 'That's What I Like'

As soon as the cameras stopped rolling for Disney Channel's Girl Meets World, Sabrina Carpenter, who landed her breakout role on the show as Maya Hart, pursued her singing career full on -- a passion she embraced at a young age and fostered through YouTube covers.

During her tween years, Carpenter forged a rabid online following for her renditions of songs by Christina Aguilera, Adele, and others, as well as her dad's requests of rock legends like Ozzy Osbourne and Guns N' Roses. Through her eclectic repertoire of reworks, Carpenter told On Air with Ryan Seacrest on Wednesday, "With posting those covers and kind of just getting used to other artists' sound, I was kind of able to find my own within doing that."

But even after finding maturity in both her voice and musical concepts -- which spawned her aptly named sophomore studio album, EVOLution, via Hollywood Records -- the 17-year-old continues to grow her vocal prowess by studying today's biggest acts. Last September at the iHeartRadio Theater in Los Angeles, she flexed her muscular vocals for Beyonce's Lemonade track "Freedom," and for her On Air stop this morning, she and her guitarist Caleb Nelson gave Bruno Mars' Jack Swing single, "That's What I Like," an acoustic makeover. 

Also during her visit, Carpenter performed her latest EVOLution single "Thumbs," a track about staying outside of mediocrity. "With everything happening in the world, there's so much follow-the-leader and a little less of everyone making a leader out of themselves," she told Seacrest. 

The song also sparked her social media movement #DontTwiddleYourThumbs, which she described as "doing small, simple acts of kindness, whether that's writing letters to people, whether it's buying coffee for the person in the line behind you, or just simple things like that to make the world a little bit happier."

Carpenter will be attending the iHeartRadio Music Awards at the Forum in Inglewood, California this Sunday (March 5) where she may run into Mars, whose cover of Adele's "All I Ask" -- a song he cowrote with the British powerhouse -- is nominated for the socially-charged best cover song category.

"Last year I went, and I'm telling you, it was the most fun awards show I've ever been to," Carpenter said, "mostly because everyone was just having a great time. Joe Jonas stood up on my table and started going crazy. I don't know, I've never been to someplace where everyone else was having such a great time. It was amazing."

Mars is scheduled to perform alongside Katy Perry, Ed Sheeran, Big Sean, Shawn Mendes, and many more. The ceremony, hosted by Ryan Seacrest, will broadcast live starting at 8 p.m. ET on TBS, TNT, and TruTV.