When American singer-songwriter Chappell Roan stepped out of a smoking apple onto the stage at New York City’s annual Gov Ball Music Festival in June, fans were mesmerised by her Lady Liberty costume.
The 26-year-old artist, meanwhile, was mesmerised in kind by the sight that greeted her as she launched into the set’s I Am The Midwest Princess introduction.
A crowd so sprawling that some were forced to watch her performance from beneath the trees lining the edges of the park in Queens was a dream, after all, she had spent 10 years painstakingly working towards – and had almost given up on.
Watch the video above.
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Days later, Tennessee’s Bonnaroo Music Festival moved Roan’s scheduled performance from a tiny tent to one of its biggest stages in anticipation of a swarm, which came in droves – some fans, according to The Tennessean, started camping out for a prime spot at 3.30am, 12 hours before Roan’s set was scheduled to begin.
And it’s not just hardcore fans who are flocking to her. If you Google her name, what will come up instead is the suggestion: “Did you mean your favourite artist’s favourite artist?”
That may be the doing of a “random twink who works at Google”, as Roan told Jimmy Fallon in late June, but the play on a Sasha Colby-coined phrase she says on stage has turned true – fellow emerging pop queen Sabrina Carpenter has covered Roan’s hit single Good Luck, Babe!, and music legend Sir Elton John has nothing but “love, love love” for her.
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“The BEST evening of pizza and outrageous laughter with the fiercely fabulous [Roan],” John, 77, wrote to his Instagram followers alongside a photo of the duo together. “Love her, love her, love her 🚀❤️🌈”.
For those that aren’t chronically online, Roan’s meteoric rise these past few months has come out of nowhere. It also somewhat came out of nowhere for Roan herself.
“I’m trying to figure out how to say this,” Roan told the crowd through tears during a performance at Red Hat Amphitheatre in Raleigh, North Carolina, in mid-June.
“I just want to be honest with the crowd, and I just feel a little off today because I think that my career’s just kind of gone really fast and it’s really hard to keep up. And so, I’m just being honest that I’m just having a hard time today.”
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“Thank you for understanding,” Roan, who some are hailing as the next Lady Gaga or Cyndi Lauper, continued after apologising to the crowd, saying she didn’t want to give them a lesser show but there was “a lot on [her] mind”.
“This is all I’ve ever wanted, it’s just heavy sometimes, so thank you.”
So who is Chappell Roan, and why is she seemingly all anyone can talk about at the moment?
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How did Chappell Roan get famous?
Born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz in Missouri, Chappell Roan – pronounced like the word chapel, not Schapelle à la Schapelle Corby – grew up as the oldest of four children in a conservative Christian family who lived in a trailer park.
“I just wanted to feel like a good person, but I had this part of me that wanted to escape so bad,” she later told Variety of struggling with her upbringing and sneaking out often, a theme she explores in her 2020 hit Pink Pony Club, which reached more than 10 million streams on Spotify in August 2022.
Roan started playing piano at a young age, beginning lessons when she was 12. In her early teens, she started uploading covers of songs to YouTube, which is how secured a record deal with label Atlantic Records in May 2015. She was 17 at the time.
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By 2020, however, Atlantic Records had dropped Roan. That same week, her boyfriend of four years broke up with her, and she spent the next two years working as a barista, nanny and production assistant to support herself.
“I got dropped because I just wasn’t making money for them,” Roan later claimed to Tom Power in late 2023. “Neither were most artists, unless you are massive. So, many artists lost their jobs.”
Roan had been working with songwriter and producer Dan Nigro since early 2020, but following the success of Olivia Rodrigo‘s debut single Drivers License, Nigro shifted his focus off Roan to work on Rodrigo’s freshman album Sour with her – prompting Roan to move back to Missouri with her parents after “[running] out of money”.
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She may have moved back down south, but Roan was not deterred, working on her music independently all the while working at a drive-thru to support herself. Roan, however, needed to be back in Los Angeles, which had acted as a muse, of sorts, for her most successful track to date then – Pink Pony Club.
“I said, ‘I’m gonna give it one more year, I’m gonna give it one shot. If I don’t like it by October 2021, I’ll move back. But let me just try to give it a shot’,” she recalled to Power.
It took her almost two more years, but by September 2023, her debut full-length album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, which she had reunited with Nigro to work on, had been released.
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What followed was a two-month run as the opening act for Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour, which saw her streams rise by 32 per cent.
It wasn’t until the release of her single Good Luck, Babe! in April, however, that everything truly changed for Roan.
Reaching seven million streams in its first week, Good Luck, Babe! explores the concept of compulsory heterosexuality, as Roan – who identifies as queer – croons about a woman trying, and failing, to deny her feelings for Roan and women in general.
April also brought Coachella, where Roan made her festival debut and performed Good Luck, Babe! live for the first time.
That, in part, contributed to Roan’s monthly listeners increase by more than 500 per cent between February and April, and the song becoming her first top 20 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in June.
At the time of writing, Good Luck, Babe! is now #11 on the chart, Roan’s peak. And if current trends are indicating anything for Roan, it’s that the best is yet to come.
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