From Missouri, US
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In a decidedly risk-averse, self-consciously tasteful pop landscape, Chappell Roan stands out. The 25-year-old singer-songwriter’s debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, is one of the most over-the-top, gloriously tasteless debuts in recent memory. It sounds, at turns, like Patsy Cline, 80s Madonna and RuPaul at his nastiest. Here is Roan’s idea of a poignant hook, on the breakup ballad Casual: “Knee deep in the passenger seat / And you’re eating me out / Is it casual now?”
Roan was born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz in the minuscule Ozarks town of Willard, Missouri, and raised a “God girl”, attending church three times a week. She was enthralled and scandalised by the pop music of the late 00s and early 10s, such as Kesha, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. The video for Lady Gaga’s Alejandro came out when Roan was in middle school: “I was like: ‘Oh my god, is this porn?’”
She grew up “feeling very different” and knew from a young age that she wanted to be a star. “I loved watching award shows,” she says. In her early teens, Roan started writing songs on a whim, because she was “in love” with an older Mormon student and thought she “had to write the greatest love song of all time”.
By her late teens, she was signed to Atlantic Records, which had been impressed by the cover videos she had posted on YouTube. She adopted her stage name in honour of her late grandfather, Dennis Chappell, and his favourite song, Marty Robbins’ The Strawberry Roan. She was soon flying across the US for writing and recording sessions. Roan thought she had won the lottery. “I was 17 and I thought I was gonna win a Grammy,” she says. “It’s funny, because, when you sign to a label, that’s when the real work begins.”
For much of her late teens and early 20s, Roan hustled in development. In 2020, she began working in Los Angeles with Dan Nigro, soon to find fame for his work with Olivia Rodrigo. She was terrified and thrilled by being in a big city for the first time, “shaking in Trader Joe’s” when she saw women shopping for groceries in sports bras – an extreme no-no in Willard. She was elated to find queer freedom in West Hollywood’s storied gay bars. “I grew up thinking being gay was bad and a sin,” she says. “I went to the gay club once and it was so impactful, like magic. It was the opposite of everything I was taught.”
Immediately after her first visit to a gay club, Roan wrote Pink Pony Club, a showtune-style empowerment anthem that has become her calling card (“Won’t make my mama proud / It’s gonna cause a scene”). Shortly after its release, Atlantic dropped her, feeling the single had underperformed, and she moved back home, heartbroken. “I felt like a failure, but I knew deep down I wasn’t,” she says.
Back in Willard, she worked at a drive-thru coffee kiosk and “schemed” about how she was going to get back to LA. She saved enough money to move west once more and gave herself 12 months: “I was like: I have no money, but I’m gonna push through; if nothing happens by the end of next year, it’s a sign I need to move back home.”
In LA, Roan resumed working with Nigro and signed with Amusement, his imprint at Island Records. The songs from those sessions became Midwest Princess, which has now been streamed tens of millions of times. It’s the kind of album – and uncompromising success story – that would make the gonzo pop divas Roan idolised as a tween proud. “If it’s not bold, if it’s not ruffling feathers, what’s the point?” she says.
