Meet Chappell Roan, L.A.'s queer pop superstar in the making

By August BrownStaff Writer

Aug. 29, 2023 3 AM PT

On a searing August afternoon, Chappell Roan sidled up to her favorite bar in L.A., Bigfoot Lodge in Atwater Village.

“It looks just like a Bass Pro Shop,” said Roan, 25, admiring the worn wood paneling and Sasquatch paraphernalia. “The original Pro Shop was in my hometown in Missouri. It was incredible. Whenever I see Bass Pro hats here in L.A., I’m like, ‘You do not know about that.’”

It’s hard to imagine better queer-girl bona fides than longing for your hometown fishing-supply store when you’re about to release one of the year’s most exuberant dance-pop albums. But “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” Roan’s debut LP out Sept. 22, comes after years in the L.A. music trenches and a humbling return home after getting dropped by her label.

Now, with an assist from Olivia Rodrigo’s producer Dan Nigro and a groundswell of Gen Z affection for campy dance rippers like “Hot to Go!” and “Naked in Manhattan,” Roan can finally afford to buy any Yeti cooler she likes.

“I was so close to giving up. If I wasn’t going to do music, then I would probably just go back home and be an aesthetician and a drag queen,” Roan said. “When you’ve been poor, you’re not really scared of anything.”

Roan’s drag-queen allusions aren’t too far afield. Chappell Roan is kind of a heightened-character version of the singer born Kayleigh Amstutz and raised outside Springfield, Mo. With cascading auburn hair and a voice that goes from fetchingly tender to absolutely howling, Roan exudes the small-town theater-kid energy that drives so many to try their luck in L.A.

Signed to Atlantic Records as a teen, Roan moved to L.A. in 2018 and took a crack at sober singer-songwriter fare. It didn’t resonate, and Atlantic cut her loose. When the pandemic hit, she was serving coffee in Willard, Mo., wondering whether she still wanted to do music at all.

In fall 2020, she gave herself one more shot and returned to L.A., working in a doughnut shop and as a production assistant on a TV series. She found inspiration in the grimy, dreamy fantasy lives of her peers. “Pink Pony Club” is a vampy stripper character-study worthy of Warren Zevon that she wrote after a long night at the Abbey in West Hollywood.

“I can’t ignore the crazy visions of me in L.A.,” she sings on it. “I heard that there’s a special place / Where boys and girls can all be queens.”

“She loves taking back campy things like Bratz dolls and Y2K aesthetics,” said Jackie Zhou, who directed the cheerleader-romp video for “Hot to Go!” “She’s this heightened version of a badass pop star you can feel like when you’re at a Goodwill in Missouri.”

That set a template for Roan now — a little tawdry, self-aware, over the top, yet piercingly vulnerable. With Nigro, she carved out a version of herself as a pop diva who arrived and went straight to reclaimed-gay-icon status.

“I hadn’t heard her, but I went to her headline show at Bowery Ballroom a year ago,” said Justin Eshak, co-chief executive of Island Records, where Roan is now signed. “The place was mobbed, but it was so different from things that just had a viral moment. This felt old school in a way that was rooted in a subculture, where everyone there seemed like they were in on something.”

Many songs on “Rise and Fall” have circulated online for a few years, but “Casual,” a bracingly candid ballad about a wishy-washy hookup, made the rounds on 2022 best-of lists. With its eyebrow-raising hook about receiving oral sex in a car, “Casual” packs three different bridges and Alanis-worthy vengeance into less than four minutes. Lines like “It’s hard being casual / When my favorite bra lives in your dresser / It’s hard being casual / When I’m on the phone talking down your sister” linger much longer.

“I was telling Dan [Nigro], ‘I can’t do this, my mom is gonna kill me,’” Roan said. “She hates that song, but it’s OK.”

A red-headed woman in a green top and necklace looks downward pensively.

Meanwhile, Roan was wrestling with a sense that she actually belonged in queer culture all along. “Red Wine Supernova” and “Naked in Manhattan,” singles now collected on “Rise and Fall,” were wish-casting for her first gay crush. “I’ve never done it,” she sings on “Naked in Manhattan.” “Let’s make it cinematic / Like that one sex scene that’s in ‘Mulholland Drive.’”

“I was dating a boy then,” Roan said. “I had never even kissed a girl when these songs were written. It was all what I wished my life could be.”

Roan is now comfortably out, dealing with typical young queer anxieties. She’s dating a woman, but “I feel scared kissing her in public,” she said. “Even though I’m in L.A., homophobia is in the back of my head. It’s liberating, but there’s a new set of problems that I didn’t know existed.”

Fame may soon be another complicating factor. In the run-up to “Rise and Fall,” Roan sold out two nights at the 1,800-capacity New York venue Brooklyn Steel, and she will headline the Wiltern on Nov. 14. “Hot to Go,” a relentlessly chant-able single about hooking up (and loving it for once), could join Troye Sivan’s “Rush” and Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam” on Pride playlists to come.

For Roan, who recruits local drag queens as opening acts on her tour dates, that would be an ideal outcome.

“It’s almost like the gays right now have the undertones of punk,” Roan said. “We have no problem making art that’s almost obnoxiously gay.”