How a drag persona helped a 25-year-old singer-songwriter with a strict Christian upbringing transform herself into a queer pop powerhouse
She’s been dubbed “L.A.’s queer pop superstar in the making” and, more directly, “the queer pop moment.” Her sound mixes the energy of 2008-era Lady Gaga and the lyricism of Carole King, served with a side of early-aughts Hannah Montana glam. Cheeky lyrics teeter between unabashedly horny and strikingly self-aware: “Baby, don’t you like this beat?/ I made it so you’d sleep with me,” she sings on her recent single “Hot to Go.” When Elton John invited Roan on his “Rocket Hour” podcast late last month, he called her “incredible” and “a complete favorite.”
“It’s crazy how fast this has gone,” Roan says over the phone. She’s speaking from a friend’s home in Los Angeles, where she had been staying in preparation for her country-spanning tour in support of her new album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.”
At the time, she was spending her days in and out of costume fittings and singing her set list while doing an intense daily cardio workout complete with running and jumping jacks. She did all of this in high-heeled boots, she says, because “my stylist [Genesis Webb] is like, ‘Okay, you can’t wear Skechers onstage.’”
At each stop, she hires three local drag performers, culled from a massive list of submissions. Next February, she’ll take her sparkly bustiers and fishnets on the road in support of Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts world tour. (The pair share a songwriter and producer in Dan Nigro.)
“Midwest Princess” forms a narrative arc not totally unlike Roan’s own life. Most often, she writes candid stories of hookups and situationships gone wrong, all inspired by her daydreams and longing. But she also embellishes these tales — particularly if “the real story” is “too boring … or too sad, and we need to make it something more campy,” she says.
She had already tried being sad. In 2017, she released her first single — the dark, intense “Good Hurt” — with Atlantic. This first Chappell Roan was a somber and serious indie pop project. But she began to break away from that with the 2020 release of “Pink Pony Club,” an unapologetically glittery (and autofictional) pop-disco ballad about a small-town girl who chooses to leave home to dance onstage at a West Hollywood club.
“I heard that there’s a special place/ Where boys and girls can all be queens every single day,” Roan sings of the mythical Pink Pony Club, inspired by the actual L.A. gay bar the Abbey. Its video featured Roan in a bedazzled cowboy hat, dancing on a bar, the sad-sack scene eventually blossoming into drag night euphoria.
The song found a niche on TikTok, and Vulture named it its 2021 “Song of the Summer.” But Atlantic dropped Roan from its roster that year anyway. The move set her loose, in a way.
“I was definitely being held back,” Roan says, referencing her legal contract requirements as well as the emotional suffocation she felt during that time. “I just felt so trapped, and it was debilitating the amount that I felt hopeless and helpless.” She moved back home for a time before returning to L.A., where she worked odd jobs as a nanny, as a production assistant and at a doughnut shop to stay afloat.
She would spend the next couple of years making and putting out music independently, with “Pink Pony Club” serving as a sort of aesthetic starting point for the campy, glam turn the Chappell Roan persona would take.
On singles such as the dreamy “Naked in Manhattan” and the chant-driven “Femininomenon,” she was unapologetically pop-forward with queer love stories that explored her sexuality in fun and shameless ways.
“Touch me baby, put your lips on mine/ Could go to hell but we’ll probably be fine,” Roan sings to a girl she’s crushing on in “Naked in Manhattan.” She first experienced living openly as a queer person in L.A. in 2018, but when Roan wrote that song and several others featured on her album, she hadn’t even kissed a girl yet.
During her two years as an independent artist — Roan signed this year to Island Records under Nigro’s Amusement imprint — she would sell out shows without label support, sewing her own over-the-top clothes and learning to do drag for sets bursting with energy and call-and-response choruses.
“I’ve always wanted to dress like this. I just have not allowed myself until now because I just randomly put restrictions on myself,” Roan says. Growing up, she would write off her queerness as a phase.
In Willard, she was caught between two selves. She would go to church three times a week, but she would also sneak out frequently. During elementary school summers, she would go to camp, where her days were spent learning Bible verses and praying. Her relationship to the church, though evolving, continues to influence how she approaches her music and persona.
Cowboys and cheerleaders — both storied queer symbols — are frequently deployed in Roan’s outfits, videos and songwriting. So are aliens, clowns and devils. These characters are vehicles for exploring themes of alienation and desire, and call specifically to experiences of being shut out and vilified while growing up queer in a conservative area.
“I’m saying that not as an observer. I was in it, and I know,” she says, referring to the homophobia she witnessed in Willard’s Christian community.
Speaking to Variety late last month, Roan said she had a “really depressed” childhood. She wasn’t diagnosed as bipolar until she was 22, which she said led to difficulties and misunderstandings with her parents while she was growing up. She often felt a need to escape, trapped by her hometown’s rigid standards and her own feeling that she needed to make people like her.
Roan’s alien, clown and devil looks, like much of her careful mythmaking, take on a double meaning in this light: “It’s all rooted in, like, fun drag stuff and queer culture, but it’s also kind of like a ‘f— you’ to the people who hate me,” she says.
And although her persona has allowed her to explore her identity in a way she might not have felt comfortable doing otherwise, it’s also been a “double-edged sword,” she says. She’s not the flirty, lewd, tongue-in-cheek Chappell Roan she is in her songs.
“I think that having the drag version of myself is nice because it does separate [the public and the private] so well,” she says. “But at the same time, it’s like, if people meet me out of my element, or I get recognized, it’s really hard to bring myself up in that drag queen head space. Just because I’m really introverted and a homebody.”
Social media presents a similar dilemma: “I have a pretty toxic relationship to it because I feel like I’m a slave to it. And if I stop, then I’m missing out on my career,” she says. “I feel really horrible about it, honestly.”
Roan has dedicated the past eight years to building an internet presence, posting or otherwise engaging with fans online “like every day.” While she admits she’s “lucky” — “I’ve never gone extremely viral and can still sell out a tour,” she says — the pressure to grab someone’s attention online can still feel like a burden.
She doesn’t read her comments anymore, nor does she check DMs. Recently, she hired someone to help her post and manage her accounts.
It’s important for Roan to connect with her fans in person instead. Each of her shows has a theme like “slumber party,” “rainbow” or “pink cowgirl” attached to it, with fans dressing up in outfits inspired by one of her songs. The result is an intimate, party-like concert experience.
The need to connect with her listeners is especially important in the Midwest, where Roan herself felt like an outsider for so long.
While she says it’s easy to label or reject entire swaths of the country as backward or too conservative, the story is much more complicated than that. The Midwest has shaped her, she says, and she understands people there. She gets how they think and where they’re coming from.
And there’s a world of eager fans ready to let go at her shows who have few outlets to do so otherwise. Roan has said that her show in Springfield, Mo., in March introduced her to a queer community she hadn’t known was there. And in September, her “Midwest Princess” preview show, also in Springfield, sold out.
“There’s a special place in my heart for queer kids in the Midwest because I know how they’re feeling and I know how isolating it can feel,” she says.
“I think that, looking back — even though I probably never would have said this until I was in my 20s — thank God I grew up in the Midwest because I have such a different perspective,” she says. “And I appreciate different things because of it.”
Credit: Source link
