Well, maybe some of those things. But what’s really unusual about Chappell Roan is that she has one of the hottest albums in the country — “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” — and it wasn’t a hit when it came out 10 months ago. Until suddenly it was.
Here, in July 2024, no one could argue that Roan is anything but a megawatt pop star. Buoyed by her joyous, unabashedly fun (fun!) brand of singalong pop, the 26-year-old songwriter has experienced an intense and undeniable ascent in recent months. Last month, she had four concurrent hits on the Billboard Hot 100.
In the first seven months of the year, Roan’s weekly U.S. streams jumped from 2.7 million to 82.6 million across all major platforms. (The entertainment data and insights company Luminate provided data for this story.) She has opened for Olivia Rodrigo’s sold-out Guts World Tour, performed at NPR’s Tiny Desk, headlined a national tour and performed at nearly every major music festival on the U.S. summer circuit. With each performance, it seems as if Roan’s fame — and chart ranking, and blanketing of TikTok feeds — has only grown.
In some ways, Roan is the beneficiary of old-school hustle: relentless touring, well-timed singles and a meticulous focus on performance. But it’s also an internet story in which Roan spent years painstakingly building a presence on Instagram and TikTok to the point of exhaustion, a grind she described to The Washington Post last year. The algorithms love her. But she resonates with humans, too. Roan is the kind of queer pop star who seems ready-made for the moment: referential, silly in a messy way yet aesthetically precise, and one of a kind.
“All pop stars are characters,” says Norma Coates, a pop-music-focused professor at Ontario’s Western University. But Roan is very explicit about her musical project being a performance of a kind of crass, bold femininity that’s often suppressed.
Obviously, there are detractors. At one point earlier this year, the allegation that Roan is an “industry plant” — that her sudden virality was somehow concocted in a board room — became something of a meme. And, sure, she’s a major-label pop star working with proven hitmakers, including Rodrigo’s producer. But if you chart the rise and rise (and rise and rise) of this Midwest princess — and talk to the key players who were there — a stranger and more interesting story comes into focus.
The beginning
Start in 2015, perhaps, when the then-17-year-old born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz was signed to Atlantic Records after uploading dark and edgy originals to YouTube. Or in 2018, when she met songwriter and producer Dan Nigro, and in early writing sessions wrote the songs “California” and “Pink Pony Club” with him. Or in August 2020, when Roan was dropped from the label and broke up with her longtime boyfriend the same week. The next year, she left Los Angeles and moved back home to Willard, Mo., working part-time jobs as a nanny and donut-shop staffer while writing music and building a following on social media.
But let’s look at April 2020, before Atlantic dropped her, when Roan put “Pink Pony Club” out into the world. It had become a glittery dance-pop song with a showtune undercurrent about leaving home to make it in Hollywood, and it foreshadowed more campy, peppy, often very personal material that she created with Nigro, by then known for his work producing for Rodrigo. Nigro signed Roan to his Amusement Records imprint (which is distributed by Island Records), on which Roan is the only artist.
“When we wrote ‘California’ and we wrote ‘Pink Pony Club,’ and when we finished ‘Red Wine Supernova,’ I remember when we finally nailed the song, my body was tingling, … and I’d run home and play it for my wife,” Nigro says. He knew. Recording the songs that would become her debut, Nigro remembers thinking, “If I’m this excited about it, there’s no way other people won’t be as excited about it.”
“The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” a 14-song sleeper hit, debuted on Sept. 22, 2023. Roan had built enough of a fan base to notch listens in the low millions on Spotify. Even so, the album did not chart on the Billboard 200.
The album makes small waves
4.8 million U.S. weekly streams, week ending Sept. 28
Two weeks after the album’s release, at a Jewish open stage event in Boston, the lights trained on local drag performer Ari Ola as they prepared to serenade a bottle of Manischewitz wine. They danced in a tight red dress and fishnets as they lip-synced to Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova,” a “Midwest Princess” single.
The 23-year-old Ari Ola identified with Roan as a queer Midwesterner who felt drawn to the coasts, so they decided to ring in the Jewish new year with the song, which they had recently found on TikTok. “Everyone was like: ‘What song is that? Who is that? I’ve never heard of that artist before,’” Ari Ola says. (The performer spoke to The Post on the condition that only their stage name be used because they feared professional repercussions for their risqué performances.) “I definitely am not the earliest listener of hers, but it felt like somehow I was ahead of the curve by a few months.” Now, Roan’s kitschiest tracks are drag-show mainstays.
You can hear why. Witty, vaguely filthy songs such as “Red Wine Supernova” — in which Roan jokes slyly to her romantic interest about having a “wand and a rabbit” (it’s a sex toy joke) — have become representative of Roan’s brand of pop.
Among those into it: NPR music writer and Tiny Desk Concert co-creator Stephen Thompson, who first listened to Roan in 2022, when a colleague recommended the early single “Casual.” He fell in love with the track — a song about struggling through an unrequited situationship that Thompson calls a “perfect cocktail of … lustful yet bored.” When he heard all of “Midwest Princess,” he knew he had to book Roan for a Tiny Desk Concert.
“She seemed to have really found who she is as an artist and how she wants to present herself,” Thompson says. About her Tiny Desk, he remembers thinking: “If her vocals are as on point as I think they’re going to be, I think she’s really going to hit it out of the park.”
Performance at NPR’s Tiny Desk (March 21)
10.8 million weekly U.S. streams, week ending March 28
At NPR’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, Roan showed up in a poofy pink prom dress, ghost-pale foundation, exaggerated blue glitter eye shadow, thin eyebrows and heavily lined lips. As she sings, pink lipstick carefully smeared on her teeth catches the light. She’s wearing a sky-high red beehive wig, accessorized with a tiara, butterfly clips and cigarette butts. Behind her, an all-femme band plays against the backdrop of crowded office shelves, black eyeliner smudged down their cheeks as though fresh from crying.
Thompson likens the experience of filming Roan’s set to “capturing lightning in a bottle. I knew it was a special one.”
“I was sitting there watching her Tiny Desk thinking, ‘People are going to absolutely love this,’” he says. “I felt like this was going to thrill her fans. The people who love her are going to point at this and say, ‘See!’”
And those who didn’t know her already? Thompson says he noticed them in the set’s YouTube comments, writing that they’ve “fallen down a rabbit hole forever.”
Since it premiered on March 21, Roan’s Tiny Desk entry has garnered 4.8 million views. But it also kick-started a broader shift into the mainstream for the artist, who had started to tour the country with Rodrigo only a month before. The week the Tiny Desk Concert premiered, Roan’s total weekly U.S. streams jumped from 7.1 million to almost 11 million. “It ended up being perfect timing, I think, for what she and her people had in mind,” Thompson says of the Tiny Desk Concert, which ended up being Stop 1 on Roan’s road map to the summer charts. When he introduced Roan to the NPR office before her concert started, Thompson told his colleagues that they would remember this moment when the Grammys rolled around. “Her people were like, ‘From your lips to God’s ears,’” Thompson says. “And I think that’s exactly how it’s playing out.”
The Guts World Tour with Olivia Rodrigo (Feb. 23 to April 2)
11.4 million weekly U.S. streams, week ending April 4
During the spring, Roan played 24 sold-out shows from California to Boston, introducing herself to tens of thousands of new fans each night.
That includes music industry veteran and Emerson College professor Kristin Lieb, who studies the relationships between gender and sexuality in music marketing. She attended Rodrigo’s April 2 show in Boston, Roan’s last on the tour. Lieb was blown away by Roan’s set, which she described as a “performance journey that is something like drag and something like a concert and something like a singalong.”
“If you’re there for Olivia Rodrigo and you got there early, you’re seeing someone who is very similar, and she’s a great performer,” Lieb says. “And performance is really what converts people with her. … Seeing her makes you want to know more about her.”
‘Good Luck, Babe!’ is released (April 5)
24.7 million U.S. weekly streams, week ending April 11
With everything on the upswing, Roan released a new single, “Good Luck, Babe!” It’s a song about compulsory heterosexuality; it became yet another example of accidentally perfect timing, Nigro says. Originally conceptualized for “Midwest Princess,” the track didn’t feel complete to Nigro and Roan, so they continued working on it. By April, it was ready — in all of its homecoming-dance synth-pop glory. “I look at it as if it was all meant to be. That song was meant to wait,” Nigro says.
The mid-album-cycle release gave Roan’s fans something to chew on in the lead-up to a jam-packed summer festival schedule.
During the single’s release week, Roan’s U.S. streams more than doubled, according to industry data and insights company Luminate. That week alone, they jumped from 11 million to 25 million. It is now, by far, her biggest hit to date.
Coachella performance (April 12 and 19)
36.6 million U.S. weekly streams, week ending April 25
More than 10 million more weekly streams later, on April 12 and 19, Roan would perform at Coachella’s Gobi tent, usually reserved for smaller artists. During Weekend 1, she performed to a crowd that extended beyond the tent in a studded heavy-metal shirt and a latex top that read “Eat Me.” That performance marked the live festival debut of “Good Luck, Babe!” and soon went viral.
“Chappell roan performing at coachella you will be remembered for generations,” one user wrote on X, sharing a video of Roan’s performance. As she crawls along the floor and belts the song’s chorus — a warning to a missed connection, “And when you think about me, all of those years ago/ You’re standing face to face with ‘I told you so’” — the audience can be heard clearly, singing every word.
Videos from her performance on the second weekend of Coachella show that, by the time she walked out in a massive pink butterfly suit (inspired by Lady Miss Kier of dance-music group Deee-Lite), the audience seemed even more excited. There were more cowboy hats, more glitter and more hands following the motions to Roan’s “Hot to Go!” dance, which she had first posted on TikTok months before.
For the week ending April 20, “Good Luck, Babe!” became Roan’s first track to break into the Billboard Hot 100, at No. 77.
Boston Calling performance (May 26)
38.9 million weekly U.S. streams, week ending May 30
By the time Ari Ola, the drag performer in Boston, saw Roan at the Boston Calling festival on May 26, the singer was popular enough to attract one of the biggest crowds of the weekend — reportedly larger than that of some headliners. On a hot, sunny Sunday at 4:05 p.m., Roan played an early daytime set to more than 40,000 people. She did so in white face paint and Édith Piaf-style eyebrows, with a fire-engine-red burlesque bodysuit to match.
“I would wager that a lot of people probably bought tickets to see Megan [Thee Stallion] and Hozier and the Killers, and then in the subsequent months found themselves becoming big fans of Chappell Roan,” says Boston Calling booking director Peter Boyd.
Those new fans arrived early, he says, noting a “large contingent of pink hats in the line before we even opened the doors.”
“It felt like something had clicked, and it felt like suddenly the crowd got it. They suddenly got her,” Ari Ola says. They had seen Roan play in Boston in October for the Midwest Princess Tour, but this was different. “Before, it still felt like she was pitching herself to the crowd,” they say. “Versus when she walked out in Boston Calling, it was: ‘You know who I am, and you know how great this is going to be. I don’t need to sell or pitch anything to you. You know what you’re getting already’”
Governors Ball (June 9), Bonnaroo (June 16) and what’s to come
55.6 million weekly U.S. streams, week ending June 13
66.7 million weekly U.S. streams, week ending June 20
On June 9, Roan took the stage at Governors Ball in New York City inside of a giant apple, covered in green face paint and dressed as the Statue of Liberty, with an oversize joint lit in hand. “I was speechless,” says Katie Schantz, a Miami resident and longtime Roan fan who flew to New York for the festival. “The assless chaps? The green? In the apple? I was like, ‘She is the woman of the year.’”
The videos of the Governors Ball performance went viral — virtually inescapable on TikTok and X for weeks afterward — and by the time Roan was set to perform at Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tenn., on June 16, festival organizers decided to upgrade her to a bigger stage.
During a concert in Raleigh, N.C., shortly before Bonnaroo, Roan broke down in tears. “I just feel a little off today, ’cause I think that my career is going really fast, and it’s really hard to keep up,” she told the crowd. “… This is all I’ve ever wanted. It’s just heavy sometimes, I think.”
“She has been rocket-launched into fame, and I feel like it might be overwhelming for her,” says Sydney Rose, a fan at Boston Calling, adding that Roan’s rise felt to many like an “overnight sensation.”
“It’s been pretty incredible, to say the least,” Nigro says. “Kayleigh and I have worked on this record literally for years and years and years, so I always felt deep down in my heart that we were creating something really special and that it was just going to take a minute for the world to catch on to it. And so, to see it start to happen, it just feels insane.”
“It’s kind of what I was always dreaming for her,” he added.
Dreams are one thing, but numbers say another. For the week ending July 4, Roan had 82,683,704 U.S. streams — a more than 1,600 percent increase from the week she released “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.” There has been no fall yet.
