Chappell Roan: 'I'd be more successful if I wore a muzzle'
2025-01-20
Category: entertainment

Chappell Roan can't be stopped.Over the last 12 months, the 26-year-old has become the buzziest star in pop. A flamboyant, flame-haired sensation, whose songs are as colourful as they are raw.Her debut album, released to little fanfare in 2023, has just topped the UK charts for a second time. Next week, she's up for six Grammy awards, including best new artist. And BBC Radio 1 have named her their Sound Of 2025.Success has been all the sweeter because her former record label refused to release many of the songs that exploded onto the charts last year. "They were like, 'This is not gonna work. We don't get it'," Roan tells Radio 1's Jack Saunders.
Reaching pop's A-list isn't just a vindication but a revolution. The 26-year-old is the first female pop star to achieve mainstream success as an openly queer person, rather than coming out as part of their post-fame narrative.On a more personal level, she's finally done well enough to move into a house of her own, and acquire a rescue cat, named Cherub Lou."She's super tiny, her breath smells so bad, and she doesn't have a meow," the singer dotes.If kitten ownership is a benefit of fame, Roan has bristled at the downsides.
She has spoken out against abusive fans, calling out "creepy behaviour" from people who harass her in airport queues and "stalk" her parents' home. Last September, she went viral for cussing a photographer who'd been shouting abuse at stars on the red carpet of the MTV Awards."I was looking around, and I was like, 'This is what people are OK with all the time? And I'm supposed to act normal? This is not normal. This is crazy'," she recalls.The incident made headlines. British tabloids called her outburst the "tantrum" of a "spoiled diva".But Roan is unapologetic."I've been responding that way to disrespect my whole life - but now there are cameras on me, and I also happen to be a pop star, and those things don't match. It's like oil and water."
Roan says musicians are trained to be obedient. Standing up for yourself is portrayed as whining or ingratitude, and rejecting convention comes at a cost."I think, actually, I'd be more successful if I was OK wearing a muzzle," she laughs."If I were to override more of my basic instincts, where my heart is going, 'Stop, stop, stop, you're not OK', I would be bigger."I would be way bigger... And I would still be on tour right now."Indeed, Roan rejected the pressure of extending her 2024 tour to protect her physical and mental health. She credits that resolve to her late grandfather."There's something he said that I think about in every move I make with my career. There are always options.""So when someone says, 'Do this concert because you'll never get offered that much money ever again', it's like, who cares?"If I don't feel like doing this right now, there are always options. There is not a scarcity of opportunity. I think about that all the time."
As fans will know by now, Roan was born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz and raised in the Bible Belt town of Willard, Missouri.The oldest of four children, she aspired to be an actress – but, for a long time, it seemed her future would be in sport. She ran at state-competition level, and almost went to college for cross-country.Then she entered a singing contest at the age of 13 and won. Before long, she'd written her first song, about a crush on a Mormon boy who wasn't allowed to date outside his faith.She took her stage name as a tribute to her grandfather Dennis K Chappell and his favourite song, a Western ballad called The Strawberry Roan."He was very funny and very smart," she recalls. "And I don't think he ever questioned my ability."A lot of people were like, 'You should go completely country', or, 'You should try Christian music'. And he never told me to do anything."He was the only person that was like, 'You don't need a plan B. Just do it'."
Drag queen heaven
Eventually, one of her compositions, a gothic ballad called Die Young, caught the attention of Atlantic Records, which signed her at the age of just 17.Moving to LA, she recorded and released her first EP, School Nights, in 2017. It was a solid but unremarkable affair, steeped in the sounds of Lana Del Rey and Lorde. Roan only found a sound of her own when a group of gay friends took her to a drag bar."I walked into that club in West Hollywood and it was like heaven," she told the BBC last year. "It was amazing to see all these people who were happy and confident in their bodies."And the go-go dancers! I was enthralled. I couldn't stop watching them. I was like, 'I have to do that'."She didn't become a dancer, but she did write a song imagining what it would be like to be one and how her mother would react. Roan called it Pink Pony Club after a strip bar in her home town."That song changed everything," she says. "It put me in a new category."I never thought I could actually be a 'pop star girl' and Pink Pony forced me into that."Her label disagreed. They refused to release Pink Pony Club for two years. Shortly after they relented, Roan was dropped in a round of pandemic-era cost-cutting.
Bruised but not broken, she went back home and spent the next year serving coffee in a drive-through doughnut shop."It absolutely had a positive impact on me," she says. "You have the knowledge of what it's like to clean a public restroom. That's very important."The period was transformational in other ways. She saved her earnings, had her heart broken by a person "with pale blue eyes", moved back to Los Angeles, and gave herself a year to make it.It might have taken a little longer than that, but she hit the ground running.During her exile, Roan had stayed in touch with her Pink Pony Club co-writer, Daniel Nigro.He was also working with another up-and-coming singer called Olivia Rodrigo and, when her career took off, Roan got a courtside seat, supporting Rodrigo on tour and providing backing vocals on her second album, Guts.More importantly, Nigro used the momentum to sign Roan to his own record label and ensure the release of her debut album in September 2023.At first, it seemed like Roan's original label had been right. Sales were disappointing and audiences were slow to catch on because her in-your-face queer anthems were out of step with the trend for whispery, confessional pop.But those songs came to life on stage. Big, fun and designed for audience participation, they're taken to new heights by Roan's powerhouse voice and flamboyant stage persona."A drag queen does not get on stage to calm people down," she says. "A drag queen does not say things to flatter people. A queen makes you blush, you know what I mean? Expect the same energy at my show."
Sure enough, it was a live-streamed appearance at last year's Coachella Festival that pushed her into the upper echelons of pop.Dressed in a PVC crop top that declared "Eat Me", she played the packed Gobi tent like a headliner, strutting purposefully across the stage and coaching the audience in the campy choreography for Hot To Go.Then she stared directly into the camera and dedicated a song to her ex."Bitch I know you're watching… and all those horrible things happening to you are karma."The clip went viral and, before long, her career did, too.By the summer, all of her shows had been upgraded. Festivals kept having to move her to bigger stages. When she played Lollapalooza in August, she drew the event's biggest ever daytime crowd."It just takes a decade," she says. "That's what I tell everyone. 'If you're OK with it taking 10 years, then you're good'."As fans discovered her debut album, Roan also released a standalone single - a sarcastic slice of synth-pop called Good Luck Babe, which became her breakout hit."I don't even know if I've ever said this in an interview, but it was originally called Good Luck, Jane," she reveals."I wanted it to be about me falling in love with my best friend, and then her being like, 'Ha ha ha, I don't like you back, I like boys.'"And it was like, 'OK, well, good luck with that, Jane'."
A masterclass in pop storytelling, Good Luck Babe has a proper three-act structure, with a killer pay-off in the middle eight and a chorus you just can't shake.Still, Roan was shocked by its success."I just threw it out, like, I don't know what this is going to do – and it carried the whole year!"The question, of course, is what the star does next, now that she's the Sound of 2025.She's already previewed two new songs, The Subway and The Giver, in concert – but all she will reveal about a second album is that she's "more reluctant to be sad or dark"."It feels so good to party," she explains.
Looking back at the last 12 months, she's philosophical about what it means to be pop's hottest new commodity."A lot of people think fame is the pinnacle of success, because what more could you possibly want than adoration?"Roan does admit that the admiration of strangers is more "addictive" than she'd expected."Like, I understand why I'm so scared to lose this feeling. "It's so scary to think that one day people will not care about you the same way as they do right now - and I think [that idea] lives in women's brains a lot different than men's."Ultimately, she decides, success and failure are "out of my control". Instead, she wants to make good choices."If I can look back and say, 'I did not crumble under the weight of expectation, and I did not stand for being abused or blackmailed', [then] at least I stayed true to my heart," she says."Like I said before, there are always options."
Chappell Roan was named BBC Radio 1's Sound Of 2025, by a panel of more than 180 musicians, critics and music industry experts.The top five, in order, were:
1) Chappell Roan2) Ezra Collective3) Barry Can't Swim4) Myles Smith5) English Teacher