Chappell Roan is unstoppable.
In the past 12 months, the 26-year-old has become the most active pop star. A gorgeous sensation with fiery hair, whose songs are as colorful as they are raw.
Her debut album, released to little fanfare in 2023, just topped the UK charts for the second time. Next week, she’s up for six Grammys, including best new artist. And BBC Radio 1 declared it their own The sound of 2025.
The success was all the sweeter because her former label refused to release many of the songs that exploded onto the charts last year.
“They were like, ‘This isn’t going to work. We don’t get it’,” Roan told Radio 1’s Jack Saunders.
Getting on the A-list of pop music is not just a justification, it’s a revolution.
The 26-year-old is the first pop star to achieve mainstream success as an openly queer person, rather than coming out as part of her post-fame story.
On a more personal level, she is finally well enough to move into her own house and get a rescue cat named Cherub Lou.
“She’s super petite, her breath stinks, and she doesn’t meow,” enthused the singer.
If having a kitten is the perk of fame, Roan bristles at the downsides.
She spoke out against abusive fans, calling out “creepy behavior” from people harassing her in lines at the airport and “lurking” around her parents’ home. Last September, she went viral for lashing out at a photographer who insulted stars on the red carpet at the MTV Awards.
“I was looking around and I was like, ‘This is what people are okay 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 a “tantrum” of a “spoiled diva”.
But Roan is unapologetic.
“I’ve been responding in a disrespectful way my whole life — but now I’m being followed by cameras and I 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 comes across as whiny or ungrateful, and rejecting convention comes at a price.
“I think I’d actually be more successful if I was good at wearing a muzzle,” she laughs.
“If I were to override more of my base instincts, where does my heart go,’Stop, stop, you’re not well‘, I would be bigger.
“I’d be a lot bigger… And I’d still be on tour right now.”
Indeed, Roan rejected pressure to extend her 2024 tour to protect her physical and mental health. He attributes that decision to his late grandfather.
“There’s something he said that I think about every step I take in my career. There are always options.”
“So when someone says, ‘Do this concert because you’ll never be offered that much money again,’ it’s like, who cares?
“If I don’t feel like doing this right now, there are always options. There’s no shortage of opportunities. I think about it all the time.”
As fans will know by now, Roan was born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz and grew up in the Bible Belt town of Willard, Missouri.
The eldest of four children, she wanted to be an actress – but for a long time it seemed that her future would be in sports. She ran at the state meet level and almost went to college for cross country.
Then, at the age of 13, she entered a singing competition and won. Soon she wrote her first song, about falling in love with a Mormon boy who was not allowed to go outside of his faith.
She took her stage name as a tribute to her grandfather Dennis K Chappell and his favorite 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 said, ‘You should go full country,’ or ‘You should try Christian music.’ And he never told me to do anything.
“He was the only person who said, ‘You don’t need a plan B. Just make it.'”
Drag queen of heaven
Eventually, one of her compositions, a gothic ballad called Die Young, caught the attention of Atlantic Records, who 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 understated affair, infused with the sounds of Lana Del Rey and Lorde.
Roan only found her own sound 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 mesmerized. I couldn’t stop looking at them. I thought, ‘I have to do this.'”
She didn’t become a dancer, but she wrote the song imagining what it would be like to be a dancer and how her mother would react. Roan called it Pink Pony Club after a strip bar in his hometown.
“That song changed everything,” she says. “It put me in a new category.
“I never thought I could actually be a ‘pop star’ and Pink Pony made me do it.”
Her label disagreed. They refused to release Pink Pony Club for two years. Soon after they relented, Roan was dropped in a round of pandemic-era cost-cutting.
Bruised but not broken, she returned home and spent the next year serving coffee at a donut shop.
“It absolutely had a positive impact on me,” she says. “You know what it’s like to clean a public toilet. It’s very important.”
The period was transformational in other ways. She saved her earnings, got her heart broken by a person “with pale blue eyes”, returned to Los Angeles and gave herself a year to do it.
It may have taken a little longer than that, but she was on her way.
During her exile, Roan stayed in touch with her Pink Pony Club co-writer, Daniel Nigra.
He also worked with another up-and-coming singer named Olivia Rodrigo, and when her career took off, Roan was given a backstage seat, backing Rodrigo on tour and backing vocals on her second album, Guts.
More importantly, Nigro used the momentum to sign Roan to his record label and secure the release of her debut album in September 2023.
At first it seemed that Roan’s original label was right. Sales were disappointing, and audiences were slow to accept it because her in-your-face queer anthems were out of step with the whispery, confessional pop trend.
But those songs came to life on stage. Big, fun and designed for audience participation, Roan’s powerful voice and dazzling stage personality take them to new heights.
“A drag queen doesn’t go on stage to appease people,” she says. “A drag queen doesn’t say things to flatter people. A queen makes you blush, you know what I mean? Expect the same energy at my show.”
Of course, a live performance at last year’s Coachella festival pushed her into the upper echelons of pop.
Dressed in a PVC crop top emblazoned with ‘Eat Me’, she played to a packed Gobi tent as a headliner, strutting across the stage and teaching the crowd 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 these horrible things that happen to you are karma.”
The video went viral, and not long after, so did her career.
By the summer, all her shows had been upgraded. Festivals constantly had to move her to bigger stages. When she headlined Lollapalooza in August, she drew the biggest daily crowd ever.
“It only takes a decade,” she says. “That’s what I tell everybody. ‘If you’re okay with it lasting 10 years, then you’re good’.”
As fans discovered her debut album, Roan also released a solo single – a sarcastic slice of synth-pop called Good Luck Babe, which became her hit.
“I don’t even know if I ever said it in an interview, but it was originally called Good Luck, Jane,” she reveals.
“I wanted it to be about how I fell in love with my best friend, and then she was like, ‘Ha ha ha, I don’t like you, I like boys.’
“And it was like, ‘OK, well, good luck with that, Jane‘.”
Allow Google YouTube content?
A masterclass in pop storytelling, Good Luck Babe has a regular three-act structure, with a killer middle-eighth gain and a chorus you just can’t shake.
Still, Roan was shocked by his success.
“I just threw it away, like, I don’t know what this is going to do — and he wore it all year!”
The question, of course, is what the star will do next, now that the Sound is 2025.
She’s already unveiled two new songs, The Subway and The Giver, in concert – but all she’ll reveal about the second album is that she’s “more reluctant to be sad or dark”.
“It feels so good to have fun,” she explains.
Looking back on the last 12 months, she waxes philosophical about what it means to be pop’s hottest new commodity.
“Many people think that fame is the pinnacle of success, because what more could you ask for than adoration?”
Roan admits that the admiration of strangers is more “contagious” than she expected.
“Like, I understand why I’m so afraid of losing that feeling.
“It’s so scary to think that one day people won’t care about you the same way they do now – and I do [that idea] it lives in women’s brains much differently than men’s.”
Ultimately, she decides, success and failure are “out of my control.” Instead, she wants to make good decisions.
“If I can look back and say, ‘I didn’t collapse under the weight of expectations and I didn’t put up with abuse or blackmail,’ [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 over 180 musicians, critics and music industry experts.
The first five were:
