Chappell Roan’s rise to stardom has been 10 years in the making. Here’s how she became famous
By Scottie Andrew, CNN
(CNN) — Chappell Roan is having the year of her life. Her songs are taking over TikTok, she’s touring the country to massive, record-breaking crowds and she’s been rising up the Billboard charts all summer long.
But Roan wasn’t pumped out of the pop-music machine as a fully formed star in 2024. Her ascent to stardom has been a steady climb, one thwarted by the pandemic and issues with her label, over 10 years. It just so happens that the last six months of her career have been stratospherically successful.
Ahead of Roan’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards — once a star-making showcase for icons like Madonna, Britney Spears and Beyoncé — revisit Roan’s journey from Missouri teen musician to one of pop’s most exciting new faces in years.
The rise of Chappell Roan, 2014 — 2015
Chappell Roan hails from Willard, Missouri. And while she never quite felt like she belonged among the Midwestern milieu, it has informed everything about the artist she’s become.
“I’ve always wanted to tie my project back here, for some reason,” she says in a 2023 mini-documentary ahead of the release of her first album. “I have to honor this place that raised me no matter how I feel about it. It’s just always going to be a part of me.”
She started out performing at school talent shows and local events before pursuing music more seriously as a teenager.
November 2014: Roan’s first self-titled EP, released under her real name, Kayleigh Rose, debuts. She’s 16.
Two fans review her work in a 2015 episode of “The Vault,” a Missouri-based music podcast. When they went to their local record store to buy the album, Roan’s mother was there selling some of her CDs. Within a few moments, all of the copies of the album sold out, the hosts say.
“They sold out that quick — that should tell you how awesome this girl is,” one of the hosts says.
There are only four songs on her debut EP, but the hosts praise the unique raspiness and almost smoky quality of her voice.
November 5, 2014: Australian pop star Troye Sivan shouts out one of Roan’s original songs, “Die Young.”
“i’ve had (this) 16 year old girl on repeat for 2 months,” Sivan tweets. “you HAVE to listen to this, guys – go send some love.”
Sivan’s support is especially meaningful because he started on YouTube, too, before getting a record deal.
May 2015: Roan is signed to Atlantic Records shortly after she turns 17. This is when she adopts the stage name Chappell Roan — her late grandpa’s name was Chappell.
“People would always ask if I had a plan B,” she says in a short documentary in 2017. “And he never asked. He just knew I could do it.”
Roan’s early work and roadblocks, 2017 — 2020
September 22, 2017: “School Nights,” Chappell Roan’s first EP under her stage name, is released when she’s 19. The songs are tinged with darkness and teen angst, and her range dips and leaps between a soulful alto and fluttery falsetto. It’s a much different sound than the freewheeling, camp-inflected pop she’ll adopt later.
September 30, 2017: Roan joins Vance Joy on tour as an opening act, her first national tour experience.
Jan 31, 2018: Roan supports English singer-songwriter Declan McKenna on tour for a few months. At this point, she’s still singing the dark, prickly songs from “School Nights.”
Roan takes much of 2019 off from public life to focus on her mental health and new music.
April 3, 2020: Roan releases the single “Pink Pony Club,” an aching ode to queer joy and choosing oneself. It was inspired by her first trip to the Abbey, a famous gay bar in Los Angeles.
Released at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, her label “didn’t even want to put it out,” she tells Tom Power in an interview years later, since it’s best listened to while dancing and singing at the top of one’s lungs in a crowded room. The song has since found a devoted audience.
August 2020: Atlantic Records drops Roan. She isn’t yet a hugely profitable artist, and in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, “Pink Pony Club” isn’t finding an audience without a tour to support it.
“Touring is how artists make their money,” she says later in an appearance on “Q with Tom Power.” “It was 2020, and I wasn’t touring.”
Roan moves back to Missouri to live with her parents after her deal ends, working at a drive-thru in her hometown. She continues to develop her sound independently when producer Dan Nigro, with whom she worked on “Pink Pony Club,” makes it big with Olivia Rodrigo and her debut record.
“As time has gone on, I realized that no matter how hard that label experience was for five years, it was the biggest blessing ever,” Roan tells Rolling Stone in 2022. “And being independent has taught me I can do it by myself.”
The making of ‘Midwestern Princess,’ 2021 — 2023
2021: TikTok becomes Roan’s creative outlet. She shares covers, promotes her original songs and posts humorous videos of her guinea pig wearing a fedora. She even teases snippets from newly written songs, including lyrics from what will become “Naked in Manhattan.”
March 2022: Roan inks a publishing deal with Sony so she can release new music, including “Naked in Manhattan,” “Casual” and “Femininomenon,” all of which will appear on her forthcoming debut album. She tours with Olivia Rodrigo in May and Fletcher in October as an opening act. (It’s around this time that she also signs to Nigro’s label, Amusement Records, through the larger label Island Records.)
But between those tours, she finally headlines her first shows in Los Angeles and New York.
February 2023: Roan embarks on her first headline tour, “Naked in North America.” Every date is sold out.
June 12, 2023: A drag queen is born. Roan gets ready to perform in London, doing her trademark glittery makeup alongside a drag performer named Crayola, who opens her show for her.
“Honey, you are a drag queen,” Crayola told Roan, according to the pop star.
The moment flipped a switch in her, Roan says. “I really have taken that on as an identity,” she tells Power. “It’s been very freeing to be like, ‘Oh, Chappell Roan is my drag project.’”
September 22, 2023: “The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess” debuts, exactly six years after she put out her first EP as Chappell Roan. It’s exhilarating, heartbreaking and unabashedly queer — and it feels like the truest artistic statement of Roan’s career. The album is well-reviewed and appears in several year-end best-of lists, including Rolling Stone’s. The outlet calls her first full-length album a “wildly ribald, extremely hooky thrill ride through sexual and personal awakenings.”
“I just wanted to make something that I could party to and that other people could party to,” she tells Jimmy Fallon in 2024. “Something that I would never be sad or bored performing.”
Roan’s star-making year, 2024
March 21, 2024: Roan leaves her mark on NPR’s Tiny Desk, dressed up as a clown-faced prom queen with cigarettes stuck in her wig and lipstick on her teeth. Across her five-song set, Roan belts and breaks hearts with cuts from “Midwestern Princess” in a performance that NPR says “forever alter(ed) the Tiny Desk.”
April 5, 2024: Roan’s new era begins with “Good Luck, Babe!” an ‘80s-influenced bop that sees her channel Kate Bush over a devastating bridge. Her range is stunning, too: She belts the verses and sings falsetto over the chorus, a fitting juxtaposition for the heavenly highs and hellish lows of loving a woman who can’t commit.
April 12, 2024: Coachella calls on Roan, and she delivers. She arrives for her first set in latex and her now-signature white clown face. When it’s time for “Good Luck, Babe!” she writhes and delivers the emotional bridge right to the camera streaming the whole thing. The live-streamed performance goes viral, and though it’s eventually pulled for copyright issues, it leaves a strong impression.
June 2024: At some point in the early summer, “HOT TO GO!” becomes inescapable. Roan continues to tour across the country to bigger and bigger crowds, and they quickly learn the accompanying dance for the song.
June 10, 2024: Roan plays Lady Liberty at New York’s Governors Ball festival, painted green and emerging from a cracked red apple with a tiny torch. She’s become known for her increasingly inspired onstage looks, which have ranged from rhinestone cowgirl looks to a Marie Antoinette-inspired gown and towering wig.
June 20, 2024: Roan performs “Good Luck, Babe!” and sits for a charmingly barbed interview with Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” After Fallon sets up a bit about Googling Roan’s name, she quips, dead-eyed, “Did you not know who I was before?” She also name-checks “RuPaul’s Drag Race” winner Sasha Colby, from whom she’s taken inspiration.
August 1, 2024: Lollapalooza becomes Chappell’s personal party when she takes the stage at the Chicago festival, dressed in a lucha libre-inspired outfit of pink latex (naturally). Organizers later tell CNN that it’s perhaps the largest set ever at the festival, with as many as 110,000 people in the audience.
August 19, 2024: After months of steadily climbing the Billboard charts, “Midwestern Princess” reaches No. 2 on the 200 albums chart. As of the first week of September, it’s spent 23 weeks on the chart. She’s the 60th most-streamed artist on Spotify in the world, with over 45 million monthly listeners.
Also on August 19, the meteoric rise to fame finally catches up with Roan. She posts two TikToks detailing “creepy” fan encounters she’s had, including people who’ve demanded photos and hugs from her, followed her around in public and found where her family lives.
“I don’t care that abuse and harassment, stalking, whatever, is a normal thing to do to people who are famous or a little famous,” she says in one video. “I’m allowed to say no to creepy behavior, okay?”
While many fans support her message, she receives some backlash from those who feel responsible for helping her ascend to fame by supporting her music or attending her shows.
She shares a follow-up message on social media, doubling down on her comments. She reiterates that while she loves her job as a musician and cares deeply about her fans, she will “not accept harassment of any kind because I chose this path.”
September 11, 2024: Roan will perform for the first time at the Video Music Awards. Anticipation is high for her VMAs debut, which proved star-making for her pop forebears: Take Madonna’s boundary-breaking performance of “Like a Virgin” or Lady Gaga’s shocking, blood-soaked rendition of “Paparazzi.” Though she clearly owes some of her artistic flourishes to those stars, Roan has carved out a lane all her own.
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