Chappell Roan, who famously said she hopes she doesn’t win a Grammy so “everyone will get off” her “ass” and she doesn’t “have to do this again,” this being, presumably, an insane touring schedule and too much fame too fast, had a conversation with Brandi Carlile at a Grammy Museum event last night.
“It just took a lot of years to convince people,” Roan said of her meteoric rise. Her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, took five years to complete because “I had no money. I had no numbers backing me up. I had an EP that did not do well by the music standards. I had toured, but no headlines. There was nothing backing me up,” she explained.
The album is comprised of a lot of songs that came out as singles before her record deal, including “Pink Pony Club,” which is how I was introduced to her, which came out in 2020. “It was the worst time for a club anthem to come out,” she said, but that song was a “complete 180,” for her performance style. Back then, she says, “I wore only black on stage. It was very serious.”
“Serious” is not how we think of her now, which she acknowledges. “The second that I took myself not seriously is when things started working.” I love that and am going to write it down and put it on the bulletin board above my desk. “Unserious” is a trendy word right now. I’ve heard it used to describe other pop girls—Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, even Taylor Swift. There’s something to be said for the women who drive the economy throwing caution to the wind and having fun while still being vulnerable and sincere.
But serious or not, “Chappell is a character,” Roan reminds us.
“I just can’t be here all the time. It’s just too much,” she said. “My life is completely different now. Everything is out of whack right now.”
“This type of year does something to people. Every big thing that happens in someone’s career happened in five months for me. It’s so crazy that things I never thought would happen happened times 10. I think that that just really rocked my system. I don’t know what a good mental health routine looks like for me right now.”
It’s unfortunate that such a fun, joyful, unserious character and act has had such serious ramifications for the artist. Lets give her her flowers now and rewatch her SNL performance last weekend.